Grounded is a cute, base-building survival game, a bit like Subnautica or Valheim. (Why have I not written a review for Valheim?) Grounded was released for PC and Xbox One in 2022, while the PS4/5 and the Switch versions came out later in April 2024. This was gifted to me by my partner on Steam, though it took me a while to get around to actually playing it.
Gameplay
Like other base-builders, Grounded will have you starting off the game with very little items or gear, and you’ll have to explore to find materials to make better gear and set up a base. You’ll have to manage hunger and thirst, as well as gathering materials in order to increase progress in the game.
Unlike many other games of this type, rather than creating your own character – Grounded has you instead play as one of four teenagers. Grounded can be played either solo or with up to a max of three other players for a total of four. Since the game uses a pre-determined set of characters, you actually aren’t restricted to any one of them – you could actually change which character you are playing each time you log in. I ended up playing as Willow for all of it, but that became more of habit than anything. The characters didn’t change the gameplay in any way, except for the occasional dialogue.
Grounded starts you off as a shrunken human – if you immediately started thinking of ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Kids‘, then you would be pretty spot-on for what the game is like. The entire game takes place in a backyard – so the environment includes things you would typically find in a generic, American suburban back yard. That includes things like a sandbox, a small pond, a barbecue grill and a lawnmower – but also, the insects that you would expect to find.
The insects found throughout the yard are your primary adversaries. You’ll start off facing down mainly red ants in the beginning, but it branches out pretty quickly! Grounded had a pretty good sized number of insects – and the handled the variety in some cases similar to how games like Valheim do – in which they just change the color of the asset to create a new variety. Think red ants, blank ants, and fire ants, for example. There’s nothing wrong with that approach – saves on some development time and keeps overall file size a little bit smaller!
Some of the insects were much cuter than others – I had a really, really hard time killing bees. The insects also make noises – if you’re small enough to be threatened by an ants, then I suppose you would hear whatever sound they happen to make – and the bees make the most adorable sounds. (I think only the moth really rivals the bee for cuteness!)
Some of the creatures, though, are much less… pleasant. If you don’t like spiders, be warned – Grounded is full of them. Orb weavers are pretty early on in the game, and frequent – and later, wolf spiders will patrol around pretty regularly.
Screenshot of a wolf spider; click to expand.
The developers for Grounded however, did realize that arachnophobia is pretty widespread, and fortunately they include a method for you to tone down the spiderness. You can change the way the spiders are rendered – so if the look of them really bothers you, you can tone them down into little blobs.
Nothing scary about a blob, right? Except maybe… the way they sound. The creepy, angry whispers of the wolf spider are not leaving me anytime soon.
Screenshot of an orb weaver spider to demonstrate the safe mode. Click to expand.
I played this with an Xbox controller as I am pretty inept at using a keyboard and mouse for video games, and it worked out pretty well. I did find that I was really easily confused on some of the controller buttons – but I think that is the layout of the Xbox controller and not the way the game is designed. For example, apparently on the Xbox controller, the triggers are ‘Left Bumper’ and ‘Left Trigger’. I’m used to seeing ‘R1’ and ‘R2’, as I play on the PlayStation more than anything. I managed to figure out the right and left part just fine, but the game abbreviated the triggers to ‘LB’ and ‘LT’. While anyone playing Xbox regularly, or uses that controller may not have had any issue, I kept confusing this with ‘Left Bottom’ or ‘Left Top’ which is the absolute opposite of what it is actually saying! I managed to get the hang of it, eventually, and fully acknowledge that this is just an issue of mine.
As with a lot of games lately, using a controller means a lot of menus are presented with a radial option – you can hit one of triggers to open the dial and then choose the option you need. This worked fairly well for the most part – it took me a long time to get the hang of weapon switching in this way, but I did manage it. I found the radials were too cumbersome to use while trying to craft, though, so I would just open the menu and scroll through to what I needed to build.
Combat was tricky at times. You can play the game in either first or third person; and I found it was easier for me in third person. There is a reticle in the center of the screen to help you identify what you are looking at, but I found that a lot of the time I couldn’t actually hit anything. Frequently, I would find that the hit box for whatever I was fighting was much lower than my character’s swings were, and I would have to look nearly straight down to hit them. That of course, screwed up my vision for looking around me and I’d often get smacked from the back or sides by other things.
