The focus of survival games is actually the game, not survival

Why do players like survival games?

Or they wake up in the jungle with nothing but their body; or they have a lucky escape from a shipwreck or an air crash, and have to regain the survival instinct of their ancestors from the Stone Age. What are the wishes and motivations that make players work in the virtual world day after day, using ancient wooden bows and stone spears to fight against nature and beasts?

Is it the will to survive?

Let’s put that question aside for now and look around. What would you see if you walked through the streets of the city?

I saw the gray cement and the blue asphalt paving the way; I saw the sewer entrances and garbage in the corners and alleys; I saw the towering buildings setting off the dense cables and glass panels in the sky; I saw the fog The clouds imprint the gray sky. Everything you see is dark and depressing.

When you close your eyes, what do you hear?

I heard the whine of the fossil engine paired with the one after another car horns; I heard the never-ending traffic and the roar of people; I heard the reverberation of the construction site and the roar of heavy machinery; I also heard the shrill meowing and straying of cats. The whine of a dog. It's so noisy and annoying when it comes to my ears frequently.

Let’s turn our attention to the original question – why do players like survival games? Or let’s refine the subject of the question again – why do I like survival games?

Screenshot of a trip in Minecraft

What I'm fascinated by is the pastoral style of "picking chrysanthemums under the eastern fence, leisurely seeing the southern mountains"; what I want is to break away from the existing social chain, get rid of the meaningless production relations, and regain my true heart. I just want to meet the basic needs of life, and I also want to truly return to the most primitive safari life relationship.

But my ability to survive cannot satisfy the reality of "picking chrysanthemums under the eastern fence", and my wallet cannot "leisurely" own my own "Nanshan". What's more, in this highly industrialized society, even if you use a local method to tan a bow and make arrows, what you shoot will not necessarily be meat that will satisfy your appetite, but a ticket for harming a nationally protected animal.

Of course, you have to survive first

To be precise, I hope to break away from the existing whirlpool of life and social structure, but I lack the resources to truly achieve complete freedom. Survival games, to me, feel like a compromise with the real world. It is a virtual window to pursue your true heart, and it can also be said to be psychological comfort. At the same time, I also believe that most players who like or even love survival games have similar thoughts.

And when you look at survival games with this set of logic, then judge the fun of these works. So, whether you can find a balance between fantasy and reality, so that gameplay and authenticity can help each other, is obviously an important indicator of whether a work is excellent or not.

If you use this idea to look at "Island Survival: Fountain of Youth" (: of Youth), then it is obviously unqualified.

Whether in the real world or the virtual world, resource management is always the first priority for wilderness survival, and "Island Survival: Fountain of Youth" is no exception in this regard. The producer obviously uses "authenticity" and "survival difficulty" as the promotional caliber of the game. Therefore, players in this game not only have to manage water, food, tools, and building materials, but there is also a very special additional resource that must also be taken into consideration.

The additional resources here refer specifically to time.

Yes, time is also a resource that needs to be managed in this work. To be precise, if you have experience and knowledge of camping or wilderness survival, you will definitely know that time is indeed an extremely important resource in wilderness survival in the real world. Everything human beings need for survival – water, food, as well as their own energy and physical strength – are directly linked to time and are lost with the passage of time.

These characteristics were also implanted by the production team of "Island Survival: Fountain of Youth" and became the selling point of the game touting its "realism" and "immersion".

In "Island Survival: Fountain of Youth", all the player's operations – collecting resources, resting and making, will consume time. For example, if the player wants to collect some leaves from the low leafy trees on the seaside, the collection process will consume 1 hour of in-game time; or if the player wants to carve out a coconut, it will take 10 minutes; if The player also wants to eat the coconut, which will take an additional 10 minutes.

To be precise, the time resource theory design of "Island Survival: Fountain of Youth" is essentially an attempt to gamify real-life survival elements. However, after the specific values ​​were implemented, not only did they not bring a sense of reality to the players, but they also did not provide a good boost to the main gameplay of "survival".

The reason is very simple. The time consumption of many actions in this game is really counterintuitive. Even just gathering a few leaves and collecting a few berries will take an hour or two of in-game time. And if players start to advance material production, or even make a prop and complete the entire process, it will take a whole day.

