Grounded 2 Lands on PS5 Today, and Its Biggest Update Yet Finally Opens the Pond

Grounded 2 has spent its first year in early access with a pond you could stare at but never swim in, which felt almost cruel for a game about being ant-sized in an enormous park. That changes today. Obsidian's Into the Abyss update is live on August 11, and it arrives on the same day the game launches on PlayStation 5 for the first time.

We like this pairing a lot. PS5 players are not walking into a stale early access build that peaked months ago; they get the game on the exact day it receives its biggest content drop so far, and everyone starts exploring the new water at the same time.

Video: Obsidian Entertainment on YouTube

The pond opens, and it goes deep

Into the Abyss turns the pond into a full playable region, both across the surface and underneath it. Diving suits let you stay down longer, which matters because the underwater depths are their own zone with new creatures to fight or avoid. Above the waterline, the update also adds two more areas, the Bayou and the Mountains, so this is not a single biome patch but a broad expansion of the map.

Our favorite addition might be the Toe-biter, an amphibious buggy that drives on land and keeps going once it hits the water. The original Grounded made you earn every inch of travel on foot, so a vehicle that shrugs off the shoreline should change how expeditions across the yard, or the park in this case, actually play out.

An Xbox game on PlayStation, again

Grounded 2 is published by Xbox Game Studios, and it now joins the growing list of Xbox titles landing on Sony hardware. What makes this one unusual is the timing: the game is still in early access, so PlayStation owners are joining a work in progress rather than getting a finished port years later. Xbox and PC players keep their perks too, with the game included in Game Pass, where it was part of the August wave we covered, and Xbox Play Anywhere covering progress between console and PC.

It is also quite a day for Xbox software showing up on other machines, since Oblivion Remastered hits Switch 2 today as well. Whatever you think of the strategy, the walls keep coming down.

Our take: the first Grounded became a quiet phenomenon by drip-feeding meaty updates until 1.0, and the sequel is clearly following the same playbook. If the pond in Grounded 2 delivers even half the dread the koi pond did in the original, PS5 players picked a good day to jump in.