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Grounded is a survival game developed by Obsidian Entertainment for PC and Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, released in Early Access on June 28, 2020, with the official 1.0 version releasing on September 27, 2022.

Described by some as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids meets Minecraft, it involves a group of teenagers waking up, only to find themselves the size of ants and stranded in a backyard. The players must gather food, water, and supplies, build shelter, and fight off hostile insects and spiders as they work to return to their normal size.

However, as the players explore the backyard, they soon discover that they are not the first to be reduced in size and that the reason for their shrinkage may just be a small step in something far more sinister.

On February 21, 2024, as part of a wider strategy for Xbox to release four of their popular titles on other consoles (including Grounded), the game is planning to arrive to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch on April 16th of that year.


The game provides examples of:

  • 20 Minutes into the Past: The intro to the game reveals in a news segment that Grounded takes place in 1990, which if anything really adds to the retro feeling the game has.
  • Abandoned Laboratory: The various labs scattered across the map feature angry robots and destroyed science equipment. Though the Undershed lab may not be so abandoned as one might assume..
  • Acquired Poison Immunity: The "Mithridatism" mutation gained by killing wolf spiders reduces the damage spider venom does to you.
  • Action Bomb: Infected Weevils have a tendency to charge up to you and explode, dealing damage. Infected larvae are similar, except they're immune to their own explosions and thus can explode repeatedly, which is not a fun thing to hang out next to.
  • Adjustable Censorship: Do you have utter hatred and/or crippling fear towards spiders? The developers were nice enough to put in an Arachnaphobe Safe Mode setting as a slider to make the spiders less like spiders. At its maximum setting, the spiders appear as grey orbs. They'll still try to eat your face.
  • Adopt the Dog: If it wasn't for the unnamed female Ominent researcher who defected from Director Schmector, stole the player characters away from him and released them into Dr. Tully's backyard to find him so he could bring them back to normal size, the whole plot probably wouldn't have happened, and the player characters would have likely been killed by Schmector like his previous test subjects.
  • Alliteration & Adventurers: A game of "Minotaurs & Myrmidons" is set up on the picnic table. A sourcebook serves as a ramp to reach the top of the table, and the game board has a maze that the player must navigate to find the Minotaur Chest.
  • All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Agitate a certain faction of insects enough by building bases near their territories or killing off enough of its species, and they have a chance to retaliate and launch an invasion on any one of your established bases.
  • Ant Assault: Ants are some of the most regular enemies the player can encounter. They will demolish the player's encampments to eat any food the player has stored and swarm the player when they get hostile.
  • Anti-Frustration Features: Patch 1.1 brought a host of nice quality-of-life changes to the game:
    • Viewing a creature through the PEEP.R zoom function shows you its creature card on the left side of the screen, detailing its resistances and weaknesses. This eliminates the need to find a safe spot and check the status menu to look up what the best weapons to use against them are.
    • Another row of inventory space was added, letting you carry much more items at a time. Additional hot bars were also added to the HUD interface, allowing players to bind more tools and consumables to shortcut keys.
    • Sleeping around nighttime before 22:00 now skips through the night and has your character wake up at 6:00 AM, rather than in the middle of the night.
    • All labs now have water coolers in them, which allow you to top off your thirst meter and refill your canteens without needing to backtrack and return later.
    • An unlockable tool called the ZIP.R was introduced and placed behind a locked door in the Oak Lab accessible after defeating the Assistant Manager. It allows you to go backwards up zipline ropes, negating the need to make multiple ziplines for traveling between areas. It also counts as an upgrade and therefore doesn't take up any inventory slots.
    • Base structures can now be made using items stored in nearby storage containers and grass/stem pallets without the need to carry them on your person, expediting construction.
  • Antlion Monster: Introduced in the Hot and Hazy update, Antlions are exclusive to the Sandbox biome, and are formidable Lightning Bruisers that can burrow underground and emerge underneath you, dealing heavy damage and stunning you briefly.
