[PC Games] Fountain of Dreams, the Wasteland sequel that time forgot

[-WAIL ツ]

We're rerunning Richard Cobbett's classic Crapshoot column, in which he rolled the dice and took a chance on obscure games—both good and bad.

From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random games back into the light. This week, another chance to enter a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but one that soon turned into a mere Bidet of Nightmares. Drink of it at your own risk.

Wasteland eventually got its long-awaited sequel, and luckily it was good. Some might even say very good. Depending on who you ask though, there already was a sequel to Wasteland, only a year or so after the first one came out. Now, to be clear, the list of people who will tell you that is very small indeed. Not the original Wasteland team, which didn't work on it, not Wasteland fans, who generally try to forget it, and not even publisher EA, who originally did tried to hold it up as a proper sequel, but were apparently convinced of their folly after three ghosts showed up to slap some goddamn sense into them.

Despite that, the lineage is obvious, and you'd think the thirst for a new Wasteland game would make anything even inspired by it worth a little hardcore fan fondness. How bad could it be that it was politely carved out of history almost as soon as it landed? Well, let's find out! Though I think we can assume the answer is "Very, very bad."

Fountain of Dreams takes place in post-apocalyptic Florida, so that's at least a bit different, some 50 years after nuclear strikes carved it off from the mainland. Nobody knows if life still exists on the mainland or beyond, but all attempts to find out lead to quick death from the contaminated sea all around or the vicious monsters that pick off what radiation can't immediately destroy. Over the last 50 years, that's meant the major cities withdrawing into themselves and becoming city states, people increasingly mutating due to exposure to all the nasty stuff in the air and underfoot, and vicious gangs rising up in the wilderness to threaten adventurers and give everyone a damn good reason to stay home.

https://www.pcgamer.com/saturday-crapshoot-fountain-of-dreams/