FOUNTAINS - Medieval Fantasy Exploration Action RPG

what's up guys and gals welcome back to the nerd castle today in the world of indie games we are continuing the next fest coverage by checking out the demo for fountains this is a game that exists somewhere in the vacuous space in between like diablo 2 and also dark souls from the best that i can tell it's got itself kind of i guess it's got itself defined as an action rpg but i do think it's somewhere in between those two points which actually to me actually sounds really really interesting so i figured we'd dive on into the demo today spend about 25-30 minutes with it see if it's something you wanted to add to your wish list the demo is freely available up until monday the 20th so you can look down below in the description sorry if this video went up after that time period i kind of recorded like five demos a day uh during the next fest and i ended up with kind of like a beefy backlog and just because i just do the one video a day i still don't feel like developers deserve to be cheated out of coverage so anyways fountains let's dive on in links down below twitch stream down below all that fun stuff get the spiel on out of the way let's go ahead and start a new game i'm gonna go ahead and pop on in here we've got to name our character now i've got to be two hands on keyboard with this game it's kind of an odd title in that like the gameplay itself is very very nice on like the mouse and keyboard but all of the menu related stuff is like keyboard only and so we'll talk about that as we get a little bit further on in but we'll just go splat that'll be easy enough we'll do this kind of old school style i like that font that's a good looking pixel font i trust you know the prophecy here's what they didn't dare to record the usurper was foretold to arise from within their own ranks [Music] look at those fuzzy little moo cows right there dude the fuzzier the cow the better that's my opinion on cows cows with short hair are inherently inferior to long-haired cows like the big long hair boofy ones are the best ones okay yeah getting sparted into a pit that's how i like to start my adventures ooh nice uh marble floor to crack our head on too that's enjoyable uh so this is fountains you move around with w a s and d you can dodge by using the uh space bar unfortunately it reset my settings for this playthrough i gotta go back through and i gotta swap that i like it when it's in walk direction but you can swap out whether or not you dodge towards the mouse cursor or whether you dodge towards the direction that you're initially moving and i prefer it in the latter category rather than the previous there's a little bit of loot down here it's gonna be a sword so let's break open the old inventory we will equip our sword there we go we've thrown it on in and so now with left click we can attack enemies don't go that way that pit like i've tried to jump over a lot of pits in this game i don't think jumping over pits is really a thing but let's go uh beat this nerd up right here yeah get wrecked i don't know why i murdered that guy i don't know if it was necessary he was the first person i met in medieval prison and apparently i've just beat the tears out of him a little bit of a fire trap right there totally normal thing to have inside your prison system there we go knock him on out now you might be noticing the blue tears coming out of all of our enemies as we bludge them with our dull blade it fills up the little meter in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen which is effectively going to allow you to like cast magic and i think also heal yourself a la estes flask so you are rewarded in this game by being aggressive basically because that's how you restore your ability to heal yourself uh we can rest at this fountain just like dark souls this is going to act as a save point we can also just get up and leave there doesn't seem to be a level up mechanic that i've run into yet from when i was testing out the demo but that doesn't mean that it like doesn't exist i just haven't gotten there maybe you can also buy water right here to refill your meter if you want to i don't know who's charging you for the water there doesn't seem to be a vendor or anything else around but apparently it is a fountain that has its financial future in mind also i see breakable crates hold on there we go i can't leave breakables unbroken it's just part of my video game ocd uh let's see here and bella will return and their sins will be oh another one you're the third one the guard have tossed down here today in that case welcome to the so-called usurper's prison it's where the guard locks up anybody they have the slightest suspicion of being the usurper well that's what it was built for anyways nowadays they'll toss anybody who questions their authority into this hole it's not like the true usurper could be held by these rusted old bars in fact i'd wager that even someone such as you could escape you look like someone who's got water in their spirit but take it from me stranger the way things are looking out there you'd do better to sit down and wait here to rot what about the others oh you must be referring to the other poor souls who were thrown into the pit today i'm afraid they didn't last long they were ripped apart by those other