  • Applied Phlebotinum: Raw Science, a physical manifestation of scientific research, is awarded for analyzing crafting materials and finding rare pickups in the overworld, and is used as currency to trade with BURG.L for crafting recipes, mutations, and upgrades to your equipment.
  • Artificial Brilliance: While their pathfinding leaves a little to be desired overall, passive insects will attempt to run away from you if you try and shoot them with arrows from a distance, and ants, termites, and larvae that are near-death will stop attacking and retreat to alert other enemies. If a hostile non-flying insect cannot reach you, and they have enough room to do so, they will attempt to jump to your position, preventing easy kills with the bow and arrow. If you happen to be on top of a structure that can be destroyed, such as a blade of grass, they will attack it and knock it down to try and bring you back down into melee range.
  • Artistic License – Physics:
    • There are the standard violations of the Square-Cube Law usually found in Mouse World settings but in particular the concept of chopping grass with an axe. Even if we assume the shrunken humans could still put enough force behind their chop, grass and weed stems are simply too flexible to be chopped in the same way that a tree trunk is chopped. A slicing implement like a knife would be far more useful. Of note, the koi pond update added a slicing tool in the form of the dagger... that also is animated with chopping motions.
    • There's really no reason you should take fall damage from any height. And it's not some strange side effect of the shrinking, either; normal insects can take falling damage as well. The smaller something is, the bigger the ratio of its surface area to its volume. This consequently will increase air resistance, reducing its terminal velocity and distribute more of the impact force over the surface area. Realistically, any bug will be able to survive its terminal velocity speed.
  • Benevolent Architecture: Several backyard tools, twigs, leaves, and branches are deliberately placed in areas to keep the player from getting stuck in crevices they can't otherwise get back out of, most notably in the Haze area, which features dozens of steep chasms that are otherwise insurmountable from within, if not for some conveniently-placed rock piles and twig branches.
  • Big Creepy-Crawlies: Ants, weevils, mites, aphids, and ladybugs wander around the backyard. They're actually normal-sized creepy crawlies, but you've been shrunk down to their level so they appear huge to you.
  • Blocking Stops All Damage: Applies when blocking with a shield, which prevents you from being damaged by almost any attack, but you'll take a stamina penalty if it isn't a perfect block.
  • Body Horror: In the Haze section of the yard, you can find and fight insects that are infected with some sort of parasitic fungus, likely based on Cordyceps. These insects have Mind-Control Eyes and their bodies are grotesquely covered in fungal growths. It's unclear whether the Haze (which is actually pesticide being sprayed from a bug bomb in the yard) is supposed to be killing the plagued insects... or if it's somehow causing the spread of infection.
    • Exploring the Haze Lab reveals that Dr. Tully had the area drenched in the weed killer due to an experiment with raw science and Cordyceps that went very wrong and the resulting mutation broke out, forcing Dr. Tully to break a hole in the weed killer tank to contain the fungus
    • Exploring the labs and progressing with the main quest reveals a rather nasty side effect of the shrinking process called 'Raisining.' While it only appears to affect older subjects, it's an advanced form of dehydration that causes skin, limbs, and tissues to shrivel up and waste away over time. Dr. Wendell Tully has suffered from a severe case of this, to the point where when you finally meet with him, he's reduced to nothing more than a dried-up head in a floating container. He gets better if you get the Golden Ending, however.
  • Boring, but Practical: The full release added an accessory slot to your inventory, allowing you to equip trinkets with passive benefits such as an infinite food resource, sizzle protection, or stat changes. Many of these are rare drops from bosses or resource nodes, or found tucked away in hidden areas, but the ones you'll probably be equipping most often are the simple Dandelion Tuftsnote , which are found almost everywhere throughout the yard just by chopping down dandelion stems. They act somewhat like manual parachutes, and can be pulled out in midair to slow your descent and prevent fall damage; considering a lot of the game's locations involve platforming on top of large structures, you'll likely always have one equipped just in case, or at the very least kept in your inventory for when you need it.
