Green Hell
Creepy Jar
The survival game genre is one of my favorites, right up there with role-playing games and military shooters. While survival horror is another spin-off of the genre, much of the time you don’t have to be facing monsters or evil spirits to experience scares.
I’ve been in dedicated Rust games before where my partners and I are hanging out at our carefully constructed base, only to hear the first explosions as other players begin their base-raids on us. Talk about jolting you into action. I’ve also experienced primal fear while playing SCUM and becoming trapped in buildings surrounded by hungry zombies who want to have my spleen for a quick snack (and then move on to the rest of my tasty body parts).
Survival games, up to this point, have had a certain pattern that they all adhere to. You start off with either nothing or a few meager supplies. From there you have to quickly scrounge through your immediate surroundings in order to locate resources for crafting, and weapons if they’re available. The third phase usually revolves around constructing some sort of shelter which you can hopefully build into a full-on fortress of some sort (Conan Exiles has the best building system so far in my opinion).
However, we’ve seen the first of hopefully a whole slew of more realistic survival games. First, we had SCUM, which has players managing all manner of their chosen character’s stats and vitals. And most recently we’ve been blessed with Creepy Jar’s Green Hell, a survival experience that is sure to give you the fits (in a good way).
Green Hell’s backstory tells the tale of the main protagonist who has traveled to the Amazon Jungle with his girlfriend. Right off the bat, I must say that this guy’s girlfriend is one of the most annoying characters I’ve ever come across in a video game. Her voice is a perfect storm of the recent croaking voice phenomenon mixed with the ubiquitous (and equally irritating) Valley Girl dialect. The frogs actually sounded better than her. But I digress…
You’re mission is to reach out to one of the Amazon’s most reclusive native tribes. But in order to do that, you’ll have to plunge deep into the depths of the ever-dangerous Amazon Jungle, the largest and most bio-diverse rainforest in the world.
Due to Green Hell being and Early Access title, the main story mode isn’t yet playable. However, it features a full-featured tutorial that will get you acquainted with all of the game’s multidimensional mechanics and systems. And you’ll need to because this is one brutal survival experience.
First off, you will have to carefully manage your limited inventory. You’re not necessarily limited as far as how much weight you can carry; it’s more about dealing with a very limited amount of space. At least in the beginning—later on you can expand your inventory space to accommodate more equipment storage.
You must also manage with four basic nutritional factors: Protein, carbs, fats, and water. While the latter three are the easiest to secure, protein is definitely hard to come by when you first start out. In addition to those, you must also keep a handle on your sanity, health, and energy metes. Knowing how to not only keep track of all of these factors, but also how to balance them with some semblance of synergy, is one of the most challenging aspects of the game.
As it stands so far, Green Hell is shaping up to be a highly-realistic survival experience that I’d heartily recommend to any fans of the genre.
SCORE: 84%
Green Hell features great graphics that make its survival gameplay truly shine. However, you want to have a pretty beefy gaming PC or gaming laptop in order to play it at a decent framerate. So, you may just want to invest in a decent gaming rig:
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