Grounded

I've put time into a lot of survival games, and Grounded is the rare one where the setting alone carries genuine weight. Obsidian took a concept that sounds like a kids' movie premise and built something that can genuinely unsettle you, blades of grass become skyscraper-sized obstacles, dew drops are life-saving water sources, and the sound of a wolf spider nearby will make your stomach drop regardless of how many hours you have logged. The world is the strongest argument for buying this game, full stop. The core loop follows the genre template: gather materials, craft tools and armor, build a base, push further into new biches. You start with pebble tools and grass-plank shelters, eventually working toward spider-silk gear, ziplines, spike traps, and fortified walls that need to hold against nightly insect raids. The progression is genuinely satisfying, with the crafting menu unlocking new recipes as you analyze creature parts and raw materials at the field station. The Mutation system adds light RPG texture, passive perks that let you specialize toward tanking hits, stealth, or ranged builds. Where the loop gets friction is in the mid-game grind. Certain recipes stay locked behind rare materials that require you to take on enemies well above your current gear tier, and the crafting menu does a poor job of signposting what you should be doing next. First-timers will hit walls that feel arbitrary rather than challenging. Combat is serviceable rather than exceptional. Blocking and dodge-rolling work well enough, and enemy behavior has real variety, ants ignore you until provoked, bombardier beetles spray acid from range, stinkbugs gas entire areas. The boss encounters that gate story progress are legitimately designed fights with readable patterns. What the game does less well is weapon balancing in the early hours; makeshift tools feel genuinely feeble against anything past a basic ant, which is authentic to the premise but can tip into frustration. The arachnophobia mode, which de-limbs spiders and replaces them with blobby shapes, is one of the most thoughtful accessibility options in the genre. Co-op is where Grounded separates itself from the crowded survival shelf. Up to four players share a world, and the game scales enemy difficulty to match. Building a base together, dividing roles between fighters and crafters, panicking collectively when a wolf spider crashes through your grass wall at 2 AM, that experience is hard to replicate elsewhere. Solo play is fully supported and the story holds up, but the social dimension is clearly what the design is optimized for. If you have one or two friends who are even mildly curious, that is the version to play. Grounded released out of Early Access in September 2022 after two years of community-driven updates that expanded the map, added biomes, and fleshed out a proper ending to the story. The result is a complete, well-paced game rather than an abandoned live-service skeleton. Its 90% positive Steam rating across nearly 100,000 reviews reflects a player base that kept coming back. The sequel, Grounded 2, entered Early Access in mid-2025, which means the original is now a finished, stable product with no content drip to wait on.

Alex · Scout Team

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