Idle Thoughts

A small world full of possibilities (★★★★★)

I’ve had a fondness of late for crafting/survival games. There’s something about their hybrid nature that appeals to me. For example, you sometimes have the choice of solving a problem through brute force and platforming or through engineering. Make some careful jumps or build a bridge over your obstacle.

It seems that to be a good survival/crafting game these days, you need to be three things:

– an action role-playing game

– a freeform base building simulator

– an interesting take on a new world to explore

There are some exceptions. Satisfactory goes all in on the logistical aspect. But generally the competition is fierce enough that you need to excel at all of these things. The “new world” is especially important to me, as the kind of world you are in should inform what kind of survival/crafting you do. For example, Starsand is a game about a desert, so survival means looking for water and navigating endless sand dunes. Towers of Aghasba has you plant seeds to create your own ecosystems.

What does Grounded have? Well, it’s a Honey I Shrunk the Kids simulator.

This doesn’t quite seem that interesting at first. But the draw is clearly how the familiar becomes unfamiliar under a new perspective.

In fact, the first few hours can be frankly unpleasant. Every blade of grass is tree-sized, so your sight distance is quite limited. In a more subtle way, you’ve also lost your bearings in video game terms. You know that steel is better than iron, which is better than bronze, which is better than stone. Is clover a better material than grass? Where do weeds fit in this? Is a ladybug more fearsome than a firefly? Where do weevils and gnats fit into this?

Yes, this game is about insects. They’re the perfect antagonists. Sorry entomologists, but bugs are kind of gross. Did you know they wear their skeleton on the outside? Weird. Fortunately, bugs are rated I to III in terms of threat. Very convenient. You can easily see that a wasp is worse than a bee, which is as it should be.

Okay entomologists, bugs really are pretty interesting. Insects really can do things that would otherwise be the domain of high fantasy. It turns out there really is something called a bombardier beetle that shoots boiling water from its butt. As for spiders, they’re obviously your scariest opponents. A spider at this scale is intrinsically terrifying. There’s a reason arachnophobia is one of the big phobias. You don’t need a fancy lore explanation or a talented monster designer, just create a 3D model from a few awful pictures on the Internet. Look at all those legs. And those fangs. And those eyes. Don’t forget about the deadly poison either. Plus, just when you thought you had a break, it turns out there really are spiders that live underwater.

Mammals are curiously absent in the game. Except for you, I guess. I suppose beating up mice would not be a good look. As I said, insects are kind of yucky. That makes them fair game. Besides, according to the game’s scale, a mouse would be the size of a building.

Speaking of scale, it makes the game full of inherent little surprises. Bees tend to stay high in the sky. So you gently coax a bee into coming down by politely shooting it in the face. Except… as it draws closer, you realize that at this scale a bee is the size of a grizzly bear. Not so cute now, eh? The mere act of climbing up to the picnic table is a multi-step, herculean task.

Fittingly, for a game about being small, it packs a lot of content into a small space. Each corner of the yard is a “biome”. The sandbox is a desert, complete with its own mechanics. You can craft a surprisingly large amount of weapons, armor and house decor from the various elements in the game. New recipes are given out by analyzing each new crafting material. That makes hunting for new materials very satisfying. A little “!” next to an item that hasn’t been analyzed yet means new possibilities. It’s always a delightful little surprise to find out what conventional item you can create out of unconventional materials. Guess what insect you can turn into a “leather” couch.

The house building aspect is no slouch either. Buildings made of grass or pine cones are somehow both pleasantly verdant and vaguely alien. The amount of craftable furniture is surprisingly large and the game also rewards you with bonuses and new recipes for creating a cozy house. So making a cool house also comes with its perks. Form meets function!

It also helps that Grounded is pretty funny. Look closely at your backpack. It uses the “Spalding” font, but it says “Holding”. It’s both a sporting goods reference and a DND reference. This is the kind of hard-working, multilevel pun I’m here for. Grounded knows its stuff. Grounded is a game that knows that “embiggen” is a perfectly cromulent word. Also, eating Brussels sprouts makes you lose health, because it’s a well-known fact that Brussels sprouts are toxic to children. A gag with gameplay implications, that’s pretty clever.

Grounded is also one of the rare games I’ve played coop from beginning to end. That hasn’t happened in a long time. It seems that when you play you someone else, you discover things about yourself.

Me, I’m a hoarder.

I have died with a pack full of healing potions. My storage chests are bursting, but still I need more. I have upgrade materials in the hundreds, but still my weapons remain puny and unadorned. Why? It’s the fear, you know, the fear of running out. What if there’s a better use for something later? Then what?

I am a hoarder, but by the grace of our Lord RNGesus, I can change.

Anyway, the theme of Grounded is about growing up. In a science-fiction sense, but also in the more conventional sense. Children growing into adults. The symbolism is facile, but it still got to me. Maybe I’m getting wistful. Somehow the theme fits with the nature of crafting simulators, of building a life for yourself, of gradually growing into your world. Grounded is just doing a much better job at it than most.

In a way, that logic applies to all video games. Every world is a new birth, a new life. At first, it’s like childhood all over again. You need to learn the lay of the land. To be taught. To figure out what to do to get what you want, what not to do because it’ll hurt. This way, you gradually expand your reach. Sometimes you even need to learn a new language:  buffs, debuffs, sets, tiers, etc. A new discovery leads to new possibilities and the cycle repeats itself. This sense of gradual, controlled discovery is the magic of video games in a nutshell.

I think this articulates why I dislike “creative” modes where everything is unlocked and free. It can serve a purpose, but what a weird thing to give to the player. It’s all payoff, no buildup. Tempting, but ultimately it defeats the whole point of a game in the first place. I can see how people would defend just spoiling themselves from the start. Why should I need to do these arbitrary tasks before seeing all the content in this game I paid for? Of course, this is completely missing the point. As any child knows, a reward loses its meaning if it is given away without merit.

Eventually, you reach the equivalent of video game adulthood. You can go out further. The things that used to scare you and seemed too hard are now just routine. Routine is a good word, because that’s what sets in. Routine is what adults live with. You optimize your time and your resources to reach the harder, more faraway goals. Those end game bosses won’t kill themselves, you know. The focus is less on discovery and more on efficiency.

It’s trite to say that there is no real death in video games. There may be setbacks, but you can always carry on, in one form or another. And yet, a different form of senescence sets in. It’s an exhaustion of the possibility space, of the capacity for marvel. You’ve seen everything, you’ve done everything. It’s the death of wonder, of curiosity. There is no permanent death, only a moving on. There’s only so much you can draw out of a game before it becomes a bit futile. I dunno, maybe you can play Super Mario 64 for decades and travel through parallel universes just to beat a level with half a press of the “A” button. But is that really what you want to do? Sure, you can stay as long as you like, but eventually it’s time to move on to something else.