Grounded is a lot of things. It's an homage to '80s cinema and culture. It's a survival game that owes a lot to games like Subnautica and The Forest. It's Obsidian flexing its talent for creative world-building and environmental design. It's also, to be blunt, terrifying.
Now, I don't think Grounded would ever openly admit that – its promotional material portrays a jolly survival-adventure game in a quirky, unique setting. Yet to play it, it feels more horror than home cinema, despite its clearly-defined inspirations. The fact that an arachnophobia mode was added so soon after the game's Early Access release, rather than with the initial product, always struck me as Obsidian being rather surprised by just how frightening people found the yard's arachnids. They certainly land harder than the giant spiders in games like Skyrim.
But the terror of Grounded goes far beyond its wolf spiders – to the point where I reckon there's a lot that horror devs can learn from Obsidian's homegrown hell.
It's life, but not as we know it
The uncanny valley is a powerful thing, and Grounded spelunks that pit as deep as it can go, taking what's familiar and mutating it into something alien and unfriendly. A BBQ knocked over becomes a fiery, ashen wasteland. A koi carp becomes a deep-sea leviathan. A tree stump you could once sit on now is a foreboding mountain range of decaying wood. It plays into a subtle sense of everything being wrong – you knew these things, but now they're totally new to you – and all these changes inevitably make the world nastier and harder to survive in. Grounded's world is beautiful and creative, but you learn very quickly that it's hugely hostile too, and the change in size never, ever plays to your advantage.
Consequently you're hardcoded to think of yourself as being on the back foot, despite the game not openly saying so – and the kids never acknowledging it either. And that's another layer of oddness the game projects: all the teenagers you control feel, well, odd. They're chipper and constantly joking among themselves, reflecting the corny movie dialogues of the 1980s, but don't seem phased by how awful their situation is. They've been kidnapped, imprisoned, experimented on, shrunk to almost nothing, and left to die at the hands of monsters with almost no chance of survival, for goodness' sake.
And weirdly enough, the teens never seem particularly frightened by this either. Not that they're brave, more like they don't recognize that they're in mortal peril at all. So when a rampaging invertebrate atrocity comes at you, mandibles dripping at the thought of ripping out your throat and laying eggs in the wound, and all the kids think to do is make light quips… well, it all feels a little surreal, to say the least, and makes me think I can't depend on these little brats quite as much as they'd have me believe.
Doing a lot with the little
Speaking of the kids, being tiny brings its own perils. It wasn't enough to tell players they were small, Grounded had to make you feel tiny as well, and you do that with more than just a shifting of scale. You're vulnerable, you're weightless, you're constantly forced to look up at everyday objects that tower above. Blades of grass don't bend beneath you, and most threats force you to look up at them, reinforcing the whole "titchy" feeling. And combat, as you might expect, makes you feel perpetually insignificant, with the game's lurking, predatory foes stirring a sense of constant, anticipatory unease.
Complacency plays its part too. For example, the shrinking machine landmark in the center of the garden is usually free of danger - enemies rarely spawn near here, which led me to think it was a safe spot for my base.
That was true for a while, at least, until one day when I was absent-mindedly glancing out the window and I saw a Wolf Spider crawling nearby, ten times my size and bristling with malevolent intent. I near-pissed myself. Not just because a predator far greater than me was in the area, but because the illusion of safety had shattered and wasn't going to come back. I'm not sure what caused it to leave its regular territory – probably hunting Stinkbugs – but it hardly mattered. I could never be entirely complacent again, and spent the rest of the campaign in a heightened state of dread. Anything could happen, after all.
It's not a bug, it's a creature!
And then there's the undeniable horror of enemy designs – and yes, the spiders are complete nightmares, the way they animate with a mix of calculated movement and sudden maniacal hunger, like they just can't restrain themselves anymore. Not to mention they're given uncomfortable qualities to emphasize their lack of humanity – whoever had the idea to make the Wolf Spiders make excited panting noises when they chase you? Screw you too.
Grounded has stumbled, seemingly unwittingly, into a rich vein of horror, similar to what Subnautica did several years before. But while Subnautica was simply trying to present an honest ecosystem with both predators and prey, Grounded's attempts to stay cutesy only made it feel creepier. I won't spoil it here, but there's one run-in with a central character that steps into body horror - again, it's reaching for goofy and ridiculous, but just feeling disturbing and upsetting. It might not have been what Obsidian intended, but Grounded is a masterclass in fright nevertheless.
For games a little less in denial about scaring you, check out all the best horror games right here!
