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Impressions: Elden Ring
God damn.
I do not necessarily want to rehash everything about Elden Ring, as you probably have already heard loads about it. As of May 2023, Elden Ring has sold over 20.5 million copies, which made it the second best-selling game in all of 2022 (with Call of Duty taking the top spot). This is truly a stupendous achievement considering the type of game FromSoftware makes and where the Dark Souls series has come from. Although, yeah, this isn’t a Dark Souls game per se.
The overall formula has been shaken up quite a bit. Yeah, combat is still super tough, requiring patience, precise reflexes, and usually trial-and-error. Death still results in all your souls runes dropping on the floor and you possibly losing them if you die before picking them back up. You still level up in a deeply unsatisfying way, raising stats one at a time and getting vague bonuses on even vaguer secondary stats you will probably never actually use at any point in the game.
At the same time, the game feels entirely different. Dark Souls offered freedom of a sort once you got to the first main area, but nothing like Elden Ring. After unlocking three bonfires Sites of Grace, you get a double-jumping magical horse that you can call at a whim and even engage enemies while mounted. As a spellcaster, there is essentially zero downside for me to not be mounted 100% of the time. Your foes can knock you off the horse, but the mounted shenanigans fundamentally change how I approach open-world combat. I never felt comfortable just running past everything in Dark Souls, but here? Anything you actually engage is on purpose.
Amusingly, there are even pseudo-stealth mechanics at play. Clicking the left-stick (these games demand a controller IMO) will cause your character to crouch, and there’s even a tutorial screen about hiding in tall grass. Again, you could backstab mobs sometimes in Dark Souls, but it typically only occurred during combat after they missed an attack, or with certain mob pathing. Now, you can practically Solid Snake your way through many areas, up to and including firing arrows at walls to make enemies turn around and investigate the sound.
I also appreciate that combat feels a lot… tighter? And more gamey at the same time? Dodge rolling is super important as always, but unlike in Dark Souls, I actually saw several times where my character clearly was hit by a sword or whatever but I had i-frames and thus took no damage. Enemy attacks seem to be telegraphed a bit better, or at least it feels that way.
At the same time, some of the weaknesses of the Dark Souls series are amplified in Elden Ring.
I already mentioned leveling feeling unrewarding, but exploration (thus far) feels both encouraged and kinda punished. Caves act as Skyrim-esque mini-dungeons, filled with enemies and traps, with a mini-boss at the end. If you are successful, you are accumulating runes that you will need to spend to level up or upgrade your gear, lest you lose them. But the freeform exploration means you can never really tell where anything is, or what you are building towards. Do you spend resources upgrading your starting gear, to help you in the encounters to come? What if the very next chest or body holds a vastly superior item? What are the Intelligence requirements for spells you find soon? Where the hell even is the Sorcerer trainer?
These known unknowns are part of the “mystique” of Dark Souls and certainly would sell a lot of game guides back in the 90s, but it’s all part of the sort of design bullshit I hate. I don’t need to be optimizing for the endgame from level 1, but I do need to feel confident that the devs aren’t being obtuse on purpose. Can you miss crucial game mechanics (Ashes of War) for not fully exploring one of the beginning camps? Yes. Could you technically get by without using them? Yes. Can you complete the entire game just using Glintstone Pebble? Yes.
Would this lead to a richer, more fulfilling gaming experience? No.
It’s a fine line to walk, I get it. It’s also useless to complain about degrees of hand-holding in a FromSoftware title… although they clearly do give way more hints with the “lines of grace” on the map (or having a map at all). But I bring all this up because the end result is that I hit up the Wiki or Youtube to get one minor frustration answered and end up seeing “How to become OP in the first 15 minutes without fighting a single enemy.” Which, cool, good job constructing your game in such a way that it rewards technique and mastery in learning routes. But also, WTF, mate? I’m over here playing Elden Ring like a standard videogame with progression when I clearly should have been running past every mob just yoinking all the upgrades off the ground from horseback.
