Recently, I’ve been hooked on Solar Opposites, a show that, according to some viewers, has its best stories actually presented via its secondary stories about a bunch of humans shrunken down by the alien family and forced to like in a giant terrarium known as The Wall. While I can’t say it’s better than the main plots myself, it’s easy to see where the appeal lies. Aside from the well-written characters and dramatics twists alongside the more humorous stuff, there’s always an element of creativity when it comes to turning the regular world into something fantastic via the use of shrinking technology that captivates us, as seen with the likes of Fantastic Voyage or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Obsidian’s new survival game Grounded, which owes a lot to the latter, aims to replicate that captivating charm as well, but does it succeed?
Set in 1990, Grounded sees you playing as one of four teenagers (or up to all four of them, if tackling the game’s co-op mode with friends), who suddenly find themselves emerging from a small case in a now-giant backyard, without any of their memories intact. After stumbling upon a strange device that causes an explosion by an oak tree, our heroes find a mysterious tiny lab with a robot named BURG.L inside of it, learning that this is the backyard of one Dr. Wendell Tully, the inventor of the SPAC.R shrinking device, who has been experimenting with the technology in order to solve various problems. Unfortunately, Tully has turned up missing, BURG.L has lost their memories and there are signs of an ominous corporation, aptly named Ominent, being involved as well…
At its core, Grounded has a familiar formula for a survival game. You hunt for resources to build various weapons, armor and structures, all while dealing with a variety of hostile creatures, both friend and foe. Well, mostly foe here, as the game dishes out quite the number of aggressive insects and other threats in contrast to the amount of friendly or neutral ones. But the unique setting means you have to get used to a few notable wrinkles along the way. For example, you might think that satisfying your character’s thirst meter would be easy, seeing several puddles lying around. But that’s dirty water that doesn’t help much, so you have to think more like someone shrunken down, instead hunting for dewdrops on grass or discarded soda cans and juice boxes that dispense droplets as well. Need food? Mushrooms can do, and you can cook insect meat, but it may also be easier to mine apple cores and discarded hot dogs (don’t worry, the preservatives keep it fresh).
Battling the hordes of insects might also cut you down a bit as well at first. Sure, the numerous spiders may look menacing, but surely you could easily hunt down an ant or a ladybug for meat, right? Ha ha, yeah, good luck with that without taking the time to hunt for the right elements in order to construct the armor and weapons needed. You start out by utilizing clovers, acorns and other vegetation until you’re finally wearing a samurai ensemble made out of the corpses of your enemies. They aren’t just for looks either, as several pieces provide unique buffs that could give you that edge in something like landing a perfect block during combat or allowing you to breather longer underwater.
Tools for survival and combat aren’t all you’re able to create, though. Depending on the area you choose to make camp in, you may also need to craft a proper shelter as well. Sure, you can just easily plop down a quickly-constructed lean-to whenever you need to sleep (or create a respawn point), and maybe add a workbench and a roasting spit, but how do you protect it all from rogue spiders, mites and the like? Well, that’s where crafting walls, ceilings and more come in. The building controls are great and easy to worth with, even with console controls, and with enough time and effort, you can craft entire multi-level bases with turrets and ziplines, assuming you have the right upgrades.
The upgrades actually come from Raw Science, a material that can either be found in the wild in glowing blobs or earned via various quests, and can be spent at various terminals to unlock new extras. If its crafting recipes you want, however, you’re able to always bring items to one of the many field stations and use the analyzer, which grants new recipes based on the material. There are even mutations you can equip that can be earned through performing regular activities as you explore, tucked-away toy molars to bust open for permanent upgrade boosts and a lot more…if you know where to find them, which brings us to Grounded’s biggest strength.
The combat, base-building and survival elements in Grounded are all a delight, but the real fun comes from the exploration. WithThe Outer Worlds, Obsidian showed how they could create an engrossing open world with a more relatively modest space, and here they strike gold yet again with a similar-sized world. Dr. Tully’s backyard is filled with a great variety of different biomes to explore, from deep koi ponds to scorching sandboxes and darkened hedges, and not only are they all visually impressive, they all have a ton of various discoveries to find. One particular sight are the landmarks, things like now-giant discarded action figures, busted monitors in trash piles, discarded cases of mints and more. Again, not only do they make for cool visuals, but they also assist in navigation, giving you points of reference on your map. They also make the yard feel lived in, giving a simple yet nice glimpse into the family here, and as a neat bonus, several of them also have a delicious coating of late ’80s cheese, which is always welcome.
