Grounded 2‘s big Toxic Tangle update just about knocked me out of my chair. It wasn’t the new maps that surprised me, though they’re larger and crammed with more stuff to discover than you’d expect from the small area they occupy. And it wasn’t from seeing how well Obsidian and Eidos Montreal fulfilled their promise of making these new regions fun and rewarding to explore.
It’s because I ran into this.
I forgot Obsidian planned to add a snake at some point, and snakes terrify me. Maybe that fear is a primal thing. Or it might stem from early childhood in Florida, where elementary school lessons included life skills like identifying which of the state’s many snakes could kill you and where they lived. (The answers are “a lot of them” and “basically everywhere.”)
The garter snake doesn’t number among the list of deadly reptiles. But I’d only ever seen the black-and-tan version of the harmless little thing and had no idea what this monster was. (It’s a California Red-Sided Garter Snake, although this one has spines on its back for some ungodly reason.) Stumbling on a gigantic red and yellow (danger sign!) tail slithering away, in a game where almost everything except snails and potato bugs wants to kill you on sight, was not an experience I had prepared myself for.
When I stopped running in the opposite direction, I composed myself and did a quick Google search to learn that this was, indeed, a garter snake. So I returned to the spot and waited, wishing I were more confident that this wouldn’t turn into a waking nightmare where a horrible deadly creature started chasing me. When it showed up again, I used the “peep” mode to see if it had any weaknesses or aggressive behaviors, the absence of which tells you the creature will not attack or engage in combat. Yes, garter snakes aren’t dangerous, but the last thing I wanted was my bloodthirsty ant buggy to go haywire and provoke the thing when I was right next to its head. So that check was warranted. The one after that, probably not so much, but I wanted no room for doubt.
The snake is, of course, harmless and won’t attack you in the game. It’s here to ferry you around the makeshift croquet field in a circuitous loop. I get it. It’s like Grounded 2‘s version of Studio Ghibli’s cat bus from My Neighbor Totoro. Except the snake bus reminds me of cold-blooded animals that can murder me, and the cat bus just reminds me of the Cheshire Cat from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, who, presumably, never murdered anyone. So there’s a pretty big gap between the two.
It’s kinda cute from the front.
And a lot less cute from above, which is the view you get while you wait for the express to reach your intended destination.
It’s gotten to where I can mostly tolerate hitching a ride on the snake now, though my stomach does still tie itself in knots if I look too closely. But I do wish Obsidian and Eidos had thought to extend the consideration behind the game’s arachnophobia toggles to those of us for whom snakes inspire a similar fear. The options let you filter spider appearances so you have:
- Full spider
- Bits of a spider
- Cute orange glob
Snake filters that let me swap the full thing for a vaguely snake-coded thing or even just a globby noodle slithering around the map would make such a difference. Sure, you don’t run into the snake as often as you see spiders. But not having an option to let me enjoy the thing that was added to the game for people to enjoy is still an oversight. Give me the noodle, Obsidian. Please.
