Playing online games with friends can be a frustrating experience. If the game is hosted on a server, you have to depend on that server being up and stable. If the game is hosted peer-to-peer, the host might have to be actively playing the game, or have a machine in their home they can use to host a server. Obsidian's Grounded, however, has found a genius way around all of this--and it's something other developers should look to replicate where possible.

WARNING: There is a close-up picture of one of the insects from Grounded, but we've left out any pictures of spiders.

Grounded recently hit 1.0 after spending a good amount of time in early access, and what Obsidian gave us is one of its most polished games ever. The core conceit is simple: Take the movie Honey I Shrunk the Kids and make it a survival game. You drop as one of four kids into a world where the grass is as big as trees, and the trees as big as skyscrapers. This game can be played with up to four players, and it's meant to be a persistent world that anyone can log into at any time. Grounded is on Game Pass, so there's no extra buy-in to get started, and no servers for the developer or publisher to eventually shut down since it's peer-to-peer.