  • Brainwashed and Crazy: Infected ladybugs and weevils. The regular ones are passive bugs who won't hurt you unless you attack them first (weevils won't hurt you at all, running away if you strike them). Infected ones have the same purple, swirly eyes as all other infected creatures, and are hostile on sight.
  • Break Meter: Defending with a weapon or shield fills up a block meter, which staggers you if it fills completely.
  • Breakable Weapons: The crafted tools and weapons have durability meters.
  • Brown Note: The hiss of an orb weaver spider can slow the player, reminiscent of the shriek of a ReDead.
  • Chest Monster: Overlaps a bit with Ambushing Enemy - Larva can mimic the 'digging' animations of Grubs, only to pop up and start attacking when dug up with a shovel.
  • Cosmetic Award: Tracking down lost SCA.B bracelets gives you new color schemes for your own SCA.B.
  • Deadly Gas:
    • One section of the backyard (Known as The Haze) is covered in yellow-tinged weed killer, which will sap your life unless you craft and equip a gas mask. The Haze can be cleared out by plugging the hole at the top of the weed killer container with gum, though this results in the killer fungus being allowed to grow unchecked.
    • Stinkbugs will use bursts of harmful gas as an attack, though this can also be countered using a gas mask.
  • Death World: You're the size of an ant and have no natural protection from the many nasty critters out for your blood. An ordinary backyard becomes a hostile, predator-filled landscape that forces you to forage and equip yourself with weapons and tools to survive while fending off said predators.
  • Decapitation Presentation: One cave in the game is filled with ant heads on pikes, along with the skeleton of a shrunken person with several bones removed and used to make an effigy on the wall. You can follow suit with the remains of insects you've killed.
  • Disastrous Demonstration: One of the records found in Dr. Tully's labs reveals that his attempt to obtain backing for his SPAC.R experiments went awry when his equipment for a live demonstration shorted out in front of the evaluating officials.
  • Disguised Horror Story: The game is a bright, colorful Mouse World survival game with the only bloody violence being the green goo of the bugs. Then you find the camp of another survivor who died long enough ago that nothing is left but his skeleton…and another body surrounded by dozen or so ant heads mounted on toothpicks…and a macabre effigy crafted from ant torsos and the bones of another human being hidden in the pond…and then it begins to dawn on you: You were not the first one’s Ominent sent to the yard..
  • Doing Research: Science Stations, tiny domed structures, contain an Analyzer. Players can bring materials to the analyzer to gain science points and unlock new crafting recipes.
  • Down in the Dumps: The Trash Heap biome, located in the southwest part of the map. Toxic fumes emit from the rotting food in this area, making it dangerous to traverse without a gas mask on hand. This is also where the Black Anthill dungeon is located.
  • Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: At higher upgrade tiers, weapons and arrows can be infused with one of four 'elements' - Salty, Spicy, Fresh and Sour. Different bugs have different resistances and weaknesses between these four types of damage, often necessitating building at least one weapon of each type in the late game.
  • Enemy Civil War: A few insect species will fight each other to a limited degree. The most reliable is everyone against stinkbugs; since their gas attacks damage indiscriminately, anything caught in range will strike back. Since stinkbug parts are necessary for some important upgrades, but you need stinkbug parts to build a gas mask to fight stinkbugs, kiting a stinkbug to the red ant hill is one of the best ways of getting past that hill.
  • Equipment Upgrade: The Smithing Station is used to upgrade tools and weapons with quartzite, making them both deadlier and more durable with each tier of upgrade applied.
  • Everything Trying to Kill You: There are over 50 distinct insects and creatures in the game. More than two-thirds of those creatures will attack you mercilessly on sight. Depending on what biome you're in, some previously-neutral enemies become hostile on sight as well, such as bees on the picnic table or black ants on the porch of the shed.
  • Festering Fungus: Bugs in the Haze are infected by a mutated strain of parasitic fungus that heavily resembles (or maybe even is) Cordyceps. The Haze's infection is contained by Dr. Tully's experimental weed killer, but turning it off would let the fungal infestation spread all over the yard.
