Grounded Review

ign.com:

As someone who played it during its early access period, I was immediately surprised by how much Grounded has evolved for its 1.0 launch. It feels like it’s not only fulfilled the potential of its “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” survival premise, but exceeded nearly all of my expectations of it. Even though it’s still plagued with mostly harmless bugs (the software kind) that can annoy, I enjoyed practically every minute of the over 100 hours I’ve played so far of this stunningly creative and consistently funny adventure, and it easily stands shoulder to shoulder alongside some of my favorite survival games.

Grounded is a survival game first and foremost, but draws a ton of inspiration from Obsidian’s history as a team of RPG wizards as well. You’ll split your time between scavenging the charming backyard setting for materials, crafting awesome items from the corpses of your enemies, building badass structures to protect yourself and your stuff, fighting giant bugs that gave my co-op partners nightmares, exploring extremely difficult dungeons, leveling up your character’s stats and equipment, and more. Numerous character progression mechanics, an enemy weaknesses and resistances system that had me poring over data in the menu, the elaborate boss fights, and NPCs and dialogue options that break up the action all make it feel more like a roleplaying game than most of its survival peers. Admittedly, there aren’t very many NPCs to find and most story development is either told via collectible audio recordings or locked behind hours of survival gameplay and a bit of grinding, but Grounded strikes a great balance between making you feel on your own in a hostile backyard and meeting quirky characters, most of whom inevitably try to