Grounded is a neat little twist on the survival genre where your characters are shrunk down and must content with hunger, thirst and the dangers of insects roaming around a backyard while exploring every nook and cranny for resources, power ups and secrets. I had a good time going through the story, even the next thing I needed to do wasn’t clear at times and there were some slight hurdles in the progression that felt more frustrating than challenging. Overall, a cool game!
The basic mechanics of Grounded are pretty simple; you have a few meters - energy, thirst, hunger, life - that you must juggle while trying to pick up enough stuff to craft gear, tools, housing and other useful items. To help you do so, you discover recipes, analyse resources , get better tools, get better resources and gear, and fight more powerful foes as you explore a really neat environment made up of a large backyard, complete with sandbox, picnic table, wood pile and hedge. Every biome has its own set of enemies, resources and dangers, so exploration is really fun and rewarding.
The story moves the pace of the game forward - even if at some points it’s unclear where the game wants you to go, since it won’t mark your map with anything relevant - and you’ll visit laboratories, ant nests and secret villain lairs hidden in castles before getting to the ultimate defend mission where a ton of enemy will attack a few objectives that you have to protect. Besides getting a bit lost a few times, the story was enough to keep us going, but at some point everything hit a shrieking stop because the game required us to have bombs - which aren’t super easy to get - before we could progress any further, and we had to backtrack all the way to a place where we could get the stuff to make them. Otherwise, things went fine.
Using all the resources you get, you can craft gear with various effects and customize the way you play your character. In combination with mutations - perks that you can level up, unlock and activate for potent bonuses - you really can decide if you are a tank, an archer, or something else entirely. I played a beefy character with heavy armor, a lot of life regeneration, defense and a weapon that drained health. I wasn’t the fastest but I could hold my own in most fights.
Building structures was okay too, while you can craft things with items in your inventory, construction is mostly done by picking up grass “planks” and moving them around physically in the world, which can get a bit tedious if you want to build something far away from any grass source, but we’ve managed to make a few bases across the map. Getting around in the early game is a trudging affair, but you get the ability to create zip lines, which is really neat, except that they are kinda tricky to create, you can get bumped off them by blades of grass that grew on their path, and I randomly fell of mine a few times.
Finally, the combat is pretty good, you hit things with your weapon, block and/or dodge out of the way of certain attacks, the stamina meter prevents you from hitting or blocking eternally and enemies have a wide range of things they can do. A few boss fights are peppered here and there as well, and they’re pretty cool too. There are a few elemental attributes you can have on your attacks and enemies either resist or are weak to them, so some strategy can be necessary in that regard.
Grounded is really neat! If you can get a group of four and go through the backyard, I strongly recommend it!
