Grounded
The world is a vast, beautiful and dangerous place – especially when you have been shrunk to the size of an ant. Explore, build and survive together in this first person, multiplayer, survival-adventure. Can you thrive alongside the hordes of giant insects, fighting to survive the perils of the backyard? Explore this immersive and persistent world, where the insect life reacts to your actions. Shelter and tools are critical to your survival. Build epic bases to protect you and your stuff from the insects and the elements. Craft weapons, tools, and armor, allowing you to better fight, explore and survive. You can face the backyard alone or together, online, with up to three friends – the choice is yours. Uncover the secrets lurking in the shadows of Grounded as you freely explore the backyard and progress through its mysterious story.
Steam User 407
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.
Steam User 151
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.
Steam User 140
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.
Steam User 253
i liked this game because there's solo options
Steam User 274
realistic depiction of people 5'4
Steam User 114
Honey I Shrunk The Dark Souls Minecraft
Steam User 137
The 5'5 experience