Game completed: Grounded

Our next co-op game after the We Were Here series became Grounded. It's a survival crafting RPG and we had a lot of fun with it.

Storywise this game takes place in the late 80s and you play as 1-4 school kids who mysteriously get shrunken to ant size and find themselves in a garden. Your job is to find out how you ended up there (because you can't remember) and how to get back to normal size, all the while exploring the garden, fighting insects and figuring out how to better survive. 

You start out with nothing, but as soon as you get your first axe things start to move along. Berry leather became the first hurdle, but via exploration we found out where there was a bunch of berries and I could easily shoot them down with my bow and arrows while climbing around inside the berry bushes and Toni picked them up as they fell. The next hurdle was underwater exploration which took a fair bit of time to overcome and in that time I expanded our modest shelter into a grass fortress with the help of Toni cutting grass and weeds.

Eventually we had ziplines across the entire yard to easily traverse it.

The most annoying boss fight was easily the robot assistant manager in one of the labs. Took us three attempts and a guide to defeat it, but otherwise we managed the game well and there were no hurdles too big so as to not overcome them. 

Spiders were very scary in the beginning, but in late game they were easy enough. Except that one scary infected wolf spider by the oak, that one was still scary even though we defeated it. And the black widow never stopped being scary. 

MIX.Rs ended up being simultaneously annoying and fun to me. They're like tower defense things spread throughout the yard and once you activate it you have to protect it from insects trying to attack it until it's done. Towards the end we had so much crafting mats that we just brought a bunch of stuff with us to the MIX.R and built walls and roofs around it to keep the insects from even reaching it while we fought them. Mushroom brick walls and feather roofs are great. 

So while we finished the game storywise and decided to move on from it, I kept it installed on my computer because I can really see myself playing around with crafting and building some more at some point.