  • Fiendish Fish: It's a koi fish, and actually it's just regular size... which means it's basically a megalodon compared to you and is more than happy to dine on tiny human meat.
  • Flunky Boss: All but one of the bossesnote  will summon Mooks during their fights once their health dips below certain thresholds.
  • Gang Up on the Human: Spiders only ever want to attack you, and will stroll right past other bugs (except stinkbugs) without even acknowledging them. Other bugs aren't as picky, though, as you'll sometimes see ants going after weevils or ladybugs going after aphids. Spiders in the Haze will also be challenged by its infected inhabitants.
  • Gender-Equal Ensemble: The four playable characters consist of two boys and two girls.
  • Gentle Giant: Ladybugs, Moths, Bees, and Roly-Polies - sickly or otherwise - will only attack you if you attack them first. The crow, hundreds of times your size, won't attack you at all.
  • Giant Food: Discarded normal-sized food and drink are scattered around the backyard. Players can slurp up drops of discarded soda and juice but will need upgraded tools in order to harvest any solid food.
  • Giant Spider: The spiders are normal-sized, but compared to you, they're the size of trucks. They move just as fast and hit just as hard as trucks too.
  • Gotta Catch 'Em All: Collecting all the scattered B.U.R.G.L. chips is the primary reason to explore the yard. Each one restores crafting and building recipes to his memory, which he will then sell you.
  • Hamster-Wheel Power: The ZIP.R option, an upgrade to the zipline trolley, utilizes an aphid running on a treadwheel to propel zipliners on upward slants.
  • Harmful to Minors: All of the playable characters are young teenagers who are forced to hunt and fight tooth and nail to survive against towering hostile insects and arachnids several times their new size.
  • Harmless Enemy: Gnats may initially appear to be an annoying Goddamned Bats type enemy, homing in on you and making a distinctive noise, but all they do is harmlessly bump into you a couple times before losing interest and flying off. Even their infected variant can't do any direct damage, compared to other infected enemies. Instead of damaging you, their bumps cause you to drop whatever you're currently holding.
  • Hell Is That Noise: Sleeping spiders of both types make guttural, disturbing breathing noises reminiscent of a xenomorph. Hearing that sound and not knowing where the spider is is a terrifying experience.
  • Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: "Mild", "Medium", and "Whoa!"
  • Incredible Shrinking Man: The player characters, massively reduced in size. Since the distance measurements are in centimeters rather than meters, this puts the kids at less than an inch tall.
  • Improvised Armor / Improvised Weapon: The players can craft clothes, armor, tools, and weapons from grass, acorns, and even bug remains.
  • In-Universe Game Clock: There is a day/night cycle, and players can build shelters/beds to sleep through the night, but you can only sleep if you're tired, and it used to be that if you attempted to sleep at a time where you’d wake up between 11pm and 5am (i.e. while it’s still dark out) the game would warn you of the fact. Patch 1.1 eased up on this - if you were to wake up during the night when sleeping, you will instead sleep through the night until 6 AM.
  • Infinity +1 Element: The Sour element is effective against the O.R.C creatures, all mechanical enemies, and weapons based on Sour (such as the Sour War Axe or Sour Staff) inflict absurdly large amounts of stun. Additionally, the Black Widow is weak to sour.
  • Interface Screw: getting poisoned, experiencing high levels of sizzling, or activating the Berserker mutation will cause the borders of the screen to warp and color, making it a bit hard to see properly.
  • Item Crafting: Players can craft tools and weapons from harvested resources, such as axes, spears, hammers, and bows with arrows.
  • King Mook: The Hedge Broodmother, a boss spider, is modeled after a demon orb weaver, and summons smaller orb weavers during the fight with her; she's essentially a queen orb weaver, which, while perhaps not scientifically accurate, makes for a fun, intense boss fight.
    • A more traditional and downplayed example is the Termite King - despite its regal name, the game doesn't consider it a boss fight, and it respawns naturally like other termites.