Building can be fun, and there are a lot of cute elements you can incorporate into your builds. There are some drawbacks, however – one of the most frustrating of them was the inability to level the ground out. You will have to spend a lot of resources to create a truly ‘flat’ surface. You also may run into issues where you just find objects in the way that you can’t move, and creatures will not stop spawning, even in your base. Don’t be surprised when you suddenly have a lot of ants in your house. (Or, god forbid, a wolf spider.)
The most difficult aspect of combat however, was the lag. Since Grounded allows you to play with friends, and is cross-platform, one of the players has to function as a ‘host’. This player starts the game, and the other players join in. For my adventure, I joined into Lady Dynamo’s game, and we were often joined by Ole’ Halfleg. Grounded is certainly not the only game handle online game play this way; but it is the most frustrating one I have played to date. As Lady Dynamo was the host, and I was joining her, I often found that our games were not in-sync with each other. That resulted in issues such as lag in combat – sometimes creatures had died already while they appeared to still be in combat with me, so I’m fighting ‘nothing’. The much more annoying aspect though, was how it affected by ability to block.
Grounded has a lot of perks you can use in combat, some of them revolving around your ability to block – and do block at a perfectly timed moment. With the lag in the game, it was often nearly impossible to time things right.
We also had many issues with the syncing of the game in which objects were showing on my screen, but I would be unable to interact with them because they weren’t actually there. For example, I might be cutting grass and attempting to pick some up. Another player is also picking up grass, and on my screen, I see a blade. I go to pick it up, and nothing happens – it turns out, another player has already picked up that blade of grass, but the syncing didn’t display this for me, so it appeared as an object I just couldn’t interact with.
We had this issue with building quite frequently as well. Dynamo would build structures, but for me, I would see the blue outline of unfinished items; or in some cases – no item at all! There are many times when myself or Ole’ Halfleg would fall through structures that had not yet rendered for us.
We were pretty heavily plagued with issues throughout our gameplay, despite this being a fully-released game. There were many times where we nearly gave up to to the frequent crashing, syncing issues, etc that made it borderline unplayable at times. Here’s a handful of examples:
- I had a very random, mysterious death occur in game. Never did figure out what caused this, but I suspect some type of sync issue.
- Climbing a ladder, following Dynamo. After she gets off the ladder, I’m able to continue climbing for sometime.
- The bridge in front of my character is fully built for Dynamo and Ole’ Halfleg, but for me it continues to show that it is not a completed structure.
- The pets really enjoyed having raves. These came up pretty often, and all three of us experienced it throughout all of our playing.
- In one case, we tried to simply rest… and after we wake up, Ole’ Halfleg is just… gone?
- Started off a night with Dynamo hosting; and shortly into the game it crashed on us. After rebooting it, we had a hard time getting back in because it kept saying she was hosting – I tried hosting or joining and it just kept repeating this. We eventually had to have her reboot her computer to get it to stop saying she was still hosting.
- Tons of syncing issues. Mostly, it’ll be items that appear on screen for Dynamo or myself, but we can’t interact with it. Also includes a lot of dew drops mysteriously floating in the air that can’t be interacted with.
- Our pets keep vanishing on us. For several nights, the pet aphid has just.. disappeared. We could see the icon on screen to its location, but could not find it. This was incredibly annoying as we had put items into the pets inventory that just vanished with them.
I did actually reach out to Obsidian for help with some of these issues, and we tried a multitude of troubleshooting but we could not ever get it to fully resolve the issues. The most difficult part to overcome however, was the frequent crashing. The worst case of this was while fighting the Infected Broodmother, near the end of the last round, only to have the game crash. That was a sad day.
Outside of the bugs and other issues, we found that the way things are described in the game to be incredibly frustrating. Normally, if you see an icon of some type on screen, you would expect to be able to hover over it and see a tooltip of some kind – but not in Grounded. We found that we actually had to rely on the Grounded Wiki to get through the game. I’m sorry but I strongly feel that if your game requires players to refer to an external source just to understand descriptions, then you are failing at some of your game design.
