Grounded

I'm old enough to remember when Honey I Shrunk the Kids came out. If you've seen this movie, that's pretty much what this game is like.

Took wife and daughter to climb a giant tree.
Area was dark, so I brought two torches.
Wife and daughter didn’t bring torches…..amateurs.
Had to inch along the branches so they could see by my light.
Wife complained and asked for my spare torch.
Told wife if she wanted to see in the dark then she should have brought her own torch.
Wife raised eyebrow.
Dropped spare torch onto branch for her.
Torch rolled off branch down to vast emptiness below. We don't talk about that.
Continued inching along with just one torch, and no plan.
Finally made it to the lab in a distant tree.
Wife and daughter entered before I could get there.
Spiders were waiting, attacked wife and daughter in lab.
I rushed to try to help them but was too late.
Watched in horror as wife fell OUT of lab to ground below, getting knocked unconscious, needing to be saved.
Daughter was left fighting spiders alone.
Had to make a call.
Jumped down to ground below to save dying wife. I am the worst father ever.
Heart wrenched at screams for help from daughter up above, terrified, dying to spiders.
Meanwhile on the ground, spiders surrounded me and my unconscious wife.
Torch finally ran out. Those spiders ripped us to shreds.
10/10, would lead the worst expedition again.
This is a game that caught me by complete surprise. I don’t normally like survival games. So often they have crafting systems that stretch my ability to suspend disbelief, suddenly able to produce ridiculous items with just a few bare ingredients. I don’t know what it is that's so different about this game, but I had a great time here.
I bought four copies of this game, for myself, my wife, and 8 and 11-year-olds. We’ve been playing it quite a bit for the past couple of weeks, and by now we’ve played just about all it has to offer. We’re holding off a bit on doing the final mission, but I’m sure we’ll be beating it in the next few days, and singing our champion song.
Where this game truly shines is multiplayer and exploration. If you like those concepts, you would likely enjoy this game. It never really pushes you to go in a certain direction. If you wanted to, from the very start of the game, you could go anywhere. Some of the areas are blocked off in the early game, but the game doesn’t stop you from building staircases to wherever you want to go. It would be foolish, since you’d die quickly in areas you’re not ready for, but the game is all about exploring. There are many interesting things to find along the way.
The exploration in many ways reminds me of Breath of the Wild, or also The Outer Wilds, which were two games where exploration was fantastic. I don’t think it’s as good as those two games, but still I always wanted to see more of the map and explore. I don’t care as much for games where they just tell you where to go and you follow the map to the next waypoint. Instead, here you have a very vague idea where things are, and what to do, but it’s up to you to explore and put it together. You have to pay more attention to your surroundings, not some quest-marker holding your hand.
There were so many bonding experiences we had as a family in this game. My 8-year-old son was fearless, joining me on many an adventure and I found myself following him as he leapt into battle. My 11-year-old daughter was more timid and reserved, scared of the spiders but embracing the base-building part of the game. She designed our base and built first-class rooms for everybody, while still joining in on some of our adventures. My wife isn’t much of a gamer, but sometimes she’d join us and, well, quite honestly, die a lot, but in the funniest of ways. I particularly loved when she randomly threw her expensive weapon into a lake because she couldn’t figure out the controls. It was strange how much my defensive instincts would kick in at trying to keep my family alive – in a videogame of all things. It was a weird feeling but then again it’s what I loved so much about this game.
Tonight I decided to make a scavenger hunt in the game, so I started a new world in creative mode, built stairways and ziplines throughout the world for ease of travel, and placed items in chests throughout the world with cryptic hints for the rest of the family to find. It was a blast to watch them scouring the world to find them. My boy was the one who ended up finishing first. Was again a great bonding experience, and I look forward to doing that again. Endless replayability with that.
With all of that being said, I don’t think this game is necessarily for everybody. At first I didn’t care much for the combat, it felt very much like button mashing. As the game went along though, I paid much more attention to blocking, and types of weapons, and watching the attack movements of the bugs, and that made it significantly funner. It’s also a game that really is best with at least one other person with you. As a single player experience I think it loses a lot of what makes it great. There also isn’t a ton of story here, and the story itself is meh. But I don’t really think this is a game about story, it’s about exploring and having adventures together.
Is this a perfect game? No. We had some glitches, some disconnections, etc. And on the Xbox One it looks horrible, compared to pc. But for me, videogames are less about graphics and more about experiences. Graphics were pretty, yes, but overall, how do I feel by the end of the game? There’s something about being in a shared world, all working together, to tackle challenges, that just resonated with me in this game. We went from being scared of pretty much everything in the game to eventually being THE THING TO FEAR in the backyard. My boy was fearsome in battle. My daughter made us a wonderful home. My wife was deadly with a crossbow when she could figure out how to use it. And I, well, I just wished it wouldn’t end. It’s been a genuine pleasure that I did not expect but I’m thrilled we experienced.