I dunno, man. The problem is: when does that stop? When do you start “playing the game” and actually tackling bosses? I encountered one open-world mini-boss recently and got clobbered, even on horseback. The typical Souls solution is to Git Gud and/or farm some more levels. I did the latter, but also spent an hour riding around and getting two additional flasks plus one flask upgrade before coming back. Beat that mini-boss and was rewarded with… crap I’ll probably never use. Not quite as bad in some RPGs wherein you can out-level gear rewards entirely, but certainly not at all on par with how powerful I had become to beat the boss. That’s certainly a unique sort of freedom, but I don’t exactly want to praise the freedom to make the game experience worse for myself.
We’ll have to see where things go from here. I’m 15 hours in, zero major bosses down, still dithering in basically the first map of the game. Will things improve? Will it get worse in new ways? Who knows. If I’m casting the same two spells another 30 hours from now though, I’ll be very disappointed.
[Dark Souls 2 ] 45 Hours later
I’m continuing to progress through Dark Souls 2. Things have really started coming together.
Which is a shame, because it only serves to highlight how awful the general design philosophy is/was in this game. When first starting out (especially as a Sorcerer) you really don’t have the tools to survive well, presuming you weren’t already a veteran of the Souls genre. Each defeat reduces your maximum HP by 5% down to 50%, and the consumable that reverses that is not is ready supply. And you wouldn’t really know that unless you looked things up. Nevermind the invasions from other players who are likely to kill you. Which, by the way, counts as a regular death meaning your HP goes down too.
At a certain point though, things improve. My character was heading towards a pure Sorcerer build, but then veered off into Hexer and I’m loving it. Early on you barely have enough casts to step 20 feet from the Bonfires before running dry, but now I have 50 Dark Orbs, 75 Soul Arrows and whatever else I want to slot in. And those consumables? I have 38 of them ready to go.
Aside from being bullied in No Man’s Wharf, I encountered no other PvP invasions for probably another 20ish hours. Until Iron Keep. The fight was actually going my way for a bit, until the invader popped the Warmth spell on the bridge, a stationary AoE healing spell. Then he got in a stable rhythm for dodge-rolling my Affinity/Dark Orb casts and I was stuck either trying to bait him into overextending or run into melee myself. Eventually I baited him out, but an ill-timed block on my part (instead of just dodge-rolling) meant I got staggered and then he executed some combo attack on me that deleted 70% of my HP. Then he finished me off when I tried to stand up.
After the fight, I was kicking myself for not slotting in Dark Fog. See, Dark Fog is a ranged, obscuring fog that can poison foes very quickly. Aside from using it for area denial (like around his Warmth spell), it would also be good for casting spells through to hopefully give opponents less time to react. Plus, most Hex spells are hard to distinguish during the cast, so it can also bait them into rolling before/after the damage is done.
But the thing is… that’s dumb. Dark Fog has some PvE applications, but there’s a reason I didn’t already have it “equipped” in Iron Keep. That’s when I realized this is all by design. The threat of PvP is a “balancing” mechanism that keeps you from focusing on pure PvE (not equipping optimum souls-farming gear/spells), or if you ignore it, actively slowing your progress by killing you with invaders. Indeed, there are numerous spells in the game whose only real purpose is as PvP fodder – the “homing” spells are harder to dodge but deal less damage than normal, for example.
I understand the design logic. Adding PvP increases the design depth (“useless” weapons might be good against human players) and adds longevity and relevancy to your game. From what I have seen on some forums, Dark Souls 2 still has a relatively thriving PvP scene despite being eight years and two sequels old. That can be considered a design win, even if I don’t personally care for it.
Luckily for me, I figured out how to disable PvP via Windows Firewall. So I did.
Time will tell if I continue playing however. One of the common criticisms of Dark Souls 2 is how much of it involves “gank squads,” e.g. enemy ambushes. I can absolutely confirm that the majority of the game indeed feels like jump scares. While the original Dark Souls had plenty of surprises, Dark Souls 2 takes them to another whole level with just an absurd amount of harassment. I appreciate that enemies do not technically pop into existence (except when they do, like the Pursuers… and Forlorn… and NPC invaders…) and thus you can often snipe them from certain angles if you are aware of them. But it gets really exhausting stopping at every single doorway and swiveling the camera around to check the corners all goddamn day. Earthen Peak in particular took ages.
