Grounded - Honey, I Shrunk the Kids by Obsidian

That’s pretty funny and awesome. It’s the little things that matter.

I see what you did there.

Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill.

Demo coming today -

Nice! I’m looking forward to trying it out.

I’ll definitely try it because it’s Obsidian, even though the concept doesn’t appeal to me. After all, I ended up enjoying Dungeon Siege 3 despite not liking the first game.

I tried my half hour tour of the game, and it’s kind of good! More interesting than I thought at first anyway, kind of a lightweight survival game but with a little added mystery. How did I get so tiny? Did somebody do this to me? Who knew ants could be such total bastards? But chopping down blades of grass to build a little hut and finding pebbles and plant fibers to lash together a spear or axe is kind of satisfying. Of course half an hour isn’t much time to do anything, I got cut short being jumped by a bunch of aphids or something while I was looking into an initial mystery, but oh well. I’ll try it for real when I get another, longer shot.

The buzz around this game seems to get more and more positive as time goes on. I remember when they announced it, a lot of the reaction was people immediately being disappointed and upset that it was a survival game, and not a RPG.

Now the reaction seems to be “hey, this is actually kind of great?”

I don’t know about ‘great’ exactly, but then half an hour isn’t really enough time to make that judgment. But I will say it plays better than it looks in the videos they’ve shown, in my opinion. If they maintain the cool mystique of figuring out what happened to you and how to get big again, it might turn out to be interesting. Anyway, since it will be on Game Pass, I’ll try it out for sure.

Having played the demo, this could be one of the few crafters that I get on with. Seems to have a fairly strong narrative direction, the production values are good, and I dig the setting. Also, it doesn’t seem to be built around multiplayer shenanigans.

Hitting Steam and Xbox tomorrow!

It’s still the Early Access version. So no achievements will be earned, for instance, for those that care about that.

I’ll probably install it, just to see what it’s like, but save any serious playing for after the final version comes out.

Yes, verified by the official account:

Not that I care about such things, certainly not.

Couldn’t care less about achievements personally. Is there any detail on what systems/content are incomplete?

Wow, they really aren’t kidding about the preview thing. I just hit an “End of story content” message after playing for an hour.

Does that mean the game is over, or you’re just out of story content? Can you keep fighting ants, building houses and leveling up?

I’ve read that it’s like Subnautica. The story is just part of it. You can spend hours and hours exploring around, crafting, etc. even before the story is built out.

Yeah, definitely like that. Hopefully more quickly updated than Subnautica though, heh.

It’s a fun little game. And it certainly pretty enough, though the graphics are simple- the lighting/day/night cycles look great, and DoF for things in the far didstance, the ‘trees’(blades of grass) all bending and moving as a spider plows through them toward you (ack!). There are see8mly lots of crafting recipes to unlock, and I didn’t even start the base building thing. After you ‘finish’ this chapter, there’s even a daily quest giver (go kill 3 gnats, etc). I might try to drag my brother in to play co-op in when he’s done with Carrion.

Yes, you can carry on crafting and building and apparently doing (repeatable?) quests. I was just a little taken aback at how little they’d added to the story over the demo. It’s basically one cut scene and a new location.

Subnautica is the only other crafter I’ve really put a lot of time into (NMS a bit), and it’s the story, or at least the narrative structure, that kept me playing. I know I’ll just fall off this fast if there isn’t a narrative pushing me forward. I’m going to drop it for now and come back when there’s a lot more to it.

I checked it out on PC Gamepass, and while I really like the look of it I wish it was tied to some other kind of game than cfaft/survival as those just don’t really click with me.