Grounded on its surface may seem like a cute sandbox building game where you're shrunk to the size of an ant and have to survive in the wilds, but believe me, this is one game where looks can be deceiving. On the surface, Grounded contains all the normal elements of your everyday survival game. Manage hunger and hydration whilst you venture around the backyard, gathering resources to build your own camp whilst fighting off all manner of creatures that want to eat you. But it is so so much more than just this. Let's get into all the awesome things you can expect.
1. Biomes
On the surface of things, one may think "How could you turn a backyard into a set of distinct and unique biomes?" Well, Grounded does ALL of that, and so much more. Explore the undergrowth in the Grasslands, dive into the depths of a massive Koi Pond, navigate your way through the surprisingly labyrinthine branches of the Hedge, or try to survive the blistering heat of the Sandbox on your hunt for buried treasure. There are 16 unique biomes in the backyard, as well as many tunnels and dungeons to delve through, from anthills, spider nests, and long forgotten ruins of tiny human activities.
2. Creatures
Grounded will pitch you against many different type of creature, each with their own character, style, and attack preferences. Fight your way through hordes of ants and termites to plunder their food stores, sneak past the spiders and try to avoid getting yourself trapped in their confounded webbing, or test your mettle against the mighty black ox beetles that roam the jungles of the Upper Yard. But don't think the bugs aren't taking notice of your actions. If you bother them too much, you might find they pay you a visit when you return home...
3. Character Progression
As well as having survival and combat elements, Grounded also gives your character many ways to progress in the game, from crafting better tools and weapons from the remains of slain foes, to infusing your character with the power of Yoked Girth Milk Molars. You will uncover character perks as your explore, known as Mutations, which you can activate or deactivate at any time to give yourself advantages in many different situations. Weapons and armor can also be upgraded and imbued with special properties, take advantage of creature weaknesses with elemental weapon upgrades, or give your armor hidden properties with sleek upgrades.
4. Story
Grounded has a fully playable story that will have you exploring the backyard in its entirety. It all starts when trying to reactivate the Mysterious Machine to grow back to your normal size - which unfortunately for you, ends in cataclysmic failure, causing explosive damage to a nearby oak tree and its unassuming robotic resident, BURG.L - Acting Science Manager for Dr Wendell Tully. But it will soon be revealed that the explosion corrupted BURG.Ls memory banks, and he can't remember how to fix the Mysterious Machine. But he does know he has backup files on Super Chips scattered throughout the backyard. It is your mission, brave adventurer, to retrieve them, return them to BURG.L, and try to piece together how you got so small, where Wendell has gone, and most importantly, how to get you home.
5. Exploration
As well as exploring the backyard to help BURG.L recover his memories, there are tons of optional areas to explore as well, all having their own secrets and rewards. Discover the story of past long lost adventurers from Ominent, brought here and tasked with the documentation and classification of Wendell's research and his whereabouts, or discover what happens when you activate all of the MIX.Rs located throughout the backyard. Or follow the stories of the four BIG BUG BOSSES and make it your quest to rid the backyard of these tyrannical creatures... After finding just the right thing to lure them out of hiding. What in the world could enjoy the taste of a Mouldy Haogie!?
6. Base Building
The base building in Grounded is extensive and comprises of several tiers of building structures, starting at grass plank and weed stem buildings, all the way through to mushroom brick and cement structures as the game progresses. As well as having many building options, you can decorate your base with all manner of furniture, crafting stations, lighting and trophies of all the creatures you've killed on your adventures. You can build in most parts of the backyard, and even connect bases with ziplines for fast travel across the backyard. You will also have access to traps and turrets to defend your base when the bugs come knocking, because believe me, they will, and you'll need to be prepared for the onslaught!
