Out Of All The New Games I've Played In 2025, Grounded 2 Deserves A...
In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2025, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We'll post new personal picks each day throughout the rest of the month. You can find them all here.
Over the past 12 months, I've played a total of 32 new games. Not just new to me, but new to market (i.e. they were released in 2025). Admittedly, some of them I only played for a brief while, because I was only doing game performance testing, like Monster Hunter Wilds, but I've sunk over 100 hours in others (mostly Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2). But the one game that really stood out for me is the one game that I really shouldn't like: Grounded 2.
Given that I played the first Grounded for around 110 hours, this might seem like a bit of a silly thing to say. I'm certainly not some kind of gaming masochist (though my 2,030 hours in Hearts of Iron 4 would suggest otherwise), so I clearly enjoyed the first game, and thus it's only logical I would love the sequel.
The thing is, I shouldn't have liked that game, either. It's not the fundamental genre that I have issues with; in fact, I really like survival crafters. I can't get enough of them, and my Steam library is full of early access 'surv-ters' (I can't think of a snappy enough single word to use here) that are mostly utterly awful. But I still keep on buying them.
That's not the problem: it's multiplayer. Co-op, MMO, PvE, PvP, PvPvE. I don't care for any of it. Single-player all the way for me. I get to play the game how I want to play the game; my pace, my style, my hamfisted gameplay. Having to suffer other people in games is my idea of Hell.
Grounded was the first game that started to change that for me, and I have to admit that 2025 has been the first year in almost two decades where I've actively enjoyed playing multiplayer games. Well, three of them: Grounded 2, Peak, and Split Fiction.
What they have in common is that my partner and our families have loved playing them, too, and I think this is what has made all the difference. Yes, I know we could play lots of other multiplayer games together, and we have tried, but only those three have gelled us together, and Grounded 2 (plus the OG) has done this more than anything else we've tried.
It helps enormously that they're not PvP, though leaving your partner stranded on a mountainside, while you leg it to a health kit in Peak, wavers very close to that style of gameplay, if the curses I heard in my headset
Source: PC Gamer