  • Large Ham: Whoever voiced the Mega Milk Molar upgrades clearly had a good time recording his voice lines.
    WORK THE CORE!!!
    GET YOKED!
    IT'S SWOLE TIME!!!'
  • The Little Detecto: A small direction-finder pops out of your HUD whenever you are near a Science Station, and bits of Raw Science with an upgrade.
  • Life Drain: The Mosquito Needle rapier heals you slightly as you deal damage with it, as does the tick macuahuitl.
  • Lord British Postulate: The game's largest creatures at the moment, the Koi Fish and the Crow, cannot be killed by the player. Their primary function is as a resource sink for Crow Feathers and Koi Fish Scales, which are used in many crafting recipes, although the Koi Fish does serve somewhat of a Border Patrol role and will try to attack you and eat you if you swim too close to it.
  • Made of Explodium: The Haze fungus is very volatile, and can explode violently whenever something that hasn't been infected by it approaches. This also extends to any bugs it infects, granting them resistance to explosive damage and allowing them to shoot or become the explosives.
  • Magikarp Power: Your own two fists can become arguably the most powerful weapons in the game. While they start off as undoubtedly the weakest, there are several powerful upgrades and mutations for them. First, there's the Truffle Tussle mutation, which produces an explosion every now and then when you punch something, adding AoE to your attacks. Then factor in Lil' Fist, which at phase 3 adds a 2% damage bonus each time you land a hit until you either get hit or end combat, which stacks 100 times, with a side order of all of your attacks landing a second time. Another bonus is that your fists deal True Damage, meaning it will always deal full damage, resistances be damned. Finally, the Power Droplet trinket adds the Fury effect, which causes 25% of your attacks with fists to inherit all of the mutation and armor effects you currently have equipped.
  • Meaningful Background Event: The players first start by waking up next to a small box with human cut-outs in a foam liner. There are four players. There are five cut-outs in the box.
  • Mind-Control Eyes: Insects that are infected by the parasitic fungus found in the Haze have eyes that are pink and purple and swirly; all these insects do is mindlessly attack.
  • Misapplied Phlebotinum: Everyone seems rather unimpressed with Tully's ability to shrink anything down to the size of an ant. Ominent only cares about using it to make soldiers, and even Tully is obsessed with perfecting shrinking living beings. A simpler, more profitable use? Shrink down non-living materials. Shipping would be revolutionized, as would computer engineering, just to start.
  • Moral Guardians: Joked about in-game. Apparently they're not fans of the crime-and-punishment-themed Punch-O brand juice boxes. Finding the Lemon Crime Punch-O box prompts the player character to exposit that this flavor in particular got a lot of complaints. The kids don't seem to be happy about that fact.
  • Mouse World: The Game. The entire point is to explore and survive in someone's backyard when you've shrunk to the size of an ant.
  • Multiple Endings: Two of them, with your ending changing whether or not you cured Dr. Tully’s raisining problem.
    • Ending 1: Grew Big and Went Home. If you complete the main story without curing Dr. Tully of his Raisining, the Teens and Tully in his support pod Embiggen themselves using the SPAC.R. Without any proof of Ominent's action, the Teens' claims that the company kidnapped them and were responsible for their disappearance go unheard, allowing Ominent's O.R.C project to be shown to the military, which drives up their stock prices. The Teens become friends, and Tully is reunited with his family, albeit while still Raisined in his pod, leaving him stuck as a shriveled head his children are terrified of for the remainder of his life... however long that may be.
    • Ending 2: Ominent Shmominent. If you find Director Schmector’s hidden outpost, defeat his armored security drone, then find the cure for Dr. Tully’s Raisining, The Teens and a restored Dr. Tully then Embiggen themselves in the SPAC.R. Armed with files upon files of hidden plans, Ominent’s involvement with the town’s recent teen disappearances is discovered, resulting in their stocks tanking, and Schmector being arrested. Dr. Tully is finally credited for his achievements, the Teens become lifelong friends and join the Robotics club (and they even made Burg.l the mascot!), and while Dr. Tully still hasn’t found his newest breakthrough, he’s perfectly fine with that, so long as he has his (now happily reunited) family.
