lol. I was playing it on the easy difficulty. I think I am starting to figure out that now that I am older, I kind of tend to prefer my stories to be more linear. Open-world games aren't really open world. You just get punished mercilessly for entering an area that you "shouldn't be in" yet and this is how they kind of enforce a linear gameplay even though technically you are allowed to go anywhere you want. I just thought of the biggest example of this and it was everyone's first interaction with giants in Skyrim that would launch you a hundred feet into the air when they struck you. Later, those same enemies were a piece of cake to dispatch.

I can only presume that this is the case with Grounded but I don't have the patience to figure that out.

When I quit there was an entrance to a pond lab that there is no indication as to how you get to it or where. I looked it up online and you have to put together a scuba outfit of sorts and you are made aware of this by randomly discovering a bone on the floor of the pond that once it is analyzed you get the recipe for a rebreather of sorts. That's a bit too cryptic for me. I need better indications of what it is that I am supposed to be doing next to avoid just wandering around endlessly. This is especially true in a game like this one where in addition to needing to rest you also have to eat food and drink clean water on a regular basis and this just adds more tedium to the exploration process.