Obsidian’s video game answer to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids may be blatantly unfinished but it’s already great fun to play.
It’s very easy to mess around with scale in video games, so it’s rather surprising that games like Grounded aren’t more ubiquitous. It’s easy enough to visualise its premise: just think of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids or The Borrowers. In Grounded, one to four youngsters are somehow shrunk down to the size of ants and wake up in the backyard of a house.
Thus, Grounded is all about survival, in its most literal sense. Bugs like spiders essentially become boss-level predators – even tiny mites and larvae can kill. You must scavenge for food and work hard to find uncontaminated water. The game’s highly accelerated timeline incudes a day-night cycle and the big, aggressive enemies mostly come out at night, so it pays to keep a keen eye on the time of day.
While you can play Grounded right now – it is available to download on the Xbox One and PC’s Game Pass – there’s a huge proviso. Currently, it’s in an Early Access preview programme, so at some point it’s likely to be taken down before receiving a proper release.
You can see why developer Obsidian and publisher Microsoft have positioned it as a glorified beta: bits of it are conspicuously missing, although the main mechanics which provide the gameplay are present (although they, too, may well be added to).
Grounded begins about as unceremoniously as possible – clearly, one of the things that it currently lacks is an introductory cut scene setting up the background to the story. After choosing your character from four options (all young teens), and deciding whether you want to play solo or co-operatively with up to three others, there’s one final thing to decide: if you’re a major league arachnophobe, the game gives you the chance to circumvent your fears by turning spiders into indistinct blobs (which, nevertheless, will still attack you on sight).
Then the game just drops you into a hole: you wake up in what is presumably a root-hole but feels like a cavern, and when you emerge into the light, your plight becomes obvious. A very basic tutorial primes you to seek food and water and from the off it becomes obvious that resource-collecting is key. The tutorial is so basic that it doesn’t even tell you how to get to your main menu, where you can examine resources, view the map, craft essential items and – handily – get a rundown of the control system. The onus is very much on you to explore.
With that day-night cycle ticking away, making a quick start is pretty essential. You need to, at the very least, collect the necessary resources to craft a lean-to, which allows you to sleep through the night, and an axe to chop the larger plants, which yield the resources necessary for base-building. A spear comes in handy, too: you soon discover that ants, huge though they are, won’t attack you unless provoked, whereas other, more aggressive predators will, such as mites and gnats.
Before you’ve established a secure base and started constructing proper buildings from grass and dandelion stems, you’re best advised to steer clear of spiders, whose lairs are telegraphed by webs liberally draped over the vegetation. No matter how proficient you may be with a spear, you will barely make a dent in a spider, and it will kill you with just a couple of attacks.
Luckily, you aren’t unduly punished for dying, beyond losing the resources you’ve collected, Dark Souls style. Your backpack will remain at the spot where you died and its icon is visible when you respawn, so it’s always tempting to make a beeline for it. That can lead to annoying feedback loops if, for example, you died in a spider’s lair. It can be frustrating hiking to your backpack, only to die mere seconds after you pick it up.
Luckily, there are techniques you can employ to mitigate that. Resources are agreeably plentiful – although key ones such as acorns, thistles, and clover are often found only in specific areas of the map. So you learn that it pays, on respawning, to collect the pebbles, sprigs, plant matter, and sap required to craft the likes of an axe, a spear, and a lean-to before setting off in pursuit of your old belongings. Every lean-to you craft can be designated as a respawn point, too, which comes in very handy.
If we’ve given you the impression that Grounded is merely an exercise in resource-gathering and crafting, then we’ve misled you: it does have a story, of sorts, and also tempts you into a little light puzzling. In your backyard environment, you come across a variety of landmarks; the first, just up from where you originally spawned, being a tiny geodesic dome containing a machine that lets you analyse the resources you’ve collected. It’s a worthwhile exercise, since the more exotic the resource you analyse the more useful the object (or objects) it adds to your crafting menu.
Crafting is a particular delight in Grounded: it’s a game that inveterate tinkerers will adore. And if you’re going to develop the means of taking out those infernal spiders, you’ll need to go pretty deep into the crafting side of the game. Apart from building elaborate bases – in which storage buildings prove vital, since you will soon reach the inventory-carrying limits of your backpack – you can make a workbench, which lets you craft some very cute organic armour, as well as more sophisticated weapons such as bows and arrows.
One of the first landmark items you discover is a curious Speak & Spell-like piece of electronic apparatus, which has three lasers trained on it. Cue your first outbreak of puzzling. One laser is obscured by a grass stalk which must be chopped down, while another is pulsing weakly, thanks to gnawing mites which must be despatched – cutely, you can turn their carcasses into hats.
Fix the machine and flip its switch and a cut scene shows it causing an explosion over by the roots of an oak tree. Make your way over there – which may be only a few tens of metres away but turns out to be a veritable odyssey – and you discover a mysterious underground base, apparently designed for tiny ant-sized people, and there Grounded’s storyline really begins to take shape.
In its present state, Grounded feels very unfinished, but in a good way. Because it major lacks elements, it forces you to work out how to play it. But whereas in some (allegedly finished) games, that would be a severe frustration, Grounded has an inbuilt accessibility and logic to it, which renders discovering its hidden features a joy. Although it does require some reserves of patience.
Grounded’s key resource-gathering and crafting mechanic, however, feels fully formed and thoroughly usable, and there are countless delightful touches to discover, such as equipping a dandelion tuft and using it to float around in the breeze. Some elements, though, could still use some work, most notably the disappointingly cryptic map.
Still, Grounded shows great promise, and apparently a large community is already at work helping Obsidian to hone it (which is the main point behind its appearance in Early Access). It has all the ingredients required to make it a cult hit and you can only hope that Obsidian will finish it off sooner rather than later.
Formats: Xbox One (reviewed) and PC
Price: £24.99
Publisher: Xbox Game Studio
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment
Release Date: 28th July 2020
Age Rating: 12
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