prisoners who have lost their minds you watch yourself lest you become like them now leave me be i want to hit this guy apparently i can hit him but nothing bad happens he does exclaim ow in the process of getting smacked but he doesn't really seem to react i thought maybe there might be like ow okay all right yeah that's what me getting hit in the face feels like luckily we filled up our water right there we can hold down the cue button and bam get all of our health back apparently it does nothing if you're at full health i saw the bar get kind of like a blue outline around it so i thought maybe using water when you're already full up would give you a shield or something alas not the way that it works go ahead and take that guy out real fast is there anything over here off to the left i mean there's a guy swinging a chain over on this side i said we go get him there we go ow okay yeah that's a nifty trick there we go we dropped him oh he didn't drop loot this time the last time i played through here so there must be some randomized procedural element to the loot i thought we were going to get a helmet because the last time i killed that guy i got a i got a helmet that had like stats and stuff on it but i guess not none shall pass unless they are nimble enough to dodge the swing of an executioner's axe ah they're being literalist about it okay this guy's got kind of a beefy health pool i don't know how aggressive i can get with this guy oh yeah i gotta watch that energy bar i suppose that makes sense luckily i don't think dodging affects your energy altogether that much the good news is there we go we knocked him out the good news is there's breakable stuff in this room and that fills my heart with joy because i love breaking things i just i took zelda a little bit too seriously as a kid and never recovered from my malady so i see a thing in a game and i gotta break it i have to destructible environments are my muse okay so out here we've got the blue fungus we'll bring him along he seems like a fun guy oh get rekt nerd see that's why you always got to watch your back otherwise naked titty man's gonna come along and spear you that's why i've got eyes in the back of my head you never know when it's coming but one thing's assured in modern society naked titty man is coming for all of us one day howdy brother ain't nobody snuck out there dungeon for a few days hope you wasn't in there for nothing bad i'm just kidding brother i wouldn't trust some guard folk to guard my dang glass of water in fact i fancied myself a bit of an informant want to know something useful about this place i got them tips for you brother well for a price that is name's doyle by the way what do i call you splat ain't never heard no name like that brother hey splat i got some info for you since you're my pal i'm gonna charge you like five pieces okay you know that they're palace to the north of here brother well i heard the guard dog holds the key to get on inside where's the guard dog well heck if i know brother well see that's not useful information then that's less than useful information uh the game is kind of freeform and like oh they hurt you like damage on touch rip and they hurt a lot too they're not playing around the game does have kind of like freeform exploration i don't know if there's like a particular order in which you're supposed to like attack this game but they do kind of let you off the leash and you are free to wander if that's kind of like your thing and in fact i honestly feel like that's going to be an appealing factor of this game for a lot of people it's not a game that kind of like guides you by the hand there's going to be little side areas like these stairs and you can keep going if you want it's like really up to you what you want to do i will buy some water right here unfortunately water kind of expensive oh it fills up like one dram gotcha okay sounds good i i thought i didn't really know what the subdivision of the water meter was gonna be right there financially uh we've got a gate over here it doesn't open from that side ain't that always the way it goes what do we have to the left here uh it looks like we've got something i can tell from the arrangement though that they're going to make a pentagram like you can just tell from the geometric angles that that's going to be like some kind of red glowing pentagram that lights up and threatens me with some kind of harm it seems like a naturally threatening place two red fungus all right our fungus stalks are growing all right knock you guys out do my best not to let them little bug boys pick up too much speed because then after that they're difficult to deal with looks like we've got some kind of gate a wall of hot smoke is blocking your way okay i see a bandit right there though let's mess them up there we go your water is now my water and i will spend it on drugs oh god ow okay yeah piggy tron's got some hits to him out okay i got struck again i thought i could walk it off i thought i could walk out of the way i was wrong glad that i bought a little bit of water right there we'll go ahead and just kind of guzzle a little bit take care of it we got two loot points up here what you got a scorching spice and a meager coin purse i'm guessing the meager coin purses they give us like some silver okay and apparently we