The time cost investment in many projects even makes people doubt whether the producers of this game really have the knowledge and experience related to wilderness survival.

Moreover, "Island Survival: Fountain of Youth" is completely unrelated to "realism" in many aspects.

For example, this game's extremely simple UI and interaction allow players to collect resources by just tapping a few interactive buttons. The entire operation process only involves the rotation of the progress bar on the screen, without any actual collection animation, and it does not bring the joy of resource collection to players at all.

To give a simpler example, the player's specific game experience in resource collection is a bit like a material manager sitting in an office in a warehouse. You don’t need to roll up your sleeves at all, just click the mouse, and the supplies will fly into the warehouse, completely abandoning the most fundamental interactive experience of survival games.

At the same time, due to the extremely high span of time consumption, if the player is addicted to the process of picking up garbage and visits a few more coconut trees, the day in the game will slip away without any sense of existence. Even veterans of survival games, no matter how experienced they are, will inevitably be confused by such a design, and may not be able to figure out the producer's thinking for a while.

What makes the game experience seem a bit childish is the resource point design of this game.

All resources in "Island Survival: Fountain of Youth" come from an extremely limited number of fixed resource points. Moreover, the regeneration speed of each resource point is extremely slow, requiring an average of 30 to 40 game days. If players accidentally make mistakes and waste some resources during production and construction, they may face a shortage of supplies.

Especially wood and stone. These two basic materials are the most commonly used in the entire game, but also the most difficult to obtain in large quantities. Even if you are surrounded by rocks and there are forests of trees on the hillside in the distance, players will still get stuck by logs and small stones.

Just because most of the trees and rocks in the game are game models rather than resource points.

There are trees everywhere as far as the eye can see, but none of them can be cut down

Apart from these key issues, "Island Survival: Fountain of Youth" also has frequent problems with multi-system coupling. For example, there is a conflict between the combat system and the collection system: as long as the player is within the hatred range of wild animals, he cannot perform any collection actions.

To be precise, the little animal grinning at you in the grass may just be a scorpion or a snake. The player has not entered the opponent's attack range at all, and will not be attacked even if he stands in place. However, under the game's judgment mechanism, the player will be judged to be in combat mode, and will not be able to perform any time-consuming operations except attacking or escaping.

You know, in "Island Survival: Fountain of Youth", the only things that don't consume time are movement and attack.

What is also puzzling is the energy system.

Players have energy bar settings in this game. Any operation or action will consume energy, and the player's replenishment method is relatively single-sleep. To be precise, a good wilderness survivor obviously needs to ensure that he always has sufficient physical strength to face any situation.

However, the energy punishment system of "Island Survival: Fountain of Youth" is very simple and crude – blood deduction. As long as the player is running out of energy, not only will his movement and physical regeneration slow down, but his health will also be threatened.

Then the punishment method is equally simple and crude, and there is also the weight-bearing system of this game. If the total weight of the items carried by the player exceeds the upper limit, even if it is only 0.01 kilograms, the player character will immediately stand still and unable to move.

This kind of design inevitably made me a little surprised. I couldn't help but re-read the Steam store interface and confirmed again and again that "Island Survival: Fountain of Youth" was a work that was just launched in 2023, rather than some "old-school survival" from more than ten years ago. game".

Use a shovel instead of an ax to cut down a tree stump

To be precise, the current gaming experience of "Isolation: Fountain of Youth" is quite unbalanced. On the one hand, the producers seem to have implanted many realistic gameplay systems in order to make the game more realistic and immersive; but on the other hand, the way these systems are implanted is very weird – or there are no specific values. Achieve a good balance, or there will be serious mistakes in the coupling of multiple systems, causing the overall look and feel of the game to be too counterintuitive, thus greatly reducing the authenticity.

However, "Island Survival: Fountain of Youth" is still in the early access stage. If you fix some design problems and make some numerical adjustments, the game experience of this game will be salvageable.

However, at present, what players can gain from "Island Survival: Fountain of Youth" is neither the struggle for survival of a shipwrecked sailor in the Renaissance nor the wonderful experience of "Robinson Crusoe". The producer of this work obviously did not control the balance between fantasy and reality, making this work sandwiched between authenticity and gameplay, which is really neither fish nor fowl.

And when a survival game is neither "real" nor game-like, then its actual experience naturally goes without saying.