If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to become a very young child forced to survive in the jungle that is your own backyard, well, today is your day. Obsidian’s Honey I Shrunk The Kids-like, Grounded, opens in early access around 6 p.m. BST, inviting you to make spears with branches and create armor with the corpses of your buggy enemies. I mean buggy like in, you’ll have to fight the bugs, although it’s in early access, so I guess you might as well be fighting the other kinds of bugs.
Grounded is a four-player cooperative survival RPG in which you play as one of four teenagers who have managed to shrink down to ants in an experiment that went wrong. Now you have to survive in the desert of what would otherwise be a pretty mundane garden, except that now baseballs are the size of your house and many insects want to eat you. There’s crafting, building bases, and all those good things you’d expect from this type of game. It reminds me a bit of Raft and Ark: Survival Evolved.
Nic Reuben chatted with the developers to find out a bit more about what to expect from the game, and even discovered some things that could come up in the future:
“Spiders sleep in the day part of the day-night cycle (a fine and sensitive cycle, for example). You can make fluffy hats with the mosquito shell. Weevils will lead you to food if you follow them. Bees search for pollen. You can’t pet the mosquitoes just yet, although Brennecke mentioned that they’d love to develop some sort of insect domestication, friendship, and horsemanship traits as the game progresses through its early access development. ”
He had me in fluffy hats, I got lost because I couldn’t pet the insects. However, the game has some other cool features that will be there today, the most important one I’ve seen is Arachnophobia Safe Mode. It’s basically a set of sliders that dims the spiders if you want to play the game but don’t agree with that sort of thing. It seems like you are able to remove so much spider that the model just turns into a drop, which I really think looks more sinister than a spider, but yeah it certainly doesn’t look like an eight-legged beast anymore. .
Look cool when Grounded comes out later today with Early Access on Steam and Xbox Game Pass (for PC and console) if you want.
If Grounded isn’t the type of thing you’re looking for from Obsidian, fear not, because they announced their next big RPG adventure the other day. It’s an Elder Scrolls-looking game called Avowed, and it’s set in the same world as Pillars Of Eternity.
