Grounded

Oh no, not another game full of bugs on release

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There’s much to like about this game, but one of the best things has to be that your teen of choice, upon awakening with amnesia in a box in the garden to find that they’ve been shrunk to the size of a particularly small ant, acts as surprised as if they’d opened a packet of crisps and found some crisps inside.

Grounded was originally released in Early Access back in 2020, and since then has been expanded to a full release with plenty of updates on top. The good news is that as PlayStation latecomers to the party, we get to enjoy the full, polished product from day one, with the bugs the developers didn’t intend to include helpfully eradicated. The bad news is that the game suffers from an issue common to games initially released in Early Access, in that much is poorly explained to those who didn’t spend years providing feedback and watching the experience evolve.

One of the best examples of this that we stumble over is when we need to find and enter an underwater area. We’re given an idea of where we should be looking for the location in question. What we