“So why keep playing?”
Because I want to play Elden Ring but don’t want to spend $52 (current sale) on it. Other games exist, but when I develop an itch to play a particular genre, playing something else as a distraction doesn’t make the itch go away.
Plus, you know, I do have fun after a fashion. The game is gorgeous, the dopamine hits from defeating bosses/unlocking Bonfires are legit, there is a tangible sense of both character and player progression, and the buttons feel good to press. In fact, if not for the HP penalty for dying (which amplifies the gank squad problem), I would rate Dark Souls 2 very high. There are a lot of improvements it brings to the formula, which I might talk about in a later post.
It’s just hard to enjoy a 1,000 mile journey with a rock in your shoe.
[Dark Souls 2] Day PvP
When I played the original Dark Souls, it was the Prepare to Die edition, which never had multiplayer reenabled after the hacking exploit back in 2022. As such, I never experienced seeing the messages on the ground, being able to summon friends to help with bosses, or indeed, to be invaded by players.
Well, I have since had the distinct pleasure of getting invaded in Dark Souls 2. Twice. By the same guy. And yes, this was a legit player and not an NPC – I got the Armorer Dennis experience separately.
In case you aren’t familiar with the system, here it is: you can be minding your own business, and suddenly a warning message will appear that “so and so is invading.” At that point, you cannot leave the general area (fog gates appear), you cannot fast travel via Bonfire, and a red invader (player) will show up somewhere. Oh, and you cannot Save & Exit the game. You are essentially locked into non-consensual PvP for the next 15 minutes until either you or the invader dies. Also, any regular enemy NPCs that are still around will still be around and will only attack you.
If you die, you drop your Souls wherever you are. If you manage to kill the invader, you supposedly get X amount of Souls. I wouldn’t know, because I was killed both times I was invaded.
Because here’s the thing: I didn’t sign up for PvP. In the original Dark Souls, the system was that you could only be invaded when you were Human form, e.g. something you deliberately triggered with a consumable. Dark Souls 2 has no such limitation. In fact, my max HP was already reduced by 20% because I was working my way through No-Man Wharf, which features enemies that will deal 90% of your HP in damage if they catch you with a combo. I already lost 17,000 Souls in this area just from NPCs. Well, NPCs and falling into the water once. So when I saw the invasion text, I ran back to the Bonfire at the start of the map with the idea that “at least my Souls will be near the respawn point.”
I haven’t mentioned it yet, but I’m playing a Sorcerer build. It’s been okay-ish for regular enemies, but it definitely leans towards the glass cannon side of things. Certainly, the invader I faced had a significant HP lead on me, as even though I managed to get a few full combos off on him, it only amounted to about 30% damage. And that’s the thing about this: the invader gets to pick the time and the place. Well, I guess I picked the place by running over to the Bonfire, but I was already out of spells both times he invaded, and I was running around with Soul Gain+ equipment rather than items more geared for PvP. Meanwhile, the invader can gear themselves however they want, with whatever spells they want, and they have to be in Human form to invade in the first place, which means they have their max HP. I think the only limitation is that they cannot regain HP from flasks/consumables, which sounds like a bigger deal than it is considering they aren’t likely to give you the opportunity to pop a consumable yourself. Plus, you know, I had already used most of my flasks working my way through the map.
At this point, I’m not quite certain what I’ll do. The option exists – one way or another – to basically play the game offline. That will mean zero chance at getting invaded, but will also remove the player messages and bloodstains. The messages have pretty much exclusively been memes, but occasionally there are warning about traps or illusionary walls. Is that worth having my gameplay interrupted to such a massive degree? If I tried to engage the invader where I was and died, I would have had to work my way through the entire level all over again, past enemies and traps that could kill very quickly. Nevermind the fact that since I did die, all of those enemies respawned, setting me back again. I did manage to trigger some shortcuts inbetween invasions, so I won’t start from scratch, but still.
