'Grounded' is Obsidian's backyard survival game that's basically 'Honey, I Shrunk the Kids'
Have you ever looked at your own sprawling backyard and thought, imagine if classic 1989 movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids actually happened and I had to furiously battle my way through towering grass blades, drink actual water droplets, and avoid now-enormous insects to survive?
Look, I did a lot of daydreaming, and apparently so did Obsidian, because their brand new game, Grounded, is for all the Rick Moranis fans out there.
Announced at Microsoft’s X019 event in London, Grounded is a new first-person, co-op survival game from Xbox Game Studios and Obsidian Entertainment coming spring 2020.
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Players find themselves shrunk to the size of an ant, with the immediate task of surviving in an insect-filled, suburban backyard, building forts from available materials like grass blades, defending said forts from hectic spiders with weapons made from pebbles and sticks, and hunting for aphids and granola bars for sustenance. And you can operate solo or in four-person co-op mode.
It's like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids meets A Bug's Life, with all the unbridled insect aggression you remember from Antz.
It's an understatement to say that Obsidian's been incredibly busy of late, with recent releases including gloriously stylised RPG The Outer Worlds and Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, but the idea of creating a survival title proved too tempting for the team.
"We've been looking to do a survival game for a little while now," senior programmer Roby Atadero told Mashable. "And once Deadfire started to wind down, we started to have some brainstorming meetings about what could be some good ideas for doing a survival game. One unique idea that popped out was, 'Hey, what if you were shrunk down to the size of an ant and had to survive in a backyard?' It started to resonate a lot with a lot of people in the studio. So Adam Brennecke, our project director, he went over the progress and said, 'Hey, we should do this.'"
Once the studio put a 14-person team together and production was up and running, Atadero says that they wanted to leave a particularly Obsidian imprint on the survival game: storyline.
"At its core, we still want it to be a survival game that people that are familiar with the genre they they will get the same style of gameplay that they're expecting, but we do want to make it more approachable and find ways to kind of lower that friction," said Atadero.
The backyard setting itself proved one of the biggest challenges for the team, with scale being the most prominent element to get right.
"The setting is so unique you have to make sure that all these elements that you do make sense at that scale," said Atadero. "We had to find unique ways to, say, use grass to build buildings or making a hammer out of woven fiber and rocks and pebbles. The scenario or the setting gave us unique challenges to find how to fit all these survival element gameplay aspects."
There's one thing to remember while you're hacking and slashing your way through the backyard, inhaling all the aphids you can, bopping all those pesky ants and mites on the head: it's an ecosystem y'all. Everything's connected.
"There's hundreds and hundreds of insects in this yard, and they each have their own kind of wants and desires," said Atadero. "So, for example, ladybugs do get hungry, they each have their own kind of individual hunger system. And when they get hungry, they'll go hunt aphids. And if you end up being the person that kills all the aphids, say and eats them all that that ends up causing the ladybugs have to migrate somewhere else."
Grounded lands in spring 2020 on Xbox One digitally through Xbox Game Preview and with Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft Store, and on Steam.
Shannon Connellan is Mashable's UK Editor based in London, formerly Mashable's Australia Editor, but emotionally, she lives in the Creel House. A Tomatometer-approved critic, Shannon writes about entertainment, tech, social good, science, culture, and Australian horror.
