Grounded turns a suburban backyard into a survival map, and the trick works

Grounded turns a suburban backyard into a survival map, and the trick works. Obsidian Entertainment built a game where you are shrunk to the size of an ant, and every lawn becomes a hostile country. It launched in early access on July 28, 2020, and got its full release on September 27, 2022. Xbox Game Studios published it. The Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 versions arrived on April 16, 2024. It holds an 8.3/10 on Metacritic.

Trailer, via XBOX.

A Backyard the Size of a Continent

The premise is simple and mean. Four teenagers — Peter “Pete” Boggs, Maxwell “Max” Smalls, Willow Branch and Ally “Hoops” Nguyen — wake up tiny and trapped in a yard, with no memory of how they were shrunk or how they got there. You play as one of them, first-person or third-person, and you need food and water or you lose health to starvation and dehydration.

The yard is full of bugs, and each one has a job. Spiders are apex predators that hunt you. Ladybugs lead you to food. Aphids can be cooked and eaten.

The Scientist in the Oak Tree

The story is told through recordings left by Dr. Wendell Tully, who invented the Spac.R, a device that shrinks people and objects. The teens find it, it malfunctions, and an explosion in an oak tree reveals a miniature lab inside. There they meet Burg.L, Tully’s robotic assistant, whose memory is damaged. Its backup chips are stored in Tully’s labs, scattered across the backyard, and recovering them means crossing the yard lab by lab.

As the teens find the chips, they recover their own memories too. They were kidnapped and experimented on by a company called Ominent, and Director Dalton Schmector ordered them disposed of. A scientist smuggled them into Tully’s yard instead. The memory loss is not the mystery the twist solves — it is the trail that leads to it.

Building a Base Before Nightfall

Survival drives everything. You scavenge resources to build a base, because some insects turn aggressive at night. You craft axes, spears, and bows and arrows. Stamina matters in long fights. Solo works, but four-player co-op is the point.

The Spider Slider

Obsidian included an accessibility option for players with arachnophobia. It lets you decide how scary the spiders look. That is a small feature and a smart one.

What Grounded Gets Right

The core idea came from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and A Bug’s Life, and Grounded understands why those stories work. Scale is the whole joke and the whole threat. A dewdrop is a canteen. A spider is a boss.

Where It Sits

A team of 13 people started Grounded after Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, while the rest of Obsidian moved to The Outer Worlds. That small crew built something with more personality than most big-budget survival games. It drew more than 20 million players at launch. Grounded 2 hit early access on July 29, 2025, and an animated series is in development.

Release Schedule

The bugs are the best part. Grounded makes the ordinary terrifying without making it ugly, and the co-op turns a backyard into a shared project. The memory-loss plot is thinner than the world it sits in, and the crafting loop will feel familiar to anyone who has played a survival game before.

What matters is the scale. Grounded takes a setting every player knows and makes it strange again. The 8.3 out of 10 from Metacritic is a fair reading of that.

co-op games · Grounded · Grounded 2 · Obsidian Entertainment · survival games · Xbox Game Studios