From what I read you can also just Alt-F4 to shut the game down and boot the player. Supposedly this “flags” your account and you cannot invade or play co-op until you use a special item that respawns after many in-game hours. Which would be just fine by me. My hesitation though is around the rather opaque auto-save mechanics. How much progress would I lose (if any)? Would it be perhaps worth it?
I dunno, man. Helistar recently questioned why I would continue playing this game if I already hated its fundamental design, e.g. failure cascades, etc. And that’s fair to ask. At the base level, I am having fun… after a fashion. I like the sense of incremental progression, working my way through a hostile map, and having spells/items/etc to look forward to. And remember: I’ve played dozens and dozens of survival and roguelike games over the years prior to this series, so this sort of thing is up my alley.
But we’ll see. Non-consensual PvP is not up my alley, and if the game feels worse without “social” elements, then that will be that.
[Dark Souls 2] Day…WTF
I started playing Dark Souls 2 a few days ago. And I have been in a near-constant state of aghast since.
See, the devs messed with the formula, but they did so in cruel and unusual ways. It started when I made it to the first formal Bonfire only to find no option to level up. I talked to the NPC nearby twice, but still didn’t know what was going on, so I thought maybe I had to unlock it further on. So I went forward down the only path that was visible: the one leading to Heide’s Tower of Flame. Needless to say, I was very confused as to how the armored knights were an appropriate challenge for new players who couldn’t even level up yet. Then again, this was Dark Souls.
So, spoiler alert, you have to talk to the NPC near the fire THREE times before it is revealed that she is the only way you can level up in the game. You can teleport between Bonfires right from the get-go, which I suppose is handy since you’ll be coming back to the starting area dozens of times.
After dying a bunch of times to the armored knights – which were not as obviously “you came to the wrong neighborhood” as the skeletons in the original Dark Souls – I then understood something fundamental: Dark Souls 2 features failure cascades.
As you may be aware, dying in a Dark Souls game means you drop all the Souls (upgrade currency) you had collected up to that point, you get sent back to the last Bonfire you rested at, and all enemies in the area respawn. If you manage to get back to your corpse you can collect all those dropped Souls, but if you die beforehand, those initially dropped Souls are gone forever. In terms of harsh death penalties in games, it’s the industry standard for pretty fucking rough.
In Dark Souls 2, dying ALSO reduces your maximum HP by 5%. Per death. Down to a limit of 50%. What in the ever-loving Christ is the point of that? The game still prominently includes “surprise, you’re dead!” traps and ambushes, which means you spend a lot of the game with less than max health, which then makes it easier for you to die again. There are Human Effigy items you can consume to reverse the HP reduction, but they are a limited resource (at first?) which only serves to excessively punish people learning the game. Did I mention you must be in Human form (no HP reductions) in order to summon friendly NPCs/players to assist you with boss fights?
Oh, and get this: regular enemies stop respawning in an area after 12-15 resets. One might assume that this would make things easier for struggling players… but think this through. If you’re dying a bunch, about the only thing that you can do outside of “git gud” is farming Souls so you can level up and gain higher stats. But now the enemies you farm no longer exist after a dozen resets. In my particular case, I got caught in a failure cascade on the way to re-attempt the Pursuer fight. Killed the enemies on the way, started the boss fight, desperately collected my dropped Souls, then died to the boss again. Repeat a bunch of times, and now the enemies on the way to the boss aren’t respawning, and realize that if I die before retrieving my dropped Souls, not just those accumulated Souls are gone, but so are any potential Souls on that path to the boss. Again, what the fuck?
In the game’s defense, there are technically ways of getting enemies to respawn. First is the Bonfire Ascetic, which is a consumable that can be used to essentially “upgrade” an area to the New Game+ version. This, of course, means all of the enemies that respawn are the NG+ versions of themselves, which might not be an appropriate solution for someone trying to farm Souls to overcome regular enemies. The second option is joining a specific Covenant that unlocked infinite spawns… in return for a massive increase in enemy attack and defense, and a decrease in damage you deal for as long as you stay in the Covenant. So, yeah, not a great solution either.