drop our silver when we die so that's basically like our savings account it kind of follows that exact same trend set by dark souls where you know you don't really want to pop all your souls ow dude he recovers from his attack animation so fast this is one of those games that's going to punish me for being greedy isn't it and i'm like a naturally greedy aggressive player too so like i can tell this is a game that's going to hurt oh you dodged the wrong direction that's not the direction that i was holding uh let me go ahead actually before we take this guy out let me get a heal off i feel like there's a solid chance we'll refill most of that meter so why let it go to waste i do want to check down these stairs over here though let's go see what's inside the stairs the combat does feel pretty good and it does feel reasonably chunky what do we have going on here oh does that like refill my water is that what it does oh i think it does it's like a water receptacle so apparently you can get water out of a stone huh sometimes the old fables are false let's continue on down into the dungeon this is a gate activator so it should open that up for me i don't know reasonably if it's timed doesn't look like it's time let me refill my water right here too the game seems to be fairly generous with healing which i'm actually kind of appreciative of because i'm mad cause bad we got the smoke charm is that gonna let us go through the smoke gate charm used to dispel the wall of smoke yes indeed it will but yeah i'd love to see dragon drop and also click menus inside of here because obviously the mouse works given this aspect of the gameplay so having mouse control inside the menu as well either like when you click on an item there's a flip down menu that has all the various things like use you know quick drop on the mouse key or you just like click and drag things to where you want them to go i think would be preferable for me as a pc gamer anyways as kind of the the standard way that things tend to run in games like this not a huge major complaint not really even a complaint just an observation and now that we got the smoke charm i was actually kind of hoping this would loop over to the right it don't look like it loops on over to the right that maybe i can just open up the door with my super rad awesome swordsman hand somehow i doubt it though yeah so we got to hit those two things right there and then it's going to open on up there might be another like access way to get on over there because it doesn't seem to connect from this side of the dungeon i say we just take our spoils and move on yeah what probably happens is you probably get some kind of grappling hook or something that creates like a magic bridge in between these two and then you'll be able to get across and i bet it loops around into the right and you've just got to kind of like remember this location for later that's okay though because i like that gameplay loop i think that gameplay loop is really really good i love it when games kind of have like areas you can't get into for right now until you have like a certain utility and then you've actually got to remember those spots so that you can come back later and knock it on out in good form get that extra loot over here oh that's a guard guy he's gonna try to hurt me isn't he yeah i was gonna say okay so he's got like a little little zesty thrust right there ow okay so he's also got a swing he's also got like a little buggy boyfriend over here let's smack him up real quick he'll okay so i got the rotation right here there we go he's down he also had pretty good financial change up in his pocket another blue fungus what do those do so blue fungus gives us water red fungus gives us a slow heal and then the scorching spice that we picked up uh allows us to get lit on fire i don't really see a market for that product but like okay general chris 355. he seems to have a head missing oh my energy hold on hold on hold on hold on i start he snuck in the gaps i thought i'd get him with a little two-piece right there little two-piece swipe the enemies respawn when i leave the area no doesn't look like they do i bet they respawn when we touch a fountain that's always the way games like this go all right so we got another blue fungus right there let me okay all right you've got projectiles oh they lead you too okay all right oh he tries to bait it out too okay fair enough i think we kind of want to dodge into that that way we can get three swings off there we go drop them nice and good we got a blue fungus right there we got a red fungus right there what else we got going on spooky spider okay i'm gonna kill the spooky spiders spooky spider for halloween there we go spooky spider done got dropped get a little bit more health tied up in my veins i do have like a little bit of money picked up true water reserves okay so i don't know if this is like caves of cod where like the entire financial system is based on like water what is that why why hide why hide in bushes so frail i was on my way to the veil when a whale i heard not a man nor a bird that's why i appear so pale in the old church where the beast sobbed he appeared as though he had been robbed but what had been stolen wasn't silver nor gold in his arms had been wickedly lobbed the brute was repulsive and mad he seemed like