Backlog Review: Grounded: Fully Yoked Edition (Switch)

A solid port that suffers from some necessary sacrifices.

By Caleb Fink. Posted 07/16/2024 22:56 Comment on this     ShareThis
The Final Grade
1up
1-Up Mushroom for...
Creative spin on the genre as only Obsidian could do; additional quality of life improvements like New Game+; lots to do, including questing, harvesting, crafting, and more
1up
Poison Mushroom for...
Load screens are overly long

Welcome to another Backlog Review, where we take a look at an older game that fans might have sitting waiting to be played or are still considering giving a purchase. This time we’re looking at Grounded: Fully Yoked Edition!


As a child, many people might have dreams, or nightmares, about being miniaturized to the size of ants, spiders, and other insects, but Grounded takes this fantasy, or hellscape, and turns it into a sandbox survival game. Fans of this type of game will find many aspects carried over from other popular games in the genre, such as Ark: Survival Evolved or Valheim. Several key ingredients of this game set it apart in the genre and those ingredients stem, no pun intended, from the studio behind it, Obsidian Entertainment. Obsidian is well known for making large, heavily varied western RPGs where players are guided through the world with quests and dialogue. 

At the start of Grounded, you are greeted with breaking news on TV that establishes the backstory of the game, with a news reporter speaking about the sudden and mysterious disappearance of several teenagers in the area. Astonishingly, or maybe not, the player selection screen presents 5 different teenagers to choose from, implying that the player character is most likely one of those missing children. I chose Pete because he was wearing a cool space shirt and seemed most similar to a young teenage version of me. One thing that is particularly unique about this character screen is that, while most survival sandbox games include a full character creation system, this one has set characters with their own unique voices and personalities. After selecting a character, they wake up in the middle of a suburban backyard, which commences the actual gameplay.

Here is where much of the appeal of Grounded comes in over other survival games in the genre. Many other games throw you onto an island or a procedural map with animals, creatures, or mythological monsters, as well as plants and buildings that are the normal size for whatever world that they are in. In Grounded, you are thrown into a world where everything in it is very familiar and would normally be glanced over, but makes all of those things legitimately larger than life and gives each one a unique purpose, whether that is to help the player survive or threaten their survival. Where someone might step on an ant in real life without noticing, in this backyard, be careful not to anger one, or else that might mean the end of you. 

The developers seem to have looked at everything that could be in a backyard and tried to give it an equivalent connection to some resource at normal size. Grass and grass planks are to trees and wood planks as a spider’s web is to a zip line wire. Practically everything seen in the game can be turned into some vital resource through the use of tools that can harvest it all. Some resources are harvestable straight off the bat with no tool prerequisite needed for breaking, but others might require a specific base tool or one that is a higher tier to break it. For those that have played Minecraft, this might sound familiar. Once a resource has been harvested, it can be used in recipes in the crafting menu or in the workbench to make tools, builds, or other useful items. But wait, there’s more to it than that.

Before items can be crafted, the resources must be scanned in an analyzer, another part of Grounded that sets it apart. A resource analyzer can take base resources and unlock all of the recipes that a player can make with that item. Only 3 resources can be analyzed within a set period of time, which stops this system from being overused. Another way that recipes can be unlocked is through leveling up, which brings in the concept of Raw Science.

Raw Science is essentially the equivalent of experience in Grounded. It can be earned through exploring the world to discover new things or by analyzing resources and crafting new items. Where this system becomes more powerful is when you are introduced to quests. Unlike many other titles in the genre, Grounded has a unique quest system that serves to guide players through different aspects of the game. At a certain point, players will find their way to a lab where they can talk to BURG.L, a robot designed for cooking food that has been repurposed to run shrunken laboratories that have been built all over the backyard by a mysterious, elusive scientist. Here, access is gained to a computer where more quests can be purchased using RAW SCIENCE! Quests are broken up into categories like kill and survival depending on what type of tasks you must perform for completion. These laboratories are also home to audio tapes and research notes left by the scientist that give off a very western rpg environmental storytelling feeling.

