Grounded is a a four-player co-op survival RPG in which you play as one of four teenagers who’ve managed to get themselves shrunk down to the size of ants in an experiment gone-wrong. Now you have to survive in the wilderness of what would otherwise be a fairly mundane garden, except now the baseballs are the size of your house, and lots of insects want to eat you. There’s crafting, base-building and all that good stuff you’d expect from this sort of game. It reminds me a little bit of Raft and Ark: Survival Evolved. Nic Reuben had a chat with the devs to find out a bit more about what to expect from the game, and even found out a few things that might crop-up in the future: “Spiders sleep in the day portion of the day-night cycle (a fine, sensible cycle, say I.) You can make fluffy hats out of gnat carcass. Weevils will lead you to food if you follow them. Bees hunt for pollen. You cannot, as yet, pet the gnats, although after some prodding, Brennecke did mention they’d love to develop some sort of insect taming, befriending, and riding features while the game trundles through its early access development.” Had me at fluffy hats, lost me at not being able to pet the bugs. The game’s got some other cool features that will be in there today, though, the most important one I’ve spotted being the Arachnophobia Safe Mode. It’s basically a set of sliders that tones down the spiders if you wanna play the game but aren’t cool with that sorta thing. It looks like you’re able to remove so much spider-ness that the model just turns into a blob, which I genuinely think looks more ominous than a spider, but yeah, it certainly doesn’t look like an eight-legged beast anymore. Have a looksie for yourself, if you like, when Grounded comes out later today in early access on Steam and Xbox Game Pass (for PC and console). If Grounded isn’t the sort of thing you’re after from Obsidian, fear not, because they announced their next big RPG venture just the other day. It’s an Elder Scrolls-looking game called Avowed, and is set in the same world as Pillars Of Eternity.