There are also the traditional rare materials to try and uncover, which once again assist you (with some being required for certain quests anyway). Or maybe you may stumble across a powerful weapon, such as when I came across a more powerful ant club in a tucked away in a wall, filled with several severed ant heads on pikes and a field report of sorts. Then there was the mysterious photograph looted off a skeleton, and even murmurings of a secret quest, revealing that there’s way more to uncover here in one way or another, and the feeling that even with a more modest world and a smaller size, you’re still only scratching the surface of Grounded.
Traversing the entire yard is also easy and fun, with the size of the map making different journeys feel epic, but never like a slog (the nice, atmospheric soundtrack that accompanies you helps as well). You can easily map out entire treks and traverse them in an in-game day or two, planning the occasional pit stop along the way for nourishment and fending off/running away from the occasional enemy. At times, you may not even be aware of just how much distance you can cover; For this player, a journey to a lab in the hedge started as a simple climb up some branches, and ended up heading across a whole corner to another side of the map. It already felt epic to begin with, but when you step back and take a look back at what you can accomplish in this game just by properly navigating the various hills and obstacles, it provides a sense of awe.
What also comes across as impressive is the story you uncover by trekking through the main quests. Grounded initially came off as a rather unique game for Obsidian to make, as before they had primarily specialized in story-focused RPGs. It turns out that they still have room for some rather impressive storytelling here as well, however, as going through the cassette tapes and files encountered in the various labs give us a greater insight into Wendell Tully, his experiments, the toll they’re taken on his life and the downward spiral into possible madness they’ve led to. Helped out by Zachary Levi (returning for another Obsidian game), who sells Tully’s excitement, zest, insanity and more, the main plot strikes a perfect balance of drama and humor, and that’s without even getting into the Ominent stuff…
Yes, exploring all of Grounded’s huge backyard and uncovering all of its various secrets and story bits is a delight, but also challenging as well. Thankfully, the game not only includes different difficulty settings you can switch to on the fly, but also welcome accessibility options and modifiers to make things accessible for all players, no matter what experience they want out of the game. And there’s a hefty chance you’ll need those options at times, especially since there’s a bit of early game difficulty on display here, especially as you first get used to the threats in each area. Dying means respawning at your last designated point with the backpack containing all your supplies left behind and nothing but the tools you had out at the time, which can get annoying when you lose your backpack in the spider death grounds, then have to find a way to navigate the spider death grounds again just to get the pack containing all the goods you were collecting in order to eventually survive the spider death grounds in the first place.
There are a few other annoyances in Grounded as well, such as the quests delivered via computer terminals not being that exciting, and only delivering three side quests at a time and requiring you to beat any before offering new ones. It doesn’t help that the Raw Science rewards from feel a little piddling, especially since you’re able to find clumps of it in the wild that give you the same amount instantly. There are also the occasional moments where you follow an entire trail to a goal or a new area to uncover, only to discover that whoops, you need to backtrack and get an item you missed in order to cross this one area as well. Yes, it is a survival game, so you should be prepared at all times, but it still feels punishing.
Finally, there are the bugs. Not the insects, to clarify, but rather the glitches and the like, proving that Obsidian still struggles a little in this department. There was a moment where I respawned in a spider web and the camera got screwed up afterwards, one where my character – Willow, for the record – kept repeating the same piece of dialogue over and over when fighting a stinkbug, and most annoying, a hiccup that caused all of the icons on the map to somehow shift downwards from where they usually are, making it near-impossible to set waypoints. Granted, none of these were dealbreakers and were easily solved by just quitting the game and starting again, but their prominence still ended up being distracting.
Overall, though, Grounded is a both a terrific survival game and an epic exploration-based journey, and another win for Obsidian. When I actually talked with Justin Roiland a while ago and asked him about a possible Solar Opposites game, he said he’d like to do something with The Wall. If that game ever does get made, though, then they have gold standard here for miniaturized adventures that they have to live up to (though now that I recall, Grounded is alsogetting an animated series,so I guess Solar Opposites is giving them a gold standard to live up to in the medium…fair competition and whatnot, I guess).
Closing Comments:
Much like the protagonists, Grounded sees Obsidian heading into new brand new territory that’s still familiar in some ways, and their expedition ends up paying off big-time. Excelling as a survival game with a nice and meaty challenge, an adventure game with a lot of secrets and goods to hunt for and a highly-enjoyable story, and a visual spectacle as you wander around and take in the eye-popping sights of now-majestic backyard clutter (and the more frightening sights of the impressive and imposing insects), this is one trip that’s tiny yet epic at the same time and is not to be missed out on.