a most stubborn lad for deep in his head did someone embed a brass sword it's really too sad his presence i currently snub by hiding right here in this shrub get rid of the beast be he gone or deceased so i can unite with my club is is the beast up there he's gonna be like in this vicinity right like why would that guy be hiding if the beast wasn't kind of like lackadaisically cruising in this area okay a little crossbow action right there oh oh okay yeah you got oh with the combo though dude okay we gotta fall back we gotta fall back just kind of knock you out real quick maybe like stay out of the way of the cascade of murder that you're trying to put on me uh we got some chain mail nice okay i'm gonna kind of duck back into this nook here get my health back real fast and then we'll take a look at this chain mail so the chain mail apparently it makes us stronger versus like it gives us armor of some kind and i'm guessing it makes us more weak to elemental possibly so like strong versus physical weak versus like magic i don't know it's hard to say ow i got stuck on the stone a red leather quaff okay some more red fungus too how do i get to that guy over here all right hold on i do like that it changed the sound of our run now that we're wearing chain mail there's actually like the clinking of chain mail and it changed up our graphics so that's good i noticed that it did change up the graphic when i put on a helmet too and it was actually kind of a creepy looking helmet like it was like the helmet did not make me feel like i was the good guy it definitely felt like the kind of helmet a bad guy wears okay dodged the wrong direction again i suppose that's my own fault perfect and does this actually lead anywhere like are there like secrets oh my god there are i didn't expect that to actually work who is this dude oh my a new friend do you want to play uh depends what you're talking about if you're talking about like yahtzee sure we could fire off a round but if you want to play a game of like flay the skin off the splatty i don't think that i'm i'm down for it here's the game i dare you to do things you will do them then you get a reward got it okay here's your first challenge i want to see you eat some scorching spice go ahead i eat it all the time okay i'm on fire okay apparently the fire goes away on its own when given like the requisite amount of time here's the next challenge hit me in the face with a swordfish swordfish are kind of rare so you're going to catch it yourself but if you have a quality fishing rod you'll catch one in no time go on and do it yeah i don't i don't i i don't know if like uh you know pascato beat downs are really something that i have in the cards for right now i'm just gonna kind of like stay away until i thin out some of the bugs oh i was trying to get through this without taking a hit but i got a little greedy right there i thought i could swipe him on the way by like a bullfighter i was wrong i want to use one of these right here let's use one of those that actually gives you like a sizable heal that restored way more meter than i expected dude that's basically like a full heal meager coin purse red fungus can't go up into that little crack right there but you know me i'm gonna try uh where does oh there's a little dog dude there's a dog here do you want to pet it yes you pet the dog see i i think there's an agreement between all indie developers in active rotation today that if there's a dog in your game it must be petable and i'm pretty sure they send you off to some very very spiky island full of misery and pain if your game has an unpetable dog in it wait for him to fire off another round and then we'll go finish him off there we go perfect anybody else going to drop anything around here another chain mail i don't know if we have like carrying capacity or not what does that do uh that gives us a little bit of everything actually i'll take it yeah now i can play a fun game of like little red riding hood what is this guy doing okay so he's got like a thrust and then he's got like a swing owl oh he's also got like a dodge okay i can dig it down you go you got any sweet ass armor you want to drop for me i'd love you forever okay i think i've got the pattern down here it's gonna take us a little while to drop him just because he's a little bit stiffer than some of our other buggy competition but like you know we'll get them there we go i bet those guys dropped sick loot i dropped two meager coin purses nice stable if you're not gonna drop gear you might as well drop a little something something so i can have me some walking around monies i ran down to energy at a bad time there we go uh path seems to cut through here oh hardened chaps okay but like are these chaps going to expose my cheekage they're pretty good actually yeah i can go for that absolutely like i didn't know if they were kind of like the the assless version you know what i mean i'm guessing we get like a ranged weapon or something we can throw at that i honestly have no clue where i am does the game have a map i don't think the game has a map so i'm just kind of like wandering randomly right now but in all honesty that's the type of game player that i am i prefer exploration and just kind of like moving around and like i i don't like to be led by the nose linearity was