The first time Grounded killed me, I was beaten to death by a lawn mite. You know; those teeny, tiny little red bugs that could line-dance on a head of a pin and scurry along paving stones, looking like they couldn’t hurt ? Yeah. One of those. Emphasis on the “one”, too, as this lad had been alone. And yet he’d taken one look at my sassy side ponytail and (correctly) presumed I was an easy target. Was it unexpected? You bet. Scary? Surprisingly so. Embarrassing? Yes. Very.
Grounded reviewPublisher: Xbox Game StudiosDeveloper: ObsidianPlatform: Played on XboxAvailability: Out 27th September on PC, Xbox One, Xbox X/S
Given I’m still on Day One of my survival journey I’d been hoping for a gentle tutorial period, but this bad boy had barrelled towards me, focused and unflinching, like a toddler locks onto a ball pit. A single thought flickers through my head: if these are the early enemies, what the hell are the strong ones like?!
The second time I cark it, I died of thirst. It wasn’t that I ignored the instruction to get something to drink as much as I was distracted by the glorious wilderness – well, if you can call a suburban backyard the wilderness – and I didn’t realise until the sun went down that I was missing the sap required to rustle up a torch. So, instead of creating a Lean To and hunkering down for the night, I huddled beneath the Kid Case spawn point instead – hotly aware of every slither and scuttle around me – and slowly expired of acute dehydration. Turns out that was more embarrassing than being walloped to death by the mite.
The truth is, if you’re not killing yourself on Grounded, something else will be instead. Though it dresses itself up in a cutesy cartoon aesthetic, beneath the sun-dappled biomes is the stone-cold heart of a skilled and complex survival sim that I utterly underestimated: and it’s brilliant.