Careful! If you are too engrossed in your constant questing, harvesting, crafting, and building you might forget that, like most modern survival games, there are hunger and thirst bars on the lower left of the screen. I was busy high up, climbing in a berry bush looking for science labs when I almost died of dehydration. Had I known berry bushes don’t have easily accessible sources of water I would have packed some. In order to stay hydrated, dew drops form on the tops of blades of grass, which must be hit to bring it within a straw’s reach. For hunger, you might not be thrilled to hear what’s on the menu. Can you guess? Yep, that’s right! Bugs! Don’t eat them raw though, you might get food poisoning. That’s what a Roasting Spit is for! After you cook an Aphid, you can enjoy a bug delicacy!

With the most recent version of the game, dubbed the Fully Yoked Edition, Obsidian has added a couple of quality of life and replayability based features to Grounded. The biggest addition is arguably a New Game+ mode. Just note, you have to beat all of the big bosses to access this souped up mode with powerful, RAW SCIENCE infused bugs. Another addition to this yoked up version of the game is the inclusion of ant queens, which bring another Obsidian-style choice and consequence element to the game. You can become friends with each of 3 queens for different ant colonies or choose to betray them. But, beware! If you should choose deceit, there will be consequences, as ants don’t like traitors! All of these features combined makes for so much extra replayability and end game content for players that want to keep playing beyond the original’s content set.

Once again, on the topic of how Obsidian is bringing over staples of their games to this one, Grounded has a mutation system that feels like perks right out of a Fallout game. If you complete certain feats in the game, you will receive a special mutation that can be equipped to give a bonus to a certain stat. For me, I used a spear a lot in my playthrough, so the game gave me bonus damage when throwing spears at an enemy.

Visuals in Grounded are very influenced by the era that the game is set in. At the start, you are introduced to the story, and the very era-accurate teenage attire that establishes this suburban backyard as a ’90s family’s home. As I explored the backyard, I found toys that felt very reminiscent of a child’s toy growing up in the ’90s. One toy that felt especially nostalgic and poignant was a Battletoads action figure, a reference to the classic beat ‘em up made by Rare. Other objects that I found scattered around the yard include more action figures, as well as juice boxes, a ’90s child’s lunchtime necessity. While the visuals of the world and enemies are stylized, they seem to lean more towards realism in their form and animation. When you have a giant beetle or spider barreling towards you, pushing aside giant grass blades that you can’t even budge without a tool, it feels more like a real life nightmare than you might think possible.

After a lot of gushing over mechanics and visual style, I must make note of a gripe that I have that is most likely more of an issue on the Switch version than other versions of the game. That gripe is with the loading screens. Although most people wouldn’t intentionally die in this game anyway, do whatever possible not to die no matter what. If you have to load a previous save, be prepared to wait at least a couple minutes to boot into your game again. I suggest watching a YouTube video or scrolling on TikTok while you wait. There is the ability to set spawn points using lean tos, basically the equivalent of beds in Minecraft, but if you respawn you will leave everything in your main inventory space at the location of your death. Actually, going and finding a backpack you left behind might take the same amount of time as waiting on a ridiculously long loading screen, so pick your poison.

Grounded on Switch is what it needs to be, a stellar survival sandbox with a uniquely crafted world and visual style. Added features like quests help to guide players new to the genre and those who have played these types of games before, but want a more quest focused experience, closer to an Obsidian-style game. What Grounded really seems to nail the most is it’s uniqueness in a space that is filled with similarly functioning games. Obsidian has found a way to take a tried and true formula and make it work in a new way that fits within the story and world that they have created. It also fits nicely on Switch, despite the fact that the long loading screens make it a drag at times, but this can be avoided by sticking to the respawn system instead of loading saves.


Nintendojo was provided a copy of this game for review by a third party, though that does not affect our recommendation. For every review, Nintendojo uses a standard criteria.

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