I honestly don’t understand what the devs were going for with these changes. Did they just not like players farming Souls and experiencing incremental progression that way? Were they trying to save players from themselves? Did they intend to double-punish people who weren’t able to retrieve their corpse? The Bonfire Ascetic mechanic is a cool addition, but everything else they “added” to the formula feels like hot garbage and I really want to know why/how they thought it was a good idea.
[Dark Souls] Final Day
I beat the final boss of Dark Souls on Saturday.
I’m so, so glad it’s all over.
According to my save file, I spent just shy of 58 hours playing Dark Souls. At no point during that duration did I ever really feel “comfortable.” That is presumably by design. Each new area has new enemies to encounter, bullshit traps to get Gotcha!’d, and just a general sense of subtle malice. If you make it far in exploration but then die, you respawn at a Bonfire and all enemies between you and your corpse respawn. If you make it far and find a new Bonfire, you have to make the choice to sit at it and respawn all enemies or continue onward but risk respawning much further away. None of the bosses had Bonfires near them, so you either had to run like crazy past guardian mobs or hack your way back and hope you could retrieve your corpse to make the otherwise lost souls worth it.
Oh and many Bonfires are just straight-up hidden, because fuck you.
Another fun aspect of the game was the simple fact that I never really found a weapon I liked, and this led me into wasting hours and hours farming for shit I never really ended up using. I used the Uchigatana for a large portion of the game, but it continued to get weaker to enemies over time. Eventually I got lucky with a Black Knight Sword (BKS) drop, which immediately became my go-to weapon for the mid-game. Unfortunately, I hated it the entire time. The Uchigatana moveset allowed for a quick strike to interrupt/kill charging enemies, and the power attack was a longish-range poke. Meanwhile the BKS had a slow regular swing, and a power poke attack that triggered after like 5 seconds of vulnerability. But, what the BKS offered was raw damage, and killing enemies in 1-2 attacks was much more useful overall than 4-5 attacks.
My final weapon ended up being the Gargoyle’s Halberd. It has good range, a relatively quick attack, and its attacks in general don’t cost much Stamina. The unfortunate aspect was the fact that I ended up leveling Strength all the way to 40 in an attempt to give all the dozens of other weapons – including the super heavy ones – a fair shake. Unfortunately, there is a point at which an unupgraded weapon is useless no matter how much baseline attack it brings, and thus you can fall into the trap (as I did) of farming and farming to upgrade weapons that you end up saying No Thanks to.
The combat system in general and most bosses specifically are full of outrageous jank, IMO. Having a shield up 24/7 is how I approached most of the game as I found dodge-rolling to almost be entirely useless. Everything I have read indicates you get i-frames by rolling, but those only seem to exist insofar as your character is at half-height during the roll and the attack may be directed higher. For example, if you dodge-roll backwards but the enemy is doing a poke, you get hit. If you dodge-roll right but the enemy is doing a side-swipe, you get hit. Sometimes you can dodge-roll between an enemy’s legs, but sometimes they shuffle two pixels to the left and you just roll into their feet. Sometimes you can just strafe out of the way of attacks, and other times the attacks will auto-swivel your way.
Perhaps this is all a “Git Gud” scenario. I mean, I beat the game, so… maybe not. In any case, I’m not sure “Git Gud” slaps as hard when we’re talking about QWOP-levels of jank.
Having said all of that, the world of Dark Souls was incredible. More specifically, the level design. You don’t get the sense of how interconnected each area is to one another at first, but by about midgame everything starts fitting together in extremely clever ways. You have probably seen a cave loop around back to its entrance a thousand times in other games, but Dark Souls has a degree of coherence that feels wholly unique. The game is also full of shortcuts that allows you to acquire powerful items much earlier in the game if you have the knowledge to do so. The average player is never going to be able to take advantage of that, but I appreciate the willingness of the developers to not throw up arbitrary barriers in a lot of places.
