WHY YOU SHOULD PLAY GROUNDED IN 2024!

grounded is an interesting game to say the least you wake up in an unfamiliar Place only to find you were very very small the world is threatening scary Yet full of potential grounded places you as a miniature teenager in the backyard of an everyday home with the initial objective of survival you see despite this setting that very heavily resembles the movie titled Honey I Shrunk the Kids this wonderful world of grounded is anything but a small offering grounded is a game that took me totally by surprise if I had to describe it simply I would say it has all the wonders of a survival game like subnotica but you get to enjoy the whole thing co-op with your friends grounded does so many things so well that it often had me forgetting I was even playing a survival crafting game as the combat story and co-option anigan had me immersed to a level I have not felt since those early hours of exploring the mysterious oceans of subnautica so why am I telling you about this game why am I getting all excited about about this itty bitty Survival game well ladies and gents I'm here to tell you that I believe grounded not only has a fantastic offering from Obsidian Entertainment but I also think that it's one of the best games to be released in the last decade full stop from the moment you chop down your very first blade of grass to the moment that you best your first spider in combat you will be hooked with grounded score gameplay grounded is one of the few survival games that has managed to make me lose track of time while doing something menial like farming resources to build or upgrade my base grounded does something fairly uncommon in these kinds of survival games instead of spending hours upon hours cutting down the same trees or breaking the same rocks trying to find absurd amounts of one specific resource gred rather chooses to focus on exploration based progression collecting resources yields two results one you get your shiney new material that can be used to craft things but secondly almost every resource in the game from bug parts to Stone and Marble is able to be analyzed at the research outposts dotted around the map which will unlock you various new crafting recipes based on that material the main draw of this progression is that almost always it's Direct ly tied to the materials that you already have which encourages you to get out there find new resources rather than just collecting lots and lots of grass how this looks is instead of having a recipe and having a bunch of resources you've never heard of that you have to go and find out in the world you go out and find Resources by naturally exploring and when you bring those back you analyze them and now you have the new resource in your hand and a whole bunch of recipes tied to that resource along with the knowledge of where to go back and get more of that resource it really is a better way to do survival than how most games do it and lastly on the crafting I'll just add that I've never once felt like the resource requirements for particular items were way too steep or even unfair combat and grounded didn't do anything that blew my mind but it definitely didn't slack off either there are many weapon types from axes to bows swords and shields but what's fun is that they're all aesthetically tied to different bugs and resources you might make a club out of the parts of an ant that you killed or some armor from a ladybug it feels very monster hunter in the sense that you're taking down weaker bugs and then wearing them and wielding them to take out much stronger bugs and then doing the same to take on the crazy tough bugs Etc and I should probably mention that grounded also has a buff and debuff system it's quite robust you and your enemies are able to use different tools to apply Buffs and debuffs to each other some as simple as poison whereas others that I won't spoil are much more fun and creative the final part of survival that I wanted to touch on was a system that the game calls mutations this is a really cool little bonus system that basically rewards you for doing certain things many many times or for reaching certain milestones in the game for example once you've cut down lots of grass you get a mutation called grass Master which allows you to cut down Grass more effectively this is just one example but there are quite a few and they get a lot more interesting than just cutting down grass these Buffs are also equipable there's a limit to how many you can have active at any one time with ways to upgrade that number later in the game but that's about all for the survival aspects of the game let's move on so now that we've touched on the usual main drawer of these kinds of games being survival I think it's about time I talked about the main surprise with grounded and why it resonated so deeply with me personally and that's the story this is going to be quite a brief section due to wanting to avoid any spoilers but I would love to still touch on it the story of grounded manages to do something that I never thought I'd experience again I'll never forget the time I first played subnotica and how I was just going about doing my survival crafting avoiding sea monsters making new upgrades and then boom a radio transmission telling me to go and explore this new place what came next was the beginning of what I would describe as a hidden story a story that is impactful integral yet completely optional the type of story that is there and is calling to you but you only need to answer if you desire this kind of story reels me in like a moth to a flame and that kind of story design is almost exactly how grounded does it as you explore the world of grounded you come across many landmarks or locations that do two very specific things they give you superb environmental storytelling within minutes of finding a new location you know what's going on at least on a surface level but secondly lited throughout the environment are completely optional voice recordings and readable documents which if you decide to engage with will slowly but surely begin to pose intriguing questions and eventually provide answers to those very questions as you Explore More this is now me in the editing process I just wanted to actually add as well there are cut scenes throughout the game there's one at the beginning but there's a few throughout the game as well that uh they show up as you do certain things throughout the game um I didn't want it to come across like there was no cut scenes or no foreground story there's just a lot of background story and that's what I really love in these kinds of games anyway back to the video this kind of masterful exploration based storytelling is exactly what hooked me on