Finally throwing in the proverbial towel on Grounded

I started Grounded, loved it once I got the hang of it, then started to feel as though it was too difficult at parts since you regularly encounter enemies that one or two-shot you and you don't even see them until it is too late. Then I started to have a newfound appreciation for just wandering around and building up my base and did that for a while..

But then again I started to discover that if you walk too far in certain directions you tend to always encounter enemies that are a lot more powerful than you are and interacting with them almost certainly results in death. Spiders of course are the worst about this.

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Spiders are of course the worst and they are also pretty fast so even if you decide to not engage - and honestly, you shouldn't engage - they will be whacking you in the back and after 2 or maybe 3 hits you go down. Just as you would imagine this will change in later game portions once you upgrade your gear, but this brings us to the next point that I used to enjoy but now just find quite tedious.

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It starts out fun because you are just crafting whatever you can manage to craft, but then you start to run into recipes that have certain ingredients that not only do you not have them, but you don't have any idea how you can get them. For example, there is a lab that you have to go to about halfway through the game that has a pesticide fog that you will die trying to get through if you don't fashion a gas mask of sorts. There is no other way to get there. When I got the recipe for this I looked at the components and saw "ok, stinkbug, I've seen one of those...let's go find one!"

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Then I found a stinkbug and it absolutely cleaned the floor with me. Like I barely even scratched this thing and now I have to walk all the way back to my corpse to get my stuff back. But now I am at an impasse. I cannot progress further in the story and I am clearly woefully unprepared for combat with the bug that holds the piece of the puzzle that I need in order to progress.

Running around and collecting random shit is no longer fun, and the components that I need in order to get higher tier weapons are presumably locked behind whatever is beyond the gas section.

So now I am at the part of a game, which happens so often in games these days, where in order to progress I am going to have to get Daddy Internet involved and this is normally the part of any game that I stop enjoying the game. Also, the amount of buttons that you need to remember in order to play this game at all, let alone when the need arises to hot-swap what is in your hand, is very high. This means that if I take a day or two off I am going to get back into the game and have no idea what the frick is going on and then rage-quit.

I guess I am just an older gamer now and I just don't have the patience or drive that I did 20 years ago and mostly stuff like this just frustrates me. I suppose I should just play SIMS or something like that.

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It is a good concept for a game and taking survival to your own yard is a very innovative concept for sure, but I think we have reached a wall as far as this rather casual player that is me is not prepared to cross over.

It's a shame that RTS (real time strategy) games suck on consoles because those were my favorite and I feel like they were the perfect balance for casual players.

Grounded is a pretty neat game, but I think that a lot of people are going to end up getting stuck just like I did and end up walking away from it. I am going to give it one more day with what I discovered on the internets and if that doesn't float my boat, I'm afraid that my days of finding running around and collecting my 107th piece of sap are behind me now.