Grounded is a masterclass in horror gameplay and won't admit it
Grounded is a lot of things. It's an homage to '80s cinema and culture. It's a survival game that owes a lot to games like Subnautica and The Forest. It's Obsidian flexing its talent for creative world-building and environmental design. It's also, to be blunt, terrifying.
Now, I don't think Grounded would ever openly admit that – its promotional material portrays a jolly survival-adventure game in a quirky, unique setting. Yet to play it, it feels more horror than home cinema, despite its clearly-defined inspirations. The fact that an arachnophobia mode was added so soon after the game's Early Access release, rather than with the initial product, always struck me as Obsidian being rather surprised by just how frightening people found the yard's arachnids. They certainly land harder than the giant spiders in games like Skyrim.
But the terror of Grounded goes far beyond its wolf spiders – to the point where I reckon there's a lot that horror devs can learn from Obsidian's homegrown hell.
Warning: The following article contains some spoilers for the plot of Grounded, and references to content that may be unsuitable for those with arachnophobia.
The uncanny valley is a powerful thing, and Grounded spelunks that pit as deep as it can go, taking what's familiar and mutating it into something alien and unfriendly. A BBQ knocked over becomes a fiery, ashen wasteland. A koi carp becomes a deep-sea leviathan. A tree stump you could once sit on now is a foreboding mountain range of decaying wood. It plays into a subtle sense of everything being wrong – you knew these things, but now they're totally new to you – and all these changes inevitably make the world nastier and harder to survive in. Grounded's world is beautiful and
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