Placing items and getting the spacing just right isn’t always perfect and sometimes the finicky controls for placing structures can result in wasted time or resources, but it’s flexible enough so that you can build around most environments or else tear off what’s there to make it your own. In my group’s case, we built our home into the side of a massive oak tree, and over the course of our playthrough our structure steadily climbed up the twisted roots and branches until it felt like a proper fortress. This alone can soak up hours of your time as you work to perfect your tiny dwelling with all the modern accommodations a miniature child might want, like a cooking station for making delicious insect-based foods, a comfy leaf bed for a night’s rest, or a garden for growing your own mushrooms and the like. What starts out as a pretty straightforward set of building blocks with base building quickly proliferates into downright insanity that goads you into unleashing your creativity with multi-story buildings, ziplines, trampolines, and housing for your pets. Part of what makes Grounded so immensely addictive is the fact that it gets so many things right with its sandbox, from building and resource management to exploration and combat. I feel like I’ve still yet to scratch the surface in a lot of ways. In the over 100 hours I’ve sunk into it so far I never came even close to running out of things to do, and although I now feel like I know the yard like the back of my hand, it’s still overwhelming just how big the place feels. That’s because the handful of main story quests are gated behind your character unlocking perks to get stronger, gathering materials to upgrade and maintain your equipment, and making improvements to your base to make life easier, like by creating ziplines to travel quickly across the massive map. Every tiny patch of grass acts as its own distinct area, with its own host of increasingly dangerous creatures, things to discover, and obstacles to overcome, and the attention to detail and creativity born from that never stopped making me smile – even small things, like how you have to collect drinkable water from blades of grass that carry a single drop of dew, are excellent little touches.Īnd although you and your friends have been shrunk down to the size of an ant, Grounded is anything but small. A koi pond becomes a terrifying and deadly game of cat and mouse as you explore the water’s depths and avoid the oppressive gaze of the pond’s gilled master. A child’s sandbox becomes a hysterical, hostile desert where staying out in the sun for more than a few seconds causes you to burn up, so you’ve gotta dart between patches of shade for cover. One inhospitable and extremely rude area of the yard has an overturned charcoal grill that acts as a volcanic mountain range, while another has a leaking bug bomb that fills the area with a noxious gas and mutated insects. Admittedly, there aren’t very many NPCs to find and most story development is either told via collectible audio recordings or locked behind hours of survival gameplay and a bit of grinding, but Grounded strikes a great balance between making you feel on your own in a hostile backyard and meeting quirky characters, most of whom inevitably try to maim you.Įven with memorable characters, though, the star of Grounded is hands-down the backyard itself, which is completely beautiful and oozes personality from every blade of grass. Numerous character progression mechanics, an enemy weaknesses and resistances system that had me poring over data in the menu, the elaborate boss fights, and NPCs and dialogue options that break up the action all make it feel more like a roleplaying game than most of its survival peers. You’ll split your time between scavenging the charming backyard setting for materials, crafting awesome items from the corpses of your enemies, building badass structures to protect yourself and your stuff, fighting giant bugs that gave my co-op partners nightmares, exploring extremely difficult dungeons, leveling up your character’s stats and equipment, and more. Grounded is a survival game first and foremost, but draws a ton of inspiration from Obsidian’s history as a team of RPG wizards as well.
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