What’s On The Shelf | Games, Music & Culture

In what might be the world’s quickest turnaround for a game, my opinion on Grounded moved from one side to the other between one session and the next. A complete 180-degree turn. Or a complete 360 if you’re Jason Kidd.

But what am I talking about here? I’m talking about Grounded. I said that already. Pay attention.

Originally released in 2022 by Obsidian Entertainment and Xbox Game Studios, Grounded is a survival-crafting, base-building horror game where you play as a small child. In this case, a very small child. You have been shrunk down à la Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, with no real idea how it happened, why it happened, or what you are supposed to do about it. That is about all you get plot-wise until more of the story is unlocked by exploring the yard. I won’t spoil any of it here.

Being of the shrunken variety means things that would normally be minor inconveniences are suddenly consistent sources of stress and worry. Ants are the size of wolves. Wolf spiders tower over you and move with the speed and decisiveness of a hunter stalking its prey. Small pools of water become vast seas. Blades of grass become inaccessible skyscrapers.

The stars of the game may be small, but the hunger and thirst meters loom large. You not only need to survive the terrors of the lawn; you also need to survive your own grumbling tummy.

Weevils, aphids, and gnats are quickly taken down, converted into steaks and other cooked meats, and chowed upon with a gulp and a blech. Water is another matter. Early on, you may find yourself drinking from dirty puddles like some kind of nasty little yard rat. It keeps you alive, but it also makes you sick. The cleaner option is to venture onward and upward, knocking dew drops from blades of grass before your thirst meter runs dry.

Dew is safer, but it is not always convenient. Collecting it can require climbing or venturing into the dark, where every moving blade of grass feels like the beginning of a nature documentary explaining how you are about to die.

Grounded contains all the usual hallmarks of a builder-style survival game. You harvest resources to make crude axes, shovels, weapons, and hammers. Those tools are then used to gather more resources, which become better tools, which allow you to gather even better resources. Harvest, create, repeat.

Base construction works in the same general vein as Fortnite, but it requires more forethought than simply having enough wood in your backpack. Many building materials are carried as physical planks rather than stored in your inventory. You chop down grass, carry the pieces home, place them, and then head back out for more.

You can only carry a limited number at one time, adding another loop of harvesting, hauling, and returning. It can be annoying when you are halfway through a wall and realize you need six more planks from the other side of the yard, but it is a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things.

Combat gives you several options for whatever form of bug murder feels most natural. You can use blades and clubs up close or fight from a distance with thrown spears and bows. Both are surprisingly viable.

I predominantly used a club with barbs jammed into it. Thistle thorns, technically, rather than barbs, but the important thing is that it looked unpleasant. It caused a bleed effect that slowly chipped away at enemies in addition to the damage from repeatedly smashing them in the face.

There were two moments when the lightbulb finally clicked for me.

At one point, like a dumb moron, I chased a spiderling down a hole and clubbed it to death. It was nighttime, and I was still early in my lawn-based shenanigans. I turned around and saw red eyes staring at me through the darkness.

Momma Spider had just gotten home, and the crushed body of her spider baby was lying at my feet.

That was the first time Grounded stopped feeling like a slightly tedious crafting game and started feeling like genuine survival horror. I was not a brave adventurer conquering the wilderness. I was a tiny idiot standing in a hole with a murder weapon.

The second moment came when my group decided to take on an Orb Weaver Spider. Each person had a task. We planned the attack, took our positions, and brought the thing down together.

By that point, we were probably overprepared. But the spiders had been such a consistent threat that finally conquering one felt like a massive weight had been lifted from our shoulders. The game had spent hours teaching us to fear these things. Now we had a plan, weapons, and enough collective stupidity to fight back.

I get it.

Before long, we were hopping through blueberry shrubs, cleaving through spiders, and exploring untouched reaches of the small-scale world. It was like a switch had flipped. Grounded went from something I was not planning to play more than once or twice into something I actively looked forward to every week.

What new area would we discover? Could we craft breathing tubes and explore the murky depths? Were we finally ready to take on the wolf spiders? Or would we spend the night improving the base and arguing about where a staircase should go?

Any of those sounded good.

Grounded did not immediately win me over. Its opening hours felt slow, repetitive, and familiar. But once the world opened up, the group found its rhythm, and the spiders started staring back, the whole thing came together.

I am surprised by how completely it turned around for me. Grounded is tense, funny, rewarding, and occasionally horrifying in ways its colorful backyard setting does not prepare you for. I would recommend checking it out, especially if you have two other people willing to get small, get organized, and get eaten by a spider together.