Grounded is super good, I’m loving this game. First survival craft 'n wham I’ve played since The Forest, and it just feels like every system has all the quality of life improvements I’ve always craved from these kinds of games. You can move full boxes of stuff around, you can parry, you can put together basic structures in the middle of nowhere with just an axe.
The setting and thus the exploration is probably the highlight for me. There’s so many times when I’ll be delving into an area and then come to this realization that I’m on a discarded glove, or fighting ants around a cookie, or running through an anthill, and it won’t hit you until you notice something that makes you think bigger for one moment.
Big fan of how this game basically makes you act like a bug as you go about survival, crawling into soda cans to slurp up sugar water, or getting wrapped up in a spiderweb after being in a rush. Good stuff.
I like the way this and Forest told a story bit by bit, as you reached new areas or found evidence. I don’t know how common having a story is to games like this but I remember them being completely absent from the likes of Space Engineers.
The combat gets kind of annoying in that most bugs seem to take 5 more hits than they should to kill. That said, once I really got into the Mutations menu and started getting the weird rare weapons, that improved things a lot. I journeyed into an overturned charcoal grill and forged a burning katana from the carapace of a rhino beetle. Pretty dope.