Fountain of Dreams Retrospective
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The editors at PC Gamer took it upon themselves to fire up a copy of Electronic Arts' Fountain of Dreams, the lesser known semi-sequel to Wasteland that pitted your party of characters against Killer Clowns and other misfits inhabiting a post-nuclear Florida, and feature it in their latest "Saturday Crapshoot" feature. This excerpt may or may not inspire you to do the same:
It's a more advanced game than Wasteland in some ways though, including having more flavour text and conversations (without the need to put them in the manual and give look-up codes to compensate for the lack of game data), with animated portraits and a bit more sense of life to a lot of areas. Annoy local witch Lupe Garoo for instance and you only have yourself to blame when she sets werewolves on you. Hang around at your farm where the game starts though and you've got a couple of friends who would love to go with you, but aren't that crazy. There's a reason why it has so much more space to play with that it can have such luxuries, but we'll get to that in about five or six paragraphs.
To give the game some credit, it also has one pretty fun mechanic - mutation. As you fight, your characters get bitten and infected by enemies and as such begin to change, adding skills like chameleon skin at the expense of other things like lowered stats. The more you're exposed to mutagens, the stronger they become and the more the potential advantages have to be weighed up versus going to get treatment, which is possible, but only a temporary fix. Soon, everyone will be scaled horrors.
This is a really good idea, worthy of a much better game. It's also the core of the story - the titular Fountain of Dreams being the Fountain Of Youth, cracked open by the apocalypse and now somewhere in Florida and waiting to be discovered - its existence proved by 'dream water' that keeps everything in check and provides cures on demand - one criminal faction going so far as to put the stuff into rum. Given the size of the place it's honestly a wonder the Fountain hash't been found some hundred million times over already, but but never mind. As a premise, it could definitely be worse.
