Grounded

You ever go in an ant hole thinking you're safe because there's no possible way anything bigger can fit through said hole just for a giant wolf spider to jump into your screen fueling your arachnophobia to a point where you can't even think or speak? ...Do you want to?
Based on a true story

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☑ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☑ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☑ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☑ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☑ 9
☐ 10

✔️ The Good
• Grounded has evolved significantly from its early access period, fulfilling the potential of its "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" survival premise and exceeding expectations.
• Draws inspiration from Obsidian's RPG history, offering a blend of survival and roleplaying elements, including character progression, enemy weaknesses, and resistances.
• Memorable characters and a hilariously ridiculous story add a unique charm to the game, with quirky NPCs and laugh-out-loud funny moments.
• The backyard setting is beautifully designed, oozing personality with diverse environments, challenges, and creative details.
• Immensely addictive sandbox gameplay, with excellent building and resource management, exploration, and challenging combat mechanics.
• The game's vast world provides endless opportunities for exploration, quests, and activities, ensuring players never run out of things to do.
❌ The Bad
• Limited inventory space becomes a frustrating constraint, forcing difficult decisions on what to bring and leaving little room for expansion.
• Some design choices, like enemies knocking weapons out of hands without easy retrieval, can lead to loss of valuable items.
• Technical issues persist, including crashes, co-op connection problems, and bugs that, while not game-breaking, impact stability.
⚠️ The Ugly
• Technical roughness remains a significant issue, with regular crashes, camera misalignment, and insects/items getting stuck in the environment.
• Lack of significant progress in stability despite two years of early access development is disappointing.
• Inventory space constraints and occasional lost treasures disrupt the flow of an otherwise fantastic experience.
Overall Score:
8.9/10

No Jumpscare comes even remotely close to the ones in this game.
10/10 will never casually walk into a hole at night again

This game is fantastic and charming, it just takes a bit of an investment of effort and time to really get going. I played with my partner and we really struggled the first 10 hours or so because its so easy to get ganked by a crew of spiders and spend 10 or 15 frustrating minutes trying to get our stuff back. The difficulty scaling is designed to make the game very challenging. We started on medium and then switched to easy and had a significantly better time because it got to a stage where we couldn't travel somewhere without having a death-defying encounter. So I'd strongly recommend a ''mild" difficulty playthrough despite the harm to your ego. The crafting and exploring is fantastic, super satisfying. You could definitely spend less time or far more time than I took to complete the game (around 50 hours). Overall 7/10 great with other people, expect to play a horror game in some sections

Grounded is one of the better survival experiences I've had over the years. I initially played the game in it's early preview stages when a lot was broken. And I still enjoyed the experience albeit it being less than stellar from a quality of life perspective.
Having completed all achievements on the game I want to break down why I recommend the game and the good and the bad.
The Good: The map design in Grounded is immaculate. So many survival games lean on auto generation and while that works amazingly for games like Terraria with a lot of games it can feel stale. Or resources can spawn in the most inaccessible seemingly broken areas. Grounded's map is hand crafted and you can feel the love and care put into it. From the Sandbox to the Termite Mound every area feels unique and contains some new resource or enemy for the player to experience. The progression loop is satisfying and snappy and the amount of grinding needed to get new armor sets is relatively small in the grand scheme. The combat systems are simple but fun with mastering the parry being a highlight for me. Enemy combos are short and learning them is not overly challenging but still gives a sense of mastery.
I would give the game prior to the optional content and post-game material an 8.5/10 in it's current form. While I did experience technical issues and multiplayer connection problems while playing it was infrequent enough to not be too upsetting.
The Bad: The usefulness of enemy drops is extremely questionable. Outside of their directly associated weapons and armor there is little to no use in killing bugs at a certain point. For example the Fire Ants. Their parts are hardly used in anything outside of the club, armor, and shield associated with them. Why are there not more weapons and ones that require a mish mash of bug parts? It feels useless even hoarding materials sometimes.
The Infected Broodmother is just not fun to fight in her current state. She has so much health that it feels rather boring in phase 1 and 2 and in phase 3 she becomes so fast that all those parry skills the game trained into you feel less useful than they should be (though I did manage to parry almost everything). The amount of debuffs she stacks combined with how small her arena is make this fight very tedious and a test of consistency more than skill.
Finally new game plus is horrendously unbalanced. There is no way to increase your defense above what you had in the base game so enemies will punish you harder than ever for missing parries. Which would not be as painful if it wasn't for every other enemy having explosive damage due to being infused. Which cannot be parried or easily avoided. It's a massive grind and frankly not fun to play.
Conclusion: For all my issues with the post-game and especially the Infected Broodmother I still find Grounded to be an enjoyable survival experience that I would highly recommend. It's super fun with friends and it's hard to say I didn't enjoy the majority of my time with it.

You didn't lose your save files!
Option -> Game -> Enable crossplay.
"Oh it works! Thank you so much!!!!"
Read the update next time and stop giving negative reviews right away.