subnautica all those years ago and it's exactly what hooked me here with grounded except there was one other thing the fact that I got to do it all with my best bud this is the part I'm super excited about I cannot applaud Obsidian Entertainment enough for making the choice to create grounded from the ground up no pun intended as a co-op experience the only reason I know grounded exists today is cuz me and my buddy Hayes chaos his twitch will be linked in the description along with mine we were browsing through the Xbox game pass while hanging out online one day and we just stumbled upon grounded little did we know we were in for one insane ride together grounded not only allows you to play through the game with up to four friends but it was purpose-built with co-op in mind allowing you to have the maximum shenanigan levels as you storm around this backyard playground with your best buds I never thought I'd play a game where one moment I was deeply engaged in a story beat to then be uncontrollably laughing with my friend as he's being chased by a giant bee to then overcome that bee together take home its body parts scan them and begin crafting entirely new equipment from them I thought I'd just interject here and tell a little story about the recent stream we did when we played grounded me and my buddy Hayes chos together it was good fun and we had this moment where we were in quite a high level area where there's lots of big scary bugs running around and we were both quite low health and so we're running for our lives and we're like we got to get out of here we're somewhat split up and I turn a corner there's spiders I turn a corner there's another enemy I turn a corner there's another one they've all got these glowing red eyes which is what the enemies do when they're chasing you and we're running and running and running and we're freaking out we're like oh my gosh we're not going to make it we get out into the open we've finally gotten past all these bugs and there's this big cliff into a pond and so without thinking I run and I jump not knowing that my buddy is right behind me and I jump off and I notice as I'm falling that the water is not as deep as I thought it was it's only maybe a meter deep and so I land and I smack and I die instantly and the last thing I see before my screen goes black is my buddy who's jumped right after me fall and hit the exact same spot and die exactly the same way that I did to us both erupting in laughter just like laughing at this this hilarious scenario that happened and that's the kind of hilarious but like fun Shenanigans you can get into in grounded I thought i' just inter with that I don't know if this will make it into the video but here it is I wanted to finish the video by spending some time on what I believe to be the standout feature of grounded the reason it hooked me and my friends for over 100 hours the reason we come back to it over and over again and even after recently completing the game we have plans to come back for side content I've come to the realization that the one big thing that has us hooked is the sense of exploration maybe it was the fact that I had zero expectations going in but every single time I thought we had experienced all this game had to offer we would stumble upon something or somewhere new and realize we still had another 20 plus hours ahead of us at least grounded so excellently entices you with the possibilities of new places without spoiling the content of those new places I'm trying really hard not to spoil too much here but to put it simply and spoiler-free spending your first few hours diving into anthills and building grass bases feels like all the game has to offer until you realize that it barely scratches the surface when the world was shaken by the insane success from from soft's eldering one of the most common and positive sentiments was how you would see something in the distance and wonder can I reach that well just like you could in Elder ring in grounded the chances are you can reach that and once you do reach that the chances are it's deeper than it looks on the surface I was watching a developer interview for Grounded recently and I remember the devs talking about how since the game hit 1.0 and officially fully released they're struggling to add new big things to the game while trying to maintain good performance on all platforms and I'll touch on that quickly grounded is technically fantastic after over a 100 hours we saw barely any performance or technical issues but this sentiment of struggling to pack more into this incredibly dense package I fully believe it there's so much on offer here and it's so seamlessly and flawlessly presented that I totally buy that the devs are struggling to pack any more in the world is huge the diversity in Flora bugs and more is staggering and the fact that it has zero load screens blows my mind the incredible developers over at obsidian into mment really do deserve all the praise that grounded has gotten over the years you can really tell within hours of playing this game that it is a passion project through and through the game has been crafted with players in mind and all I can truly say is that I'm excited for the next Evolution that obsidian has in store for this franchise whether that's a new game or the studio figuring out how they can cram more into this already complete and fantastic offering grounded truly is worth your time and I can personally recommend it to anyone who likes video games yo so if you made it this far then well thank you cuz this is the end of the video and um I just wanted to say that yeah thank you so much for sticking through the whole thing this video took a long time to make put a lot of passion into it I am not at all qualified to um talk about video games and how they're made because I have no experience making them I've done a little bit of modding but that's about it um but I am passionate about it and so here I am talking about them anyway and so thank you for sticking through and listening if you liked the video maybe leave it a like if you like this kind of content then this is something I want to keep doing so if you could subscribe that would be awesome um twitch channel is linked in the description as well I do stream I try to once a week but we'll see how we go in the future I just got married so life is crazy um but um yeah thank you so much for coming down here thank you so much for hanging out tell me all about your favorite games in the comments below and I'm sure I will see you very soon cheers

Channel: J-Niss

Views: 11,035

Keywords: Gaming, Fun, Spiders, Scary, Video Essay, Essay, Commentary, Winning

Id: elPGDWtZqhE

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 13 2024