As of the 1.2 Super Duper update, building bases now becomes even more important. As you get a better base, you get higher levels of Coziness, and that gives you new buffs whilst you're in your base, even unlocking more build pieces for you to use. Some of these build pieces also have extra uses when interacted with, like bug wall trophies giving you attack buffs against that particular type of creature, the stuffed bug statues giving you extra chances for rare loot, and the new Petal Bed giving the Comfy Stamina and Comfy Defense buffs to anyone who sleeps in it for the entire next day.
7. Bosses
Grounded has a mixture of required and optional bosses to complete the story. Without giving too much away, there are 2 main story bosses and 5 extra, completely optional bosses that you can fight. All story and optional bosses give you a special mutation upon their defeat, so even if the other five are not required to complete the story, the experience is worth it and the things you can craft from their parts are definitely worth it.
8. Playgrounds
Do you want to make your own maps and challenges in the world of Grounded? With the 1.3 update, you can now create your very own Playgrounds and custom interactions between objects! Place most terrain pieces and points of interest, down to each individual blade of grass, spawn bugs anywhere including bosses, make parkour maps and arenas, the only limit is your creativity!
Now we have some other things to talk about that will make themselves more apparent after a playthrough or two.
1. No Modding Support
Mods for Grounded are extremely limited currently as Obsidian have not enabled mod support for their game at the moment, and have stated that this is not planned. A small group of modders have currently been working on a project to inject mod pak files, but this is not fully finished as of yet. Since the game is built on Unreal Engine we also don't have luxuries like Harmony or BepInEx, making mod creation a little tougher as well.
2. Late Game Creatures
A good majority of the creatures in the late game are essentially reskins of the early game creatures you find in the grasslands. Most of these have some alternate attacks compared to their original counterparts and hit harder, but you may find variety a little lacking. Example: Ladybird being a reskin of a Ladybug. Whilst this is not a dealbreaker or anything, it would be nice eventually to see more variety of creatures in the end game, and as of the 1.2 Super Duper update, the devs have introduced 4 more creatures, 2 of them being bosses. The other noticeable part is that some biomes, such as the Sandbox, only have one type of creature that predominantly resides there, and you won't see much variety in the entire biome. It would be great in future updates if these were fleshed out some more.
Overall, I can highly recommend Grounded. Even after the 1.0 launch the Obsidian team are working hard on more updates, more base pieces, more bosses, and more content for us. Things did feel a little sketchy when 1.0 came out due to much content getting scrapped last minute, but rest assured the 1.2.2 update has convinced me that this game is FAR from done.

i love the building with my daughter. it gives us time together even though we're miles apart.

Its just like living in australia.

I highly recommend this game if you’re a fan of survival games.
Grounded doesn’t do a lot new, besides its setting. But it manages to make a lot of what it does better than every other competitor. Grounded’s biggest achievement is managing to streamline the actual crafting to the point where its never tedious and doesn’t get in your way almost at all. You don’t have to go sifting through inventories, trying to remember all the components of the thing you need to make. Grounded makes everything in the storage around the workbench accessible, it automatically pulls out what you need when you craft something. Building is streamlined in the same way. Building materials are pulled from nearby storage. Even better, after a long day of wandering around gathering materials and hunting bugs, you can “hot deposit” all your materials with one button. And not just into the closest storage, Grounded automatically puts items with others of its type. So if you have some plant fibers in one crate and ant parts in another, it will put the ant parts and plant fibers together. Overall Grounded does a lot to get out of the way of the player having fun, something a lot of survival games could learn from.
I could talk about the rest of the game being fun, exploration being heavily rewarded. The charm of the visual direction, the sense of achievement from taking down the hardest bugs... But other reviews have all talked about that. In my opinion Grounded might have taken over Subnautica as being the best single player survival game. And thats probably the highest praise I can give a game.

its just like living in australia