Survival: Fountain of Youth Reviews

The game looks beautiful and I want to explore, but the balancing is hilariously bad, primarily caused by the fact that you don't interact with the world. It's a menu simulation. Everything you do says "used up x minutes/hours". - Trying to start a fire, takes me 4 hours, energy/hunger/water went down in the meantime. - Cook 7 crabs to bring up hunger bar (who in their right mind eats 7 crabs as a meal?). Had to commit a genocide to get them. Due to cooking time, Thirst dropped and energy dropped. - Drink coconuts and go to bed to restore energy as I'm nearly passing out. This drains hunger/thirst. - Go hunt crabs to refill hunger bar and spend 4 hours trying to start a fire. This drains energy/hunger/water. Repeat the above. - All your equipment has decay timers just from...existing. Your armor/backpack don't break because you use them, get damaged etc. This means that while you are time skipping left and right fixing your stat bars, everything you are wearing is breaking on your back. The time isn't long either. Apparently the bag/cloak I picked up before leaving the ship need fixing every few days...from materials I don't even have yet, nor can look for due to the above. Yo, when do I get to do anything other than micromanage energy/hunger/thirst? I can't leave my base when fixing 1 stat bar drains the other 2 and I get stuck in an endless loop of trying to fix my stat bars. A normal survival game understands a human sized portions of food. It also respects day time and let's you you know, explore and do stuff during the day instead of skipping all day every day via time skip actions from everything you do.

A solid addition to the survival genre. Pretty basic storyline, but its propped up by decent survival mechanics and a well detailed, immersive world. I got lost in the game for a while setting up a base of opps, crafting, and farming. Some elements of the game still need refining and were lost to me. I (pretty much) finished the game without doing much exploring underwater, and i had to do way too much online reading about the game to figure out the repair mechanics. I had forgotten the fighting mechanics by the final boss fight because i had never used them (except for the clunky tutorial at the start of the game which i didnt care about at the time).

An awesome survival-crafter, and I've played a ton of them as it's one of my favourite genres. Good story, innovative crafting mechanics, good visuals, all at a great price-point (currently 50% off). A gem that's not getting the praise that it deserves ATM. That may change.

Enjoyable so far, good learning curve. feel like im starting to understand the basics and moving towards getting further away from my base and exploring without worrying about dying. Which in turn gives me more resources to survive for longer. Great game :) great sound design. 8.5/10

Fantastic survival game. Plays flawlessly on steam deck. I hesitated for a long time on this title because of the few negative reviews about missing action animations when crafting etc. But actually this game is doing you a service in saving time. Plus those animations always get stale after the beginning hours. Again, I thought I'd be put off because I had been so used to it from all these other similar games. So I'm glad I took that chance and got it on big sale. So worth it. Surviving is brutal especially in the beginning but gets rewarding with every advancement. The map is huge with a shit ton of crafting recipes to explore and unlock. This game really positively surprised me. Highly recommend it.

Excellent survival game, great feelings of progression in a beautiful environment, with a fun story to boot. 10/10

This game is entirely too tedious. The expectations of making every single littlle pious item to create anther item is insane! Expect to die, thirst and starve all while searching for advanced items in areas the game does not equip you to explore in. Bottom line, its a fucking waste of time.

[h1]Hats off to the Devs! Survival: Fountain of Youth is a Hidden Gem[/h1] Oh my goodness, what a joy of a game to play! [h2]Short Review, for those who like less words:[/h2] Solid 8+/10, only due to lack of animations while interacting with resources. Potential for a perfect 10 if the story concludes very well or if there are large mysteries to uncover further into the game (review written at approximately one-fifth completion, will revise when finished.) [h2] Long Review, for those who like all the details: [/h2] [b]Please do not let the simplistic UI choices in this game fool you![/b] I was really iffy on this one, because I read many mixed reviews from people who did not care for the "time is resource you must manage" mechanic, and I am so sorry I waited so long that I had to pause the game and come write my own review to try and offset some of that! At only about 33 hours of gameplay as of this writing and what I can guess may be only one-fifth or less completion based on what I have learned so far (I take my time in survivalcraft games so this may not be "average"), this game is shaping up to be one hell of an experience. The mechanic and UI choices (in which you do not actually interact with resources through animations but rather in UI menus) by the dev(s?) felt a little hollow at first, giving me the impression of a very small indie project that may lack some depth. Nothing could be further from the truth, however! This game revolves around the real history of the Spanish Conquistador Ponce de Leon's exploration of the islands of present-day Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Florida and the choice to make [i]daylight and thus time itself[/i] one of the resources you must manage feels incredibly realistic for someone living in that era, on an expedition to an unknown location. How do you get your maps? The same way Ponce de Leon really did! You climb the tallest thing you can find, and you MAKE them! ("Uncharted" does, in fact, mean "unmapped" lol) If you want a game that will completely suck you into its world through brilliant use of fiction-meets-real-history storytelling, a highly dynamic and interesting setting to truly explore - the way the 14th and 15th century explorers from our real history [i]really did explore these these places,[/i] and that you can spend a potentially [b]astronomical[/b] number of hours engaging with without finding all of its secrets, this is the one! The biggest piece of critical feedback I have, however, is not the lack of interaction animations during resource-gathering tasks. (No, you will not be hacking away over and over at trees to cut them down, but is this really a bad thing for your thumbs?) Instead of taking it out on your hand joints, this game forces you to consider time and daylight as resources to be managed, which I feel actually gives it a more realistic feeling to what it may have been like for the rel-life explorers of the 14th century. However, I truly dislike the fact that the DLC content offers so little for such a high price. [b]Devs, please add music to your game without making me pay for it. I am not paying for that though I might buy the soundtack if I actually heard it first and thought it was good (as I have with other games).[/b] Thanks. [h2]Review Metrics:[/h2] Story: 10/10+ Worldbuilding: 10/10+ UI/Mechanics: 8/10 Difficulty: 7/10 (can be changed, this is about where I like it best, personally) Graphics: 7/10 Time Investment: Unknown as of this writing as I am not yet even finished with the first of 5(?) maps at approximately 33 hours in-game, but this one is going to be a long one (which I happen to prefer) [b]Overall Score:[/b] 8+/10 (with a great deal of potential for a 10/10 if further gameplay reveals huge facinating mysteries or mind-blowing story evolution, which seems very possible. Will update after completion if this is the case!)

Great survival experience. It's got an interesting 'time as a resource' mechanic, which I quite enjoyed! Lots to do and explore. This one deserves more love from the survival community :)

This is some janky 2005 crap in a 2015 wrapper. You don't chop down trees, you click them and a popup shows you the tree's "inventory". Every 5 minutes the game throws a random popup at you. Everything is done via popups that block 80% of the screen. Combat is an after thought. Enemies don't even need to face you to attack you. Their movements don't match their feet/wings. Attacks don't align with the animations so you just have to memorize when the attacks are going to land. Blocking is exceedingly generous, but melee is basically done by guesswork. You need a base to make things but you're encouraged to keep moving. Stopping to make a base in the beginning is not rewarding because collecting materials to build is a huge chore. Exploring isn't rewarding because you constantly need stuff from base to deal with the environment. I bet having 5 different types of each item serve different purposes is fun later on, but in the beginning it's a nightmare to collect and carry. The still art is beautiful and the environments feel well crafted. Everything else is a hard pass. This game might be worth 1/3 of what they're charging.