Overall, I am glad that I played Dark Souls even if it was not the most enjoyable experience. Seeing where things began (Demon Souls notwithstanding) gives you a greater appreciation for where things have gone in the meantime. Plus, it is an extremely boldly-designed game that took risks to stay true to the designers’ intentions, and I respect the moxie.
I do already own Dark Souls 2, but I think I’m going to take a break from the tension and play other things for a while. Perhaps something in which I don’t have to worry about instantly dying all the time.
[Dark Souls] Day 1
Killing the first boss on the first attempt was not that surprising. Technically, this was not my first rodeo.
Steam says I had two hours on Dark Souls (Prepare to Die Edition) with a Last Played of 2018. At that time, I was a tourist, sticking around just long enough to get the experience of being instantly killed on the ledge, or later after dodge-rolling off a cliff. That sort of experience was just not what I was looking for at the time. I then proceeded to play Dead Cells, Hollow Knight, Sundered, Hades, Salt & Sanctuary, and probably a dozen similar games over the next five years. So “coming back” to Dark Souls, everything clicked right away. Hell, it was surprising to learn that you had 5 Health potions to start – everyone else is so damn stingy.
Anyway, my character is Thief because getting a free Master Key sounded useful. I also chose the Witch’s Charm or whatever because that wasn’t a consumable and otherwise sounded like it could be useful somewhere.
A big part of the Dark Souls experience is exploration. However, when the very first body I looted contained 3 “Humanity,” I sighed and looked up some beginner tips. Do those disappear on death? (No). Is there a reason to use them now? (Technically no). Am I going to screw things up if I use them right away? (Technically no, but ill-advised). There are some things I am willing to learn via experience, such as boss attacks or where traps are. But obfuscated gameplay mechanics or Blind Choices are things I take a dim view on. Which… might be a problem with Dark Souls. Presumably.
Speaking of experience, I walked down some steps and got utterly mauled by the skeletons down there. They didn’t have levels over their heads, but when a single attack brings me to half-health and my attack deals 2% of their HP, I can take the hint. Was I frustrated? Nope. Fallout: New Vegas predates Dark Souls, and walking anywhere but south out of Goodsprings brings death and pain.
Plus, you know, a decade of Soulslike games.
Another learning opportunity was: Poison attacks hurt. For an absurdly long amount of time. Didn’t think much of the Poison meter when I was eating some Giant Rat attacks, but once it got full and started draining health, I started paying attention. Through literally three health potions. Noted, game.
Made it to the second Bonfire after clearing out some Hollow mobs in a new area. Resting/saving your game respawns all enemies, which is intended to create some Press-Your-Luck tension. Which it would… once I’m done farming this infinite pile of respawning Souls steps away from a Save Point. I’m going to assume that gaining five levels this way isn’t going to bite me in the ass later. While farming, I end up getting two “liquid” Humanity (as opposed to the “solid” items), which is a resource that goes away when you die. So, I spent one Humanity to turn into a Human, and then another to Kindle the Bonfire, which grants me more health potion uses for this area. Again, I’m assuming this won’t set me back permanently somehow.
And that was Day 1.
Time will tell how long I stick around farming in the immediate Bonfire area. “Until you get bored” is not a particularly healthy target, but it also feels silly to not make a few more circuits when you can gain levels within 5-10 minutes. Then again, the farm option would still be there if I just plow forward until hitting a brick wall. Hmm.
Let’s be real: I’m going to farm the shit out of this area, aren’t I?
Impressions: Grounded, pt 2
While the first Impressions post for Grounded was a week ago, the reality is that I have been mainlining the game daily for the past three weeks. That first post was written based on my first dozen hours or so, but I ended up playing so much that I never got around to actually posting it. So here are my impressions about the game after some 50+ hours.
Grounded is good. Sometimes annoying. Definitely still Soulslike.