never something that really worked for me personally um i don't think we can get across that pit for right now yeah i don't think we can get across the pit is there anything in that little nook doesn't look like it but i tend to be like when it comes to skinner boxes like i think they're divided up into like it's like builders explorers and fighters basically oh it loops back to here okay all right fair enough yeah absolutely we'll have to keep an eye out for secrets though i actually uh now that i know that there's secrets i'm feeling far more stimulated by the game but like i said my skinner box is definitely exploration i love finding things and having access to paths that players other players don't know about and little secret crannies and whatnot like it's just one of those things that i've always found to be a gameplay aspect that gets its hooks under my skin ever since the days of like doom did we go down this way i don't recall if we did yeah because this is where the little sphere was i guess the trees just permanently despawn here that's what like threw me off about it is that the trees didn't like come back so i guess that's not really like a a shading effect that happens right there it's actually like the trees are magical or something and they kind of just poof and disappear once you've actually uh gotten the thing found what you want to do bro what you want to do what you got for me i got your pattern on lock brother oh okay all right a little bit of hubris right there i may have you know i may have been a little bit more humid than i thought i was previously there we go drop him get a little bit more of that cash i actually want to see what we can spend our money on that's what i'm most interested in so far really all we found is water the hell is that thing the guard dog but he he's a woofer dude i don't want to kill him he looks like a big old puppy buddy who doesn't love a puppy buddy okay yeah i kind of dodged the wrong direction again i'm just gonna kind of like not get grow oh he's got a death ray okay yeah he's better at this business than i am i don't get a death ray and i'm the hero of the story kind of get one off right there combat feels pretty good i'm liking the boss pattern i'm just gonna stay away during that mass oh that counted okay i felt like i was kind of above him for that one but fair enough we'll throw out a dodge roll from here on out just to make it a little oh that was a terrible plan i thought maybe for a second i might be able to get away with it but apparently i was wrong yeah you could oh he's shooting two missiles now gross i don't want to be near you anymore oh the fight doesn't pause i learned a new thing today okay yeah i don't think he actually has a gap large enough to use my water here oh right into it too when he point blanks like that and it splits in those two directions there we go we got a little bit off right there a little bit off right there little hit of rooney's right there oh god okay uh i would like to yeah let me use one of those perfect i just i would like to have more health than i currently have go ahead and give him a little scuffy right there get off like what is he doing oh he's got phases i hate my life okay yeah a little bit more oh okay i'm just gonna try to get a gap here i mean if he wants to come in and spark beef up close i guess i can go for it dude i can't see those missiles to get out of the way of them for nothing there we go yeah i'm gonna need a little bit more health here okay we got health we're fine we'll get a little bit of water back that's it just a little bit of water i think i have to use the iframes to get away from that at this point yeah there's like a lot going on right now like i'm out here looking for openings but man they are not making it easy okay oh boy yeah this is getting a little bit tense i'll tell you what he don't like it when i back off like that and that point-blank shotgun is brutal there we go i knew i could do it man i was feeling myself right there i could feel the crackle what you got on the waterfall key okay that was a pretty good boss fight dude that was that was a pretty solid boss fight right there like that was a good intro to like the basics like you could tell that that boss fight was effectively designed around the idea of spacing and also knowing exactly what part of your role is covered by iframes because there's certain situations in that fight that you're not going to be able to get out of the way of you have to dodge through it and so you could tell with that fight that the game was basically teaching you the basics of like all right frames two through six are the ones that you have immunity you need to learn that gap otherwise you're not going to make it much further uh there's our fountain right there i think i probably will invest in water a little bit and then the guy in the bush you reach out and touch the waterfall but nothing happens oh i thought it was gonna let me get in there let's go get the guy that was hiding oh the gate closed behind me oh interesting okay so i guess we live here now true water reserves does that just like fill up my meter oh half my meter okay so you get one from the mushrooms and you get two from the true water infusions or whatever an altar to amtar the god of insanity pray to amtar and refill your