Middle-earth? Azeroth? Nirn? Thedas? They are nice worlds but there’s one that’s usually always better.
Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time looking down. Not because I’m fascinated by my feet or because there’s dog shit on the street to dodge. There is some, and there was this one time I walked unaware into a fresh pile near here, wearing an open-toed plaster cast, which wasn’t pretty. It went down between my toes, which is, probably, a bad enough experience to change my walking habits, but it’s not the reason I’ve been looking down. I’ve been looking down because I’m reappraising what’s there. I’m looking again at blades of grass to see how tall they actually are; I’m looking again at the skins of fallen berries to judge how strong they’d actually be if woven into armour; and I’m sizing up every insect I see from the imagined perspective of being an inch high. I’m thinking about Grounded.
More specifically, I’m thinking about Grounded 2, but the concept across both games is the same. It’s like the film Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, from 1989, which I realise is a rubbish reference in 2025, but I’ve got an appropriate amount of grey hair to go with it, so you’ll forgive me. The idea of the game, as in the film, is a bunch of teenagers are shrunk down to the size of ants and lost in a back garden, which is now a vast forest to them and filled with dangers they previously – as comparative giants – totally ignored. In order to survive the game, you’ll need to fight insects and harvest their parts for armour and food, a bit like a micro version of Monster Hunter but with base building, which I now realise is a much better reference for 2025.
I’ve been thinking about Grounded 2 because I’ve been reviewing the early access release of the game, and one of the persistent thoughts I had while doing it was, ‚What if Grounded doesn’t work when taken out of the back garden setting?‘ Because if you don’t know, Grounded 2 moves from a back garden to a park. A small park – not, like, Hyde Park or Central Park, because that’d be ridiculous. It’d take days to cross spaces that large being so small. So that’s what I’ve been turning over in my head: is this idea forever confined to a back garden? But it just occurred to me how silly I’ve been.