  • Nemean Skinning: The player can make armor out of the parts of various backyard critters and gains special abilities from doing so, and even more for wearing a matching set.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: It is possible to plug up the hole in the weed killer canister with gum, eliminating the deadly hazy fumes surrounding it, but doing so causes the Cordyceps fungus strain to spread throughout the yard, infecting more bugs and causing new types, such as Infected Wolf Spiders, to start appearing. This is hinted at through several of Dr. Tully's audio logs and readable files in the Haze lab - he purposefully had the canister punctured to trap the fungus within the haze so it wouldn't spread.
  • Not Quite Flight: The players can use dandelion seeds as makeshift parachutes, allowing them to drift and glide to the ground from high places. Dandelion seeds also have durability meters so be mindful of how much you use them.
  • Optional Boss: Of the game's seven boss encounters, the only strictly-mandatory boss fights needed to finish the game are the Assistant Manager and the Mant. To get the best ending, however, Director Schmector's armored drone must also be defeated. The other four, the Hedge Broodmother, the Mantis, the Wasp Queen, and the Infected Broodmother are entirely optional and are fought solely for materials needed to craft powerful weapons and gear.
  • Oxygenated Underwater Bubbles: The Koi Pond update added swimming including bubbles that refill the Oxygen Meter.
  • Planimal: Muscle sprouts, one of the inventions of Dr. Tully, is a brussel sprout crossbred with meat fibers. Apparently it tastes like beef liver and goes great with onions. It’s used to make stronger potions, or as food in an emergency. Dr. Tully uses it to give his Mant creation extra muscles, Turning it into a bulky behemoth.
  • Palatial Sandcastle: The sandcastle located at the southwest end of the Sandbox. It's a normal-scale sandcastle, but since your character is minified, you're able to walk around inside it. You have to build a bridge to it to cross over the moat, and it has a lot of Antlions prowling its perimeter, but it contains a lot of buried treasure and a couple Milk Molars within.
  • Poisoned Weapons: Venom Arrows can be crafted using poison scavenged from slain bugs. The larva blade and spider fang dagger also carry poison in them, due to being made from parts of venomous critters.
  • Power Degeneration: Continuous use of the SPAC.R on humans is revealed to incur advanced dehydration and excessive wrinkling of the skin as a side effect, coined as 'raisining', in-game.
  • Protection Mission: Activating a MIX.R device enrages bugs in the surrounding biomes, causing waves of them to appear and attempt to destroy it. Successfully defending a MIX.R device until it overcharges rewards you with large amounts of Raw Science; failure leads to the device breaking and needing to be fixed with a Repair Tool before you can try again.
    • Later on, there's the defense of the JavaMatic machine, tasking the player with fighting wave after wave of Ominent-possessed insects while the JavaMatic brews the Embiggening Cocktail needed to complete the game.
  • Punny Name:
  • Rare Candy: Milk Molars can be brought to BURG.L to increase your health and stamina, lower the rate of food and hunger drain, and increase the number of mutations you can have active at once. The rarer Mega Milk Molars are used to increase stack sizes for crafting resources, consumables, and ammunition.
  • Red Eyes, Take Warning: Hostile insects attacking the player will have their (compound) eyes glow bright red. It's even visible at night. The only exceptions are bugs that don't have eyes, such as garden mites.
  • Resources Management Gameplay: Players must manage their food and water intake, gather supplies, and make tools to survive in the backyard.
  • Ridiculously Cute Critter: Aphids are cat-sized (compared to you) green bugs with big, adorable eyes that give a comically shocked expression when they see you. Players can tame them as pets by feeding them and make them wear little hats... or kill them and eat their roasted corpses.
