Grounded (PS5) first impressions

This is one of the PS-Plus games for the month of June in I think the global offerings. This is one of those games that I probably wouldn't have even known about had they not been offered up to me for free. It was released on PS5 in 2024 but it sometimes takes a bit of time before they are willing to give it away.

here are my impressions from playing just over 2 hours of it.

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Grounded is a survival game that has elements of other games in it that you may end up finding quite familiar because one of the major aspects of the entire game is gathering resources and then crafting items and buildings.

You are shrunk down to the size of a bug in a sort of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids sort of way and you are in your own backyard. You are given various quests to kind of guide you in the right direction as to how you are meant to make your way through the game.

This game has a 4-player co-op that is available or you can play it as a solo game. I only have 3 "friends" on my PS so I just decided to play it alone. Here has been my experience so far or if you don't like a lot of reading I will say I think the game is OK, but as far as the questing is concerned and combat is concerned the game is kind of lame and it appears as though it is specifically designed to take a very long time to get anything done.

You are going to need to craft literally everything that you use in the game and this includes the basic things you need in order to interact with all the plants, rocks, and insects that are around you. This can prove a bit daunting at first because while the various things are all around you, it kind of gets a bit old when you are searching around for yet another piece of sap to build something, and you haven't yet learned where that is. You kind of just happen upon it over time.

Once you make your shovel, spear, axe, and hammer, you head around to break stuff down, analyze it, and build more stuff. That's the whole game actually: You build stuff that helps you to build more stuff. There is a quest that goes on and you can just skip and do all of those things but only people who have played the game a ton are going to be able to slide through that so easily.

Just like you would think it would be the things you encounter early on are not aggressive, or if they are, they are super easy to kill and don't do much damage. I never made it to the point where I could build greater weapons and I only had the first tier of armor, not that it really matters because the only things that I ever encountered that could actually kill me were going to be able to kill me even with the armor. Spiders are the apex predator in this game and when you do first spot them the game warns you to avoid them, which isn't always so easy.

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I did find it a bit amusing that at the very start of the game when you are choosing a character that they have an option to scale down the scary nature of giant spiders or I think it was an arachnophobia setting. I left it as it was but even if you are not afraid of giant spider (who isnt?) it doesn't much matter because if you take them on early in the game you better just run and pray because otherwise you are going to die.

I don't suppose death really matters that much though because you respawn where you chose to and then you can run back and pick up your pack that is clearly displayed on the map and normally the spiders have moved on at that point.

Going into caves with your newly crafted torch can be a fun experience and I will hand it to the devs on this because they keep the terrain and places that you need to go pretty varied. The combat is simplistic and not very challenging at this point (unless it is impossible like with the spiders you are not equipped to take on at all anyway.) The running around and collecting of stuff is pretty interesting for a time but then after a couple of hours of building increasingly tedious items I started to realize that this is likely what the entire game is all about.

At about 90 minutes if you are slow like I am you will encounter your first lab where you are let know that this world you have entered is the creation of some scientist and in order to return to large size you will have to go on a bunch of missions to retrieve data cards. This is kept reasonably interesting until I got kind of stuck because all the paths forward were filled with spiders that I am incapable of killing and for the most part mean certain death.

I am sure that this is just encouraging you to find another way, but I found navigation to be more complicated than I like it to be. What can I say? I don't like a bunch of overly-complicated stuff. Building in 3D with a controller is not really my favorite thing either.

For me the building and upgrading and what not was decent enough until you start to get to more rare materials that even once you know where they are incorporate walking vast distances to acquire them. My first of such an example was when I needed acorns yet I had never so much as seen one at that point. you just need to relax when something like this happens because I discovered something that should be obvious at this point and that is that the story is going to lead you right to acorns and it did exactly that.

The game is easy enough and if you die there aren't any real consequences other than losing your bag and the game at that point DID ENCOURAGE YOU TO MAKE STORAGE although it was optional. Once you have storage there really isn't any setback that is caused by death other than needing to start walking from wherever you set your respawn point.

A couple of things that I really didn't like was that you constantly need to be discovering water and if you drink the readily accessible water it will make you sick. The dewdrops on plants are another source of water but in order to find these you have to be constantly looking up at blades of grass and then following the stalk back to the ground to knock them down. This just seems like unnecessary busywork to me. Pursuing food is equally as silly but at least that is all over the place.

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Later on you will learn how to turn bugs into easily eaten food with a cooking station that you build but again, to me this kind of seemed like busywork to distract you from the fact that the quests are pretty repetitive.

All in all I think this is a decent game that unfortunately uses a ton of controls so it is therefore too complicated to be something that you pop in and out of playing casually from time to time. Forever searching for more materials especially since you cannot mark these locations on your map means that you will spend a lot of time running around, mostly in vain, and then on occasion attract the attention of a spider that if you don't manage to run away from, will definitely kill you.

I don't really see myself returning to this game but it was interesting for a few hours at least.

It was free, so I am not going to complain.

There was a time when 15 million people were playing this game, so perhaps it is more fun with Co-op and that is the reason why I am missing the point and was only able to get a few hours of enjoyment out of it.

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_{perhaps it is more fun in a group}

If you like gathering and building things than this is a relatively casual game to accomplish exactly that. It's just not the kind of game that I think I would enjoy too much and kind of reminds of of V-Rising and how that became a resource gathering game with a ton of tedious things built into the game to give it the impression of being long as well.