The game world continues to be a huge star of the show. Survival games sometimes have to make huge contortions to accommodate varied biomes – lava must coexist with snow and deep oceans and deserts all in the same map – but the way Grounded interweaves its own biomes is a masterclass in design. The backyard is a believable backyard. And yet going from the Grasslands to the canopy of the Hedge is a big transition. Or to the pond. Or in the sandbox, with it’s deadly Sizzle effect when you traverse the dunes without shade. These are different places, with different resources, and different challenges to overcome. And it all feels… coherent. Believable. Or at least, as believable as teenagers crafting crossbows out of grass vines and crow feathers can be.
Some aspects of the game have begun to provide friction. As you become stronger and explore further afield (ayard?), you… well, have further to go each time. Ziplines become a means of faster-ish travel, but they require a LOT of setup – constructing a vertical tower in the yard, carrying supplies to build destination anchors, and slaughtering dozens and dozens of spiders to turn their webs into silk to craft the zipline itself. Meanwhile, the only way to repair your Antlion Armor is to kill Antlions in the Sandbox, the best healing component must be farmed in the Pond, and you feel in your weary bones how much more time will get wasted with each unblocked attack you take while exploring the Upper Yard for the first time. It gets pretty exhausting, especially when you have to leave an area, inventory laden with loot, and know how much busywork is ahead of you before you can go back again.
Perhaps the better recourse would be to build multiple bases instead of one major hub. Problem with that is some of the more advanced crafting stations can’t really be moved easily. Plus, it’s arguable as to how much time you would really be saving building several bases.
In any case, I am decidedly approaching the endgame. Having achieved upgraded Tier 3 Armor and Weapons, I can say that most fights with bugs are less Soulslike than they were in the beginning. As in, I don’t have to Perfect Block every single attack in order to not die. The tradeoff, as explained earlier, is that you end up needing to farm up considerably more healing potions and items to repair your gear. Some of the bugs I am facing do indeed still pose an incredible threat even with all my gear, so don’t believe you can necessarily gear your way past everything. Plus, there are required boss fights in this game, including different Phases and novel attacks.
And this is kinda what gets me about Grounded. The setting, premise, and story do not match the gameplay. Teenagers from the 90s shrunken down and running around their backyard for flimsy story reasons leads you to believe this is a game that might appeal to younger players. On Normal difficulty, it most decidedly is not a game for younger players. Or older players that may be reflex-impaired. Every time I think I’m hot shit crushing bugs left and right, I take two unblocked hits and I’m sprinting away chugging healing potions. And this is in a game where I can hit Save after every encounter!
I have my frustrations with Grounded, but I’m still here mainlining this game for like 3+ hours every night. There isn’t anything special about the story, and yet I find myself eagerly traversing the yard to clear out the labs to get the next morsel of plot. Or, if I’m more honest, to unlock the next piece of gear and craft the latest weapons from the bones exoskeletons of my enemies. And all this feels fine to me, as there is a definitive conclusion on the other side. No “keep playing until you get bitter and jaded” purgatory here as with ARK or other survival games.
So, yeah. Grounded. Not the worst way to spend 50+ hours.
Impressions: Grounded
Grounded is a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids survival game from Obsidian, which recently graduated from Early Access. I played it for about a dozen hours during Early Access, but decided to wait until full release before diving in for real on Game Pass.
What I have discovered is… well, a fun albeit highly incongruent survival Soulslike.
To start out, the world of Grounded is amazing. You wake up in a small cave that opens out into a forest of grass and weeds that towers above you. Although there are giant juice boxes and other items to hammer home just how tiny you are, they are really unnecessary – everything about how you move around the yard, the distances involved, and of course the creatures keeps everything front and center.
