Obsidian Development, of Fallout: New Vegas fame, released survival game Grounded about a month and a half ago. This followed years of early access. It’s currently available on XBOX GamePass.
The premise is Honey-I-Shrunk-the-Kids with a focus on the backyard. You wake up with amnesia under some grass roots, the mad scientist is MIA, so it’s up to you to explore and discover what happened & how to fix things. There’s combat, collecting, crafting, building, and a storyline.
I’ve been playing with friends for about a week, it’s pretty fun. The environment is awesome, the story is pretty good (so far). I will look back fondly on our assault of the old anthill and hedge maze for months. I also enjoy collecting and building, very chill until it isn’t. Those spiders keep you on your toes. The developers made a point of letting people with arachnophobia replace big spiders with nondescript evil blobs.
My main complaint is that the Xbox interface is a bit clunky. Too many commands, not enough buttons. I get the feeling this is definitely a PC game ported to Xbox - even something as basic as switching from your shovel to a weapon takes three commands (open radial, pick weapon, confirm). On PC each slot is bound to a key. You have a cursor on your inventory screen. Etc.
I played the shit out of it on pre-release. I restarted it once the full version was available. I really really enjoy it. Took a couple of weeks off when my buddy took a vacation to Europe, but I’m excited to get back into it and get into all the new stuff that wasn’t available before. 10 thumbs up!
Spiders don’t bother me so I have them on. I’ve seen them but kept my distance.
It’s a tiny thing, but one thing that seemed sort of dumb to me was my character’s reaction to being inexplicably shrunk; it amounted to “wow! Neat!” Seems to me a certain amount of confusion and fear would be likelier.
Oh, the game is plenty scary on its own. I have yelped out loud more than once for various reasons, especially in multiplayer when I’ve been distracted by chattering and then [redacted].
But I think the “wow, neat!” reaction is perfect for the vibe they’re going for. It’s an 80s/90s family-friendly adventure movie, not horror. There are plenty of grim survival games out there already. This is super refreshing and, imo, a huge part of its appeal.
I played it for a while several months ago (they hadn’t yet added any of the underwater stuff). I’ve started a new playthrough and am enjoying the additional narrative. The hedge lab is no longer just a cool space to find your way through, but contributes to the story and there’s an actual goal there.
My main issue is much the same as it was the first time. To make cool higher level gear, you need to get parts from critters that will kill you in seconds if you don’t already have that cool higher level gear, which just encourages me to find the cheesiest possible ways to kill them. Maybe I’m playing it wrong.
I didn’t enjoy the game immensely, but I’ve come to realize that I just don’t care much for these “survival” type games. I can’t really articulate why. But it has dawned on me lately that this game and similar games, like Conan Exiles, just fall flat. I should probably know not to bother with them. At least I didn’t pay anything for this one.
The exception is Subnautica, that game was a complete blast. I’m not sure what made that game different. If I could tell what sets it apart from other survival games, that would help me a lot.
One thing that specifically irritated me about Grounded is that I can’t tell what’s going on most of the time. “You need food or you’re going to die!!!” Okay, I ate my meal bars, so what else can I eat? Hmm, I can make some kind of paste that I can eat, but I need to gather it first… And now I’m dead because it only gave me about a minute before I magically dropped dead of hunger seconds after hunger pangs started. (Maybe that’s a side effect of the shrinking process?) I guess when a game is set up to challenge you to plan ahead and use your reasoning to figure out a way to succeed, but gives you not enough information to make a plan and tosses “reason” in garbage can and sets it on fire, it really takes away the enjoyment of the game immensely.
I suppose if it stopped trying to be a “survival” game and just became a game about exploration, puzzle solving, and combat, it would be better. As it is, it seems clunky and badly done. I’m going to be uninstalling it for certain.
Hmm, I guess in the process of writing this out, I figured out my problem with the game. It’s not that it’s a survival game, it’s just a badly-designed one.
Yes, but there’s no indication of whether you are in danger, no “alert”, until it’s pretty much too late to do anything about it. And the HUD is lousy.
There really aren’t any explanations in-game about what any of that means. I’m not the only one thrown by it.
If you enjoy trying to figure out an arcane interface and that’s part of the challenge for you, awesome. Seriously, no snark, that’s cool. I just personally don’t enjoy that.
I also really dislike things like swapping tools, where you have to press a button, then select the tool in a radial menu and press A, and then you select it. Which is awful when you need to do it suddenly, say you are under attack and need to swap to a weapon. And the controls don’t make a lot of sense; I kept throwing my tools by accident. It’s almost like they tried to make it difficult on purpose, because it isn’t anything like any other game I’ve played.
Again, these are just my opinions on why I dislike the game. There are others in this thread who love the game and that is great. It’s not going to appeal to everyone, and clearly it’s not an objectively bad game if others are having fun with it.
Your max stamina is halved when you are really low. Along with a powering down type of sound. Not sure what kind of alert you require. But there definitely is one.
Yeah, the HUD didn’t really make sense to me until I read the survival guide in the pause menu (very basic explanation for new players, but stupidly not pointed out in the tutorial). Any bar less than halfway full means you’re in trouble.
If you aren’t burned out I recommend switching to mild difficulty, it’s recommended for your first time playing but stupidly not the default.
Just bought this before the Steam Summer Sails end tomorrow. A little more expensive than what I would normally spend on a game; $24 compared to my usual limit of <$20, but I could no longer resist the anticipation.
Just the very beginning few seconds already has me terrified. Being the size of insects feels like nightmare fuel. I cannot wait!
I’m going to resist rereading this thread until I’ve gotten pretty far. So my first impression is being very unsettled about getting two different warnings about spiders when I started a new game. As a moderately arachnophobic person, I think this game might hit me as hard as when subnautica unlocked my previously unknown fear of open water.
Don’t worry, not many of the insects or arachnids will be trying to kill you. Except the spiders. And the soldier ants. And the stink bugs. And the bombardier beetles. And the larvae. And the mosquitoes. And…
Okay, quite a large number of the insects and arachnids will be trying to kill you. But don’t worry, they’re tiny. Could effortlessly squish them with your pinky finger, if you weren’t shrunk down like that.
I only got to play about an hour last night, but it was so good. As soon as I stepped out of the little starting cave I saw an ant. I had already learned that I could punch, so I tried punching it. The ant then proceeded to murder the shit out of me with extreme prejudice. Dying appeared to be a no-harm no-foul situation since I didn’t have anything to lose yet.
After running around for a bit I discovered collectible items and how to craft with them. Made a pebble axe and pebble spear, unblocked that one laser, and then used the spear to attack the ant in the electronics box beneath the lasers. You can block! Holy shit, actual combat! I’m swooning with excitement over here, in that subnautica basically had no combat, and to call raft’s combat rudimentary would be giving it too much credit. Killing the ant with the spear, I took zero unblocked hits. I assume actual enemies will be harder, but still, what a wonderful first impression.
How much swimming is in this game? I haven’t decided on a control scheme yet (using my Xbox controller) so still rolling with the default. I’d really like the shoulder buttons to be mapped to swim up and down, same as I did with Subnautica and Raft, but they are mapped to other things by default and swim up and down aren’t even mapped to the controller at all. If there’s virtually no swimming then I guess I don’t need to bother mapping those buttons.
