Tag: grounded’s
Best Of 2022: Grounded’s Cute Aesthetic Masks One Of The Year’s Scariest Games
When we think about the best horror games, or even just the most popular, a certain aesthetic comes to mind: dark, grimy corridors; wet, organic, but indescribable objects; monsters that were once human but are no longer anything close. Dead Space, Outlast, Amnesia, Scorn, Resident Evil, Silent Hill. Almost as far back as horror games go, so does that aesthetic. It’s so common as to be predictable, but one of the most powerful aspects of horror is its ability to surprise. Obsidian’s survival game Grounded, then, definitely qualifies as horror despite being absolutely adorable. Warning: There’s a picture of a spider further into this piece.
Indeed, Grounded doesn’t look a whole lot like the type of games we think of as horror. They often mimic movies like The Thing, Alien, and Jacob’s Ladder. Grounded, in both pitch and aesthetic, is much closer to Honey I Shrunk The Kids, a sci-fi romp about kids who are accidentally shrunk by their father’s newly-invented shrinking ray and have to survive giant ants and the like and get back to normal size. That’s exactly what Grounded is about; you play one of four young teens trying to survive in a backyard while also looking for a way to return to your normal size. You can make houses out of grass, axes and hammers out of pebbles, and there are weevils and aphids all over that make for a good dinner. Water droplets hang from blades of grass, and ladybugs wander around making the cutest sounds you can imagine.
But all of that belies a terrifying world. Your first encounter with the true nature of the backyard may not be the same as mine. You might encounter a stinkbug, a soldier ant, or maybe you accidentally whack a ladybug, turning it from a neutral beast into an angry murder dome. Or maybe you see the blades of grass rustling ahead of you and then hear the telltale slurping sounds of a wolf spider just out of view. It won’t remain out of view for long, though, as these things are the size of a motor home relative to your character. The second it sees you, it’ll do two things: scream and charge.
Multiplayer Co-Op Saves Get A Brilliant Reimagining With Grounded’s Shared Worlds System
Playing online games with friends can be a frustrating experience. If the game is hosted on a server, you have to depend on that server being up and stable. If the game is hosted peer-to-peer, the host might have to be actively playing the game, or have a machine in their home they can use to host a server. Obsidian’s Grounded, however, has found a genius way around all of this–and it’s something other developers should look to replicate where possible.
WARNING: There is a close-up picture of one of the insects from Grounded, but we’ve left out any pictures of spiders.
Grounded recently hit 1.0 after spending a good amount of time in early access, and what Obsidian gave us is one of its most polished games ever. The core conceit is simple: Take the movie Honey I Shrunk the Kids and make it a survival game. You drop as one of four kids into a world where the grass is as big as trees, and the trees as big as skyscrapers. This game can be played with up to four players, and it’s meant to be a persistent world that anyone can log into at any time. Grounded is on Game Pass, so there’s no extra buy-in to get started, and no servers for the developer or publisher to eventually shut down since it’s peer-to-peer.
Coming to Xbox Game Pass: Deathloop, Slime Rancher 2, Valheim, Grounded’s Full Release, and More
Celebrating Grounded’s Journey to Launch with Phil Spencer and Adam Brennecke
Grounded’s latest test update adds a new way to share worlds
Miniaturised survival game Grounded doesn’t have dedicated servers, but the latest update offered up for public testing contains a new feature that’ll help. It’s called “Shared Worlds”, and it allows Grounded worlds to be stored in the cloud so that anyone that world is shared with can host the game.