water now i'm good i'm i'm kind of solid on water i don't think that praying to insanity is something that i find to be the laser ring hold up let's see here gives the wearer the power to summon a short burst of light the guard dog was once a man in the subject of unorthodox experimentation oh oh sweet see and now we know how to get into those other areas that we couldn't access before see now we're good and golden oh wow it does a solid grip of damage too yeah i was gonna get hit by something right there i had a sneaking feeling don't you even think about swinging that thing around again okay so now we've got like a risk reward segment too where i've got to decide like how much of my water i'm willing to use to heal myself versus how much i'm willing to use to like spam kamehameha waves at the enemy nice i like little uh i like little conflicts in gameplay like that still don't know how to get down there looks like there's a stairwell that leads down to it so i guess my initial hypothesis was wrong the door over there and this obviously i think loops back to that other dungeon maybe that's still shut the oh it's binary okay gotcha i guess binary might not be the right word for it okay yeah oh god i'm getting wrecked oh my god okay let's disengage for a second wipe you out get a couple heels in me okay i gotta learn the reads for those guys i gotta learn the reads for them those ones actually the amount of damage that we took for like a preliminary just kind of like mini mob fight right there worries me and so i think we're we're definitely gonna have to learn that pattern right there otherwise it's going to cost us in the future there we go we've opened up the shortcut that leads back and over to here so it looks like the entire game is designed to be a little bit of like a channeled honeycomb basically where there's a bunch of things that loop back to places that you want to go and in fact this puts us out on the other side of the gate right but there's also that door up here loving the exploratory aspects right now i guess i could refill my water over here too i bet that guy wakes up though right oh he didn't wake up i expected him to but he didn't i was gonna say i don't think i can curve that over there i don't think that's gonna be an option all right kate what you got it's locked and the key doesn't go to that either oh the key went to the previous store that's right okay so yeah i guess this is probably just like a loopback to get us back and around and outside that gate that we were trapped behind oh there's spiders over there i seen them i saint the spider oh okay i don't know why there's two spiders on there they're decorational spiders okay they're playing around with new found ways to spice up your home decor everybody needs a couple good terrier sized you know decorative spiders i found my way out of the loop back but this guy swapped sides hey pal didn't see you there i was too busy gawking at this fancy ring i gots me nah you don't want to be missing out on a ring like this one listen to this if you put this ring on it heightens your senses or something lets you deflect stuff with your sword say one of them guard crony shoots an arrow at you you hit it right back at him he won't even know what hit him so what do you say want to buy this absolute beauty of a ring so that you can deflect projectiles with your sword it's worth it's worth a lot but i'd be willing to part with it for let's say 50 pieces sure nice doing business with you so we've got the ring of deflection okay yeah throw it on there apparently i can deflect arrows with my sword now which i'm totally okay with i do like that the advancement in this game seems to be mostly related to like gear that makes it have like kind of a low fantasy feeling to it where you're not like leveling up or anything uh you're just kind of a guy picking up stuff you find by the wayside but we're out of time for the day this is fountain so far i'm impressed by it everything feels good and tight and responsive i like the animation and the art style i think the game looks good i think the game feels pretty good i don't really have any complaints i'm especially enjoying just the ability to explore and like move around the map and have a good time like finding things uh the impacts all feel good and satisfying it's simple yet working like it's simple but it works like the pixel art ranges from like you know just a couple of like 8-bit or 16-bit sprites to things like the trees and whatnot that look quite good with the contouring but anyways my name is splatter cat i sit through the file to find worthwhile in the world of indie games every single day so you don't have to today up on the chopping block we had a game called a fountains you can get the demo down below in the description see y'all later take care everybody

Channel: SplatterCatGaming

Views: 92,539

Keywords: fountains gameplay, fountains walkthrough, fountains john prywell, fountains steam game, fountains playthrough, lets play fountains, fountains review, fountains preview, fountains impressions, fountains download, fountains guide, fountains tutorial, fountains music, fountains soundtrack, fountains trailer, fountains pc game, fountains indie game

Id: f7rFvpLSANs

Length: 35min 19sec (2119 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 23 2022