  • Roar Before Beating: Hostile bugs will give a battle screech before attacking. Orb Weaver Spiders in particular will rear back in a threat display and give a loud hiss before charging forward to eat your face, giving you a chance to Run for your life. As of the Hot & Hazy update, the orb weaver's screech debuffs the player's running speed, making it harder to escape them.
  • Robot Buddy: B.U.R.G.L, a repurposed burger-flipping robot, is found by the players, and he vows to help the players return to normal.
  • Sanity Slippage: Between his family leaving him, losing his job, multiple failed experiments at both normal and shrunken size, and his ever-growing Raisining problem Dr. Wendell Tully's audio logs suggest he's been going through quite a lot of this.
  • Shifting Sand Land: The Sandbox biome, accessible via an entryway from the Black Anthill. You constantly suffer sizzling damage in this area during the day, which is mitigated by finding shelter, crafting gear out of Antlion parts, or consuming specific meals.
  • Shout-Out: Relatively close to the house, you can find an action figure of Rash from Battletoads; doing so triggers a landmark notification that uses the game's logo and the original NES game's iconic pause "music".
  • Shrink Ray: The actual shrinking device itself, the SPAC.R, isn't too far from the player's starting point. Getting it to actually, legitimately function long enough to re-size the players, however, is an entirely different kettle of fish, and is the main driving force behind the game's central quest line.
  • Status Effects:
    • Hit a bug hard enough and you'll stun it, complete with circling stars dancing over their heads.
    • Wolf spider bites poison the player, which is one of the most deadly things about them since poison damage ignores defense. After killing one, the player can poison their arrows, allowing them to poison foes (excluding spiders). Killing five wolf spiders unlocks the Mithridatism mutation, which grants poison resistance (and makes the Broodmother fight much easier).
  • Underground Monkey: Various insects have hardier, texture-swapped variants in different parts of the yard. For example, there are three varieties of ant - red, black, and fire ants. The latter two are exclusive to the more advanced parts of the map, have more health, and deal more damage than their red counterparts.
  • Utility Weapon: Some of the various tools the players can craft are, while intended for usage in resource gathering, are also usable as functional weapons.
    • Axes are required for chopping down grass but can be thrown as a last-ditch effort.
    • Hammers are needed to smash apart tougher resources, like acorns, sap, and rocks, but also have the highest stun chance of any weapon or tool.
    • Shovels are mostly used to dig up grubs, although the higher-tier shovels get more use once you reach the western areas of the yard.
  • The Worf Effect: In the Broodmother's lair, as players progress through to the boss room, they'll encounter numerous corpses of the various insects that have been kicking their asses all game, trussed up in the web walls; the Broodmother is so big and tough that she preys on things that can tear a player to shreds. And then you find the crafting recipe that summons The Mantis requires broodmother chunks to cook…oh joy.
  • Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Or your rapier. Or your dagger. Or your club. Or anything that counts as melee weapons really. While you may have to retrieve your thrown weapon, if it lands it does massive damage, relative to the weapon in question. This is especially effective against flying bugs if you can nail them with a club or hammer, as the heavy stun will force them to the ground, letting you get in tons of free hits if not outright kill them.
  • Too Awesome to Use: Granola Bars refill your hunger and heal a substantial amount of health instantly. However, they are found in rather finite supply throughout the yard, mostly in the research outposts and lab dungeons, so they usually go uneaten in favor of other food items.
  • Treacherous Advisor: Director Schmector, the head of Ominent Labs' science division and Dr. Wendell Tully's Mean Boss before he was fired. He is revealed to have overseen the project that caused the player characters to be shrunken down.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: One of Director Schmector's employees gets fed up with his inhumane experiments, and steals the player characters away from his lab under his nose, releasing them into the backyard to find Dr. Tully, who can reverse the shrinking process. They never appear again in the story beyond the player characters' flashback sequences.
  • Zerg Rush: Mites are fragile and do little damage, but are also very fast and attack in swarms. One alone isn't a threat, but when you're fighting twelve or fifteen, you can easily get overwhelmed.

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