Grounded 2 Gets Steam Deck Verified With The New Playgrounds Mode

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I have played so many different survival games over the years, with many of them feeling very unique. One of the ones that still sticks out to me is Grounded. It’s like if Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was a game. You’ve been shrunk down in the backyard and need to use resources to survive. This continued with Grounded 2, which is another great survival game and takes it a step further in a much larger world. It is still an early access, but yesterday, it was able to secure the Steam Deck Verified badge.

With its new green checkmark, Valve has determined that the game is considered a great experience for the Deck. Specifically, the default controller configuration works. Well, it shows the correct controller icons, the text is legible, and in the default graphical configuration, it works well. While the Verified system isn’t perfect, it is a great indicator of whether a game could run on the Deck.

Looking back at the game updates, this seems to have correlated with the most recent Playgrounds mode update. Well, nothing is mentioned in the announcement, but the public test patch for this new mode, which came out at the beginning of this month, includes two changes for the Steam Deck. We have specific Steam Deck icons, and the default graphical quality settings have been updated. I wouldn’t be surprised if this came with the new patch and was why it got the Verified badge.

It’s also worth noting that, in this case, performance has not improved with the latest update. It looks like there were just some minor changes to make the UI more fluid with the Deck gamepad and quality setting changes to make it so we don’t have to change any settings ourselves. It’s a nice little update, but not what I would say will make this game a better experience if you didn’t like it before. Still, it’s hard not to be excited when seeing new games get updated and showcased as great on the Deck.

Grounded 2 can be purchased for $29.99 on Steam.

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