As just one example – in the late game, I decided I wanted to try to build some of the spider gear. There is some gear that gives you +Poison Coating, and some that gives you +Poison Damage. The game itself does not actually tell you what these things do! From the Wiki, I was able to find the difference:
- +Poison Coating – All attacks have a 25% chance to apply a Poison effect dealing 16 damage every 5 seconds over 30 seconds. DoT damage does not stack per armor piece.
- +Poison Damage – Depending on the gear you use, either:
- Increases damage of player-dealt poison attacks by 50%.
- Each melee hit has a 25% chance to increases damage of player-dealt poison attacks by 30%. This effect does NOT stack with each armor piece, only applying once.
In the game, you’ll only see the name of the effect itself – no description with it. There are a lot of places where the name of it sounds like it should behave one way, only to find that it in fact, does not do that thing.
For example, Mithridatism. Grounded describes this as, “Your body has been ravaged by the thrilling surge of poison coursing through so many times that it has built up a permanent resistance.” That sound awesome! I immediately think, ‘I am not immune to poison!’ That is not the case. What it actually does is increases your resistance by 25%/50%/75% depending on how leveled up it is. However, you can’t actually see the numbers of your stat in the game, so it’s very difficult to determine what it actually does at times, and since the status effect can stack, I very often felt like it did nothing at all. Oh, and venom is an entirely different, much worse effect from poison, which can also stack, and this does nothing for venom.
Story
Grounded’s story is pretty cute! It’s not complicated, but it is enough to serve as the drive to get you to progress in the game. You are playing as a teenager wakes up one day to find out that you have been kidnapped, shrunk down, and then released into a yard – and you have no idea how this happened. Your goal is find out what happened, and then to ‘Embiggen’ yourself back to your normal size so that you can go home.
Along the way you’ll find out how this happened – you’ll find various recordings from Dr. Wendell Tully who invented the technology, and you’ll meet his assistant BURG.L. BURG.L has had his memory damaged, so you’ll need to find memory chips from around the yard to help him so he can help you.
As the game progresses, the teens will have dreams that remind them of [spoilers],
their kidnapping, where they will learn that the evil Director Schmector (what a name lol) is behind their kidnapping and experimentation. One of the scientists who work for him actually smuggles you out into the yard to try and help you.
As you keep going and find additional memory chips for BURG.L, he’ll start to recall what goes into the cure – but that only Dr. Tully knows the last ingredient, and you’ll have to find our what happened to him to get the answer.
BURG.L sends them off to Tully’s last known location where they find [spoilers]
that he is suffering from ‘raisining’ as a result of shrinking himself. Which means he’s now little more than a floating head in a jar who really, really wants a Billy hog. He explains his history with Schmector, and goes with you to finalize the Embiggening Cocktail so that you can return home.
Grounded actually has two endings available – a ‘good’ one and a ‘bad one’, depending upon how you handle [spoilers]
Schmector. You’ll be able to decide if you want to confront him or not:
- If you do not, then Schmector wins. He takes credit for the SPAC.R, the teens are accused of faking everything, and Tully stays as a floating head. (Or may continues to raisin into nothing?)
- If you confront him, you are able to hand over the data, come back as a hero, and save Dr. Tully ensuring that he is given credit for his invention and research.
Again, Grounded does not have an incredibly complicated story – and it in itself is kind of short. The game stands out more from its detailed environment, gameplay and set of challenges than it does for the story.
Overall Review
I ended up settling on a 6/10 for Grounded. It has a lot of charm, and some of its mechanics are really great. The mutations are fun, and there is a wide selection of gear you can use to customize your builds. There are a lot of options for building bases, and there are some quality of life enhancements over other base-building games, such as pulling inventory from available containers nearby.
I would have rated this much higher if I did not have to rely on the wiki so much, and if the game had not been so buggy or crashed so often. The bugs and crashing honestly had us considering giving up on the game entirely, and it makes it hard for me to give it a solid recommendation. I have been told that playing it solo is a much better experience, but I only played it in multi-player.
Was it fun, though?
Yeah, I would say we had fun even with everything going wrong. The bugs are cute, and we often had fun just doing really silly things. Like, what if I just make sounds like weevils all day? What if I tell the story of Gnarly Butthole?
I ended up making a lot of highlights, and the full play-through is on YouTube if you are interested in reviewing how any of our adventures went.
The Bardic Unicorn 