Oh my God, but how can such a wonder exist...
It is incredible, extraordinary, admirable, astonishing, prodigious, fantastic, magnificent, superb, fascinating, heavenly, DIVINE, sensational, historical.
I am broken and fascinated at the same time.

Please do yourself a favor and play this marvel.

A brilliant passion project from Josh Sawyer and Obsidian. The attention to detail in every aspect is outstanding, showing a real love for medieval history, culture and art. The writing is superb, following a large cast of characters over multiple time periods without being confusing or disjointed. The central mystery offers the player compelling choices and decisions that affect the narrative dramatically. Themes not often seen in games such as religion, bereavement and class dynamics are presented in an insightful manner, with a perfect balance between levity and seriousness. Lets hope it inspires more smaller, experimental projects from AAA studios.

I wish more survival games had hand-made maps instead of procedural generation, because the world map in Grounded is easily its greatest strength. The world of Grounded is deliberately cheesy, but it has great variety, clearly differentiated regions, and barely any repeated content. And it all comes together to make a world that is extremely satisfying to explore. There are plenty of collectibles and secrets to find without feeling overwhelming or padded, and there's a nice variety of enemies and environmental hazards to keep it constantly feeling fresh.

I played through this on a server with 2 friends where I quickly became the designated builder / base curator (that always happens in these games...). While the building mechanics aren't anything to get too excited about, they are very streamlined from a UI perspective. And this great UI permeates throughout the entire game. Any menu or feature you could possibly want to access has it's own hotkey for quick access, you can hold a button to automatically build an object instead of feed ingredients in one at a time, buildings will automatically pull resources from nearby chests if you have none in your inventory, etc etc. None of these are all that innovative or groundbreaking on their own, but it's all done so well here that it feels like smooth UI is the core philosophy of this game.

This sort of player respect extends to the amount of grinding / resource gathering you have to do as well. While games like Conan Exiles end up being almost entirely about mining and chopping down trees, we honestly didn't have to go out of our way for resources very much at all once we had a basic base set up and running. It's a tough balance to strike in these kinds of game; you want there to be enough resource gathering to make whatever you build feel more earned, but not enough to get in the way of actually playing the game. But Grounded strikes this balance pretty damn well.

I think I would say Grounded's main weakness, on the other hand, is its difficulty curve. The devs very clearly had a progression path in mind when making this, but it isn't at all clear which order you are intended to do some of the areas in. But even if you guessed right, the difficulty curve is... still very rocky. Enemies tend to swing wildly between trivial to deal with and nearly impossible, and a lot of times the gear you need to comfortably beat a given enemy requires a part you only get from killing that enemy. We never got stuck on any of these bits for too long, but it felt a bit jarring having to beat difficult enemies with underlevelled gear in between long periods of just kinda coasting through life. This spiky difficulty was mostly an issue during the early and mid-game, but the single worst example of it was one of the endgame quests, which we only ended up doing after 2 play sessions just preparing for it.

But generally? We had a good time here. The weird goofy 90s vibe isn't really to my taste but it's done pretty well and didn't detract from the experience. I did feel that Grounded lacked a nice gimmick; I find that all my favourite survival games (e.g. Raft or Subnautica) have an obvious twist on the standard survival game mechanics to help them stand out, and Grounded doesn't really have anything like this, outside of its set dressing. But as a pretty standard and by-the-numbers survival game, I'd say this is one of the best.

The visuals are amazing. The story and the way that it is told is amazing. I would literally play the game to get more dialogue from everybody and I usually don't care about game stories at all. The gameplay is hard but as fair as it gets. I never felt like the game cheated me. I just felt disappointed that I choked. There's so much replayability because of the weapons, the different build combinations you can try from combining the gods' powers, and the way to adjust harder challenges to your liking. The music is iconic. Nothing but good things about this game.