Your first experiences with the yard fauna is usually benign. Aphids, Weevils, and Gnats are basically mobile food and resources. Red Worker Ants are curious about you, but only go hostile when you hit them. Same with the lumbering Lady Bug, although they will quickly one-shot you in the beginning when attacked. Mites are typically your first hostile mob, and they are only really dangerous when you’re distracted or get surrounded. But it doesn’t take a lot of exploring before you encounter the apex predators of the backyard: spiders. Orb Weavers relentlessly patrol their territory and Wolf Spiders are the terror of the night, ranging far and wide through the yard from dusk till dawn. Daylight does not offer much comfort once you journey further afield though, as you encounter Larva, Stinkbugs, Mosquitos, and more.
And this is where things go a little off the rails for me. Grounded has all the trappings of survival games, including a huge map where you can build bases just about anywhere, resources needing to be gathered, and so on. But what you are actually doing to progress at all is a series of escalating Souls-like melee encounters. I say “Souls-like” because everything revolves around performing Perfect Blocks against insect attacks, then counter-attacking. You can technically just regular block attacks (with a shield made out of Weevil meat), but you still take a significant amount of damage, can get debuffed, and eventually stunned depending on the frequency of attacks. Meanwhile, you completely block all damage even with a Pebble Axe from any enemy if you Right-Click your mouse at the correct time.
In games like ARK, there’s no Perfect Blocking a T-Rex bite. But, you can still take out a T-Rex through clever terrain and/or structure use. In Grounded, most enemies ignore most terrain that otherwise slow you down, e.g. grass stems. And even if you happen to engage from on top of something they cannot reach, your (early) ranged attacks with the bow don’t deal much damage. Indeed, since you cannot block while using the bow, the game seems to discourage any realistic use of it outside first-strike or fleeing bug scenarios. “What about flying bugs like Mosquitos?” Yeah, sure, try to get a few arrows in. But you will 100% die if you don’t perform Perfect Blocks with a regular melee weapon of some sort, even if you have the clunkiness of having to toggle between it and the bow.
The worst part, IMO, is how there isn’t much of an escape from the bug-based progression. I guess I cannot claim that it is impossible to complete the game without learning each bug’s song and dance, but it is a fact that several crafting stations require bug parts to be constructed. Again, in ARK the dinos are “soft” required because nobody has time to collect 10,000 Stone and Iron to build the goodies you want. In Grounded, you simply aren’t building a Drying Rack without Bombardier Beetle parts. I haven’t made it into any of the later Lab story areas yet, but there are plenty of bugs between me and where I think the front door is, so… yeah. Prepare to “git gud” or die trying.
(Or play on a lower difficulty, I guess.)
Overall, though? I’m still having fun. The first dozen or so hours had me running from everything more powerful than a Solider Ant, but I’m basically approaching Tier 2 equipment and a general level of confidence to take on most things. Had it not been for an Orb Weaver Jr joining the fight in defense of its momma, I would have taken one of those down already. Luckily, the game features both the default survival “fuck you” of dropping all your gear on death AND the ability to Save your game at any time. Which… is weird. I’m assuming you don’t get saves while playing Multiplayer and that’s the difference. In any case, saves won’t, er, save you from getting owned by spiders or whatever, but it at least affords you the opportunity to practice Perfect Block timing as many times as necessary to get the last bug part to craft a new Hammer or whatever.
In An Age 
Like Souls
Feb 13
Posted by Azuriel
In the past two weeks, I played a few hours of Blasphemous and Salt & Sanctuary. Both of these games are in the increasingly crowded 2D Soulslike genre, made famous by Dark Souls (or Demon Souls if wish). As I was farming some currency to level up a bunch of times in Salt & Sanctuary – and before remembering I had previously played the game for 10 hours a few years ago – I had a thought. I have played a lot of Soulslike games over the years… and not actually Dark Souls. That’s weird, right?
So, it’s happening.
Not certain whether I’m going to chronical this shit, or just give the occasional summaries. Not much oxygen left in the room between Elden Ring and decades of Youtube videos of people beating the entire Dark Souls trilogy without taking a single point of damage while using a DDR dance pad as their controller. That might be two separate videos. Whatever.
If you want to see me “Git Gud” or otherwise maintain my adequate levels of Gud, buckle up.
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Tags: Dark Souls, Git Gud, Soulslike, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?