One New Indie is a Faithful Attempt at a 2D Dark Souls

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home January 2, 2025 4 Views 7 Min Read
One New Indie is a Faithful Attempt at a 2D Dark Souls

The influence that FromSoftware’s Dark Souls has had on the industry is such that the subgenre it helped create, the “Soulslike”, has now spread into myriad other subgenres. One of the more prominent types of game to begin adapting and adopting many of the elements of Soulslikes is the Metroidvania, which has seen a surprising influx of aptly nicknamed “Soulsvanias” in the wake of games like Hollow Knight and the many titles it inspired. But Fountains, a new indie title from solo developer John Pywell, is so faithful to its Dark Souls influence as to come full circle and deliver what might be the most authentic approximation of a 2D game in FromSoftware’s legendary series.

Pywell launched the crowdfunding campaign for Fountains in 2022 alongside a demo of the title on itch.io and Steam, and it quickly sailed past its meager funding goal just 2 weeks after the launch of its Kickstarter. The title was officially released on December 20, 2024, and already sits at a strong 92% “Very Positive” on Steam. What helps set Fountains apart from other Metroidvania titles that take inspiration from Dark Souls is its emphasis on making its world feel interconnected, replicating the surprising ways that the world of Lordran connects and feels like a singular, dense space.

The Chosen Undead from Dark Souls over a screenshot from Haunted Chocolatier

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Fountains’ Perspective and World Inject it With Plenty of Scale and Mystery

Much like Lordran in the original Dark Souls, Fountains‘ world is arguably the star of the show. The game’s zoomed-out, top-down perspective helps to instill a sense of scale that often eludes other games taking inspiration from the original Dark Souls, making the vast map feel like a real, lived-in place with history and mystery beyond what the game presents to the player. Further, the world of Fountains is intricately interconnected like Lordran, with regular journeys both above and below ground opening up surprising shortcuts that showcase how the game is essentially one giant dungeon.

While Fountains is technically a Metroidvania, it is only as much as Dark Souls is, with a more accurate descriptor being that the game is an intricately designed action RPG with a massive, interconnected world. Fountains also borrows more from Dark Souls than its approach to world design, incorporating similar environmental storytelling and obtuse lore that have been trademarks of FromSoftware games for decades. That it is able to do all this using evocative 2D-pixel art makes Fountains a unique experience among the small crop of 2D Soulslikes.

Combat and Character Progression in Fountains Call to Mind One of Dark Souls’ Primary Influences

One area where Fountains diverges from its obvious Dark Souls inspirations is with its approaches to character progression and combat. Interestingly, though, these elements of Fountains call to mind a game that is one of Dark Souls‘ (and countless other action RPGs’) primary inspirations: The Legend of Zelda. Like in the first Legend of Zelda, players in Fountains have a limited pool of gear and equipment to use, requiring them to master the tools at their disposal before they can venture forth and acquire new implements for their arsenal. There’s no parrying and no blocking, with players needing to focus on a singular evasive maneuver as their only hope of defense.

The limited move set and equipment pool, combined with a more streamlined approach to character progression and a lack of builds, make combat in Fountains an exercise in understanding the system’s fundamentals. Instead of feeling limited, it feels like a system meant to trim the fat from other, more complex games in the genre, and it delivers a similar sense of purity to each encounter that’s reminiscent of both The Legend of Zelda and the early hours of the original Dark Souls​​​​​​. Though the closest analogs to Fountains might be games like Hyper Light Drifter or Death’s Door, the game takes a concerted “back to basics” approach to all of its systems and comes off feeling like a hidden gem from gaming’s past as a result.

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