While on the ground at Summer Game Fest 2025, I got to play a little bit of Grounded 2 and then had a quick chat afterwards with game director Chris Parker. In the brief time I had with the game, which is a sequel that continues the survival game story of kids shrunk down to itty-bitty size, I got to fight off some creepy little multi-legged mites with a spear I’d fashioned from twigs, pebbles, and twine. And as I fought off those bugs, even though they weren’t quite spiders, I thought about how they could still trigger somebody’s arachnophobia (thankfully, not an issue for yours truly).
I have good news for those of you who hate eight-legged freaks: Grounded 2 will also have an arachnophobia mode.
“I think the Grounded team — the Grounded 1 team — did a really good job in tackling this problem,” Parker said. “I mean, even though you’re mostly fighting what looks like balloon animals” — that’s how the spiders end up looking with the arachnophobia mode turned on — “that foundation made it easy for the Grounded 2 team to build on that.
“But we certainly have more challenges,” he said, referring to the new rideable bugs in Grounded 2 (the first game didn’t have mounts). There’s a big red ant that you can ride, which I got to try for myself in the demo, but what I didn’t know was what Parker told me next: There’s also going to be a rideable spider in the full game.
“And so we have to respect arachnophobia mode for that as well, which has been a little bit more tricky,” he went on. “We have to calculate feet, and things like that, so you can really understand what’s going on, and how to run that thing around the world, and how the world is going to interact back with it. It’s tricky, but it’s probably not as tricky as you think. We really just go onto the skeleton and put cute-looking spheres where claws and eyeballs and abdomens used to be. And as long as we take it far enough away from that eight-legged insect, that seems to work for people. So yeah, it’s not all that crazy.”
Of course, there are also players who are just a little bit scared of spiders but who don’t necessarily want to turn off the option to see them entirely. Creating the right balance between scary and fun, particularly in a game that’s intended to be family-friendly, has also been an entertaining challenge for the team. In Grounded 2, the characters have aged up a little bit, as some time has passed since the first Grounded, and also, the young players who tried the first game have grown up a little bit, too. So, I had to ask: How scary is too scary?
“There are some healthy debates about this, actually,” said Parker. “So I think in general, we try to just push that as hard as we can, and at some point we go, ‘Oh, I think we pushed this too far.’ And we do bump into certain assets that we’ve created where we’re like, ‘Well… I don’t really know. Let’s take that out.’ Or, ‘Let’s put it in there, and see what user research has to say about it.’ Now that we’re finally able to talk about the game and we’re going into early access, we can talk to the community about it. But those are the kind of conversations that we want to have with the community out there, see what they have to say about it too.”
To be specific, Grounded 2 will be available in early access on July 29 for Windows PC and Xbox Series X, as well as on Game Pass. And you heard them — if it’s too scary, Obsidian Entertainment wants you to say so.
