Survival: Fountain of Youth Review

Survival: Fountain of Youth is a uh, well, you can tell from the title. It’s a survival game developed by Odinsoft Inc. and published by Twin Sails Interactive and CE-Asia. Initially released on Early Access back in April 2023, it has now reached its full release. Being the first game in this developer’s library, is it worth being stranded on a deserted island for, or should you just stay at home with your current luxuries?

It’s the 16th century, the Age of Discovery, when legends such as the titular Fountain of Youth were thought to be out there, and many explorers set out to find them… and sometimes never return. You are a shipwreck survivor from one of the ships sent out to find the Fountain. Stranded on the Island of Hope without your memories, you'll have to work hard to not only survive the ordeal but also follow in the footsteps of your captain and find the Fountain yourself. It’s actually a fairly interesting story that is sort of worth getting invested in if a little cliché, and there’s plenty of lore about the islands and the natives that lived there if you want to learn more.

While you can rush the main quest, it is ill-advised. This game is called Survival, after all, and the continued reminder of this is more important than potential immortality. You'll need to keep your health, hunger, thirst, and energy up, or else that Fountain won't be of much use to you. You can get poisoned, catch a disease, and even have a near-death experience that actually takes away some of your max HP. It's a dangerous world out there, but you will learn to thrive in due time. That said, it will take a while before you reach that point, as I will elaborate further.

Welcome to the Island of Hope.

Actually, speaking of which, let's talk about how you actually improve your chances of surviving. Outside of crafting or finding tools and equipment, you also level up. You gain XP for various aspects, such as Athletics and Crafting, by using it. Sprinting, crafting, cooking, doing anything will improve that skill. Otherwise, there are books scattered around the islands that you can read to learn new skills or make the ones you already know better. Reading a book will take 10 hours, but it's worth sacrificing a day to learn how to fish. Also, if you complete side quests and discover some ancient ruins, you get SP to spend on improving your character, like improving the quality of sleep or gaining the ability to see nearby loot at the press of a button.

There’s plenty to discover on the islands, with all the flora and fauna having some use… or will hurt or kill you if you aren’t careful (stupid scorpions…). These places are pretty big with tons of points of interest, either story-related or nice bonuses. You can map out the area with these specific tall trees. It’s not quite a Ubisoft tower, but it kinda feels like it despite having no climbing challenge to go with it. Oh, and there are over 15 islands you can explore as long as you have a boat, so you’re gonna be doing this sort of thing a lot because you’re going to need to exploit every resource you can get your hands on.

Explore from both land and sea.

Resources take time to harvest (and sometimes tool durability) and can take days or weeks before you can do it again. This means you're often made to go out and explore for all the food and materials you need. Be aware that some resources, like trees and plants, don't respawn when cut down, which you will have to do eventually, as even the early recipes require doing so. Also, almost every tool and piece of clothing has durability and food can spoil. While you can repair some equipment, they'll lose a chunk of their max durability until it becomes deadweight, which can be a problem.

Inventory is a serious struggle to manage. While you do have as many slots as you want, you have to keep a careful eye on the weight of everything you bring. In the prologue, before the ship burns down, I managed to grab a nice backpack as one of my starting items, and man, does it help massively because the primitive one you can craft really sucks, and I don’t like being over-encumbered after a couple of small rocks. You also can’t carry bigger items like logs or crates in your bag; you either need to shoulder them or carry them in carts. All this inventory management and item carrying are annoying, but that’s all the more encouragement to plan out your day and work towards smaller goals before you get to the bigger ones. It’s realistic in a sense.

However, that’s sort of my main issue here: it might be too realistic.

There’s plenty of videogame stuff, like shimmering walls, flashing red enemies, and the Concentration button, but there’s so much stuff you have to worry about and deal with first that I just began to settle into a routine instead of getting through the story. I want to build stuff and improve my equipment, but getting there will take double-digit hours. There is a crowd for this type of progression, but constantly doing busy work in between trying to improve my situation, from living out in a cave to building a hut, it was just going to take too long for my patience to hold out on. I’m not saying this is bad, but some quality-of-life features would be nice.

...Yeah, I should avoid being you.

Onto other issues, I found combat to be way too basic to be all that engaging. You just whack/stab/chop whatever is trying to kill you and sometimes raise your guard to prevent damage. That’s sort of it. I also ran into an issue when trying to play with a gamepad. While Steam did tell me that the game fully supported my PlayStation 4 controller, I just couldn't get it to work properly. I pressed all the buttons and triggers, but all I could do was move, jump and check the pause menu. And since the tutorial was very minimal and the game only lists key bindings in the options menu, I wouldn’t recommend using a controller. Please tell me if I missed something, though. At the very least, the game ran well on my mid-tier PC, running consistently with no drops in performance. I also didn’t encounter any glitches as far as I’m aware.

Survival: Fountain of Youth is actually quite a nice time if you like a more slow-paced progression. You won’t be building entire wooden mansions in only a few hours or turning the island into your own factory, but the slow build-up to completing goals can be quite the relaxing experience… you know, if you can deal with all the things that can poison and kill you. It’ll take a lot of time for things to really get going, and not everyone will have the time or the patience to ever reach that point, but you will eventually move on from merely surviving but to enjoying your time on the islands. It’s only the fact that it might take way too many hours to reach that point. Realistic, and not the most fun, but it can pay off… eventually.