The Most REALISTIC Survival Game You’ve Never Heard of

– [Jake] So there’s a survival game that we’ve been wanting to talk about for a minute. We missed making a Before You Buy video on it, but sometimes like we do, when we miss our chance, we like to kinda go back and make a topical video about something anyway,

And today, it’s this pretty realistic, story focused-survival game called “Green Hell.” People really seem to be enjoying it, but it has still managed to fly below mainstream gaming radar. Despite that, the game has sold over one million copies, according to the developers. The Metacritic score is very good.

It’s got a 78 on PC and PS4 and an 84 on Xbox, and the game’s also available on Nintendo Switch. The game was nominated for a Best Game and Best Design award at the Central and Eastern European Game Awards in 2019, and it’s developed by Creepy Jar, a Polish studio based in Warsaw

Made of former Techland employees who have worked previously on “Dying Light, “Dead Island,” and “Call of Juarez: The Cartel,” “Mod Riders,” “GTI Racing,” and a couple more. “Green Hell” seems to continue to grow, as it was more recently released on consoles and is continuously updated,

Most recently with “The Spirits of Amazonia” part two update and more that we’ll get to in a bit. So what is it? “Green Hell” is a survival game that dumps you into the shoes of anthropologist Dr. Jake Higgins. It starts you out with a tutorial with your wife Mia, establishing their relationship

And teaching you some of the game’s main mechanics. The tutorial is kind of boring, but it sets up everything before thrusting you alone in the Amazon with a walkie-talkie in a story presentation that is part a-person-with-a-voice-on-a-radio mystery, like “Firewatch,” parts psychological sanity horror, and part more mystery stuff,

Which I can’t get into for potential spoilers. And it’s honestly pretty interesting. You’re dealing with the local tribes and culture, dangerous elements, while actually progressing forward in a somewhat linear fashion and learning about the story. But the highly realistic survival elements are what really make it a treat, especially for survival fans.

There’s tight inventory management and some fairly intuitive crafting, as you’d probably expect, but it’s all of the actual danger and stuff that feels awesome if you like these types of games. A lot of it is managed on your watch, carbs, fats, protein, and hydration, which you need to monitor,

But it also keeps track of time, date, and compass, like a real watch. Other stuff like crafting is managed in your journal, with handwritten notes that are pretty cool. Now, you can screw yourself over really hard and in pretty quick and easy fashion in this game.

Like fans of those survival-type television shows know, one small thing can totally ruin you, kind like in real life. If you try to stick a wild animal with a spear, that spear might get stuck in that animal and then they’ll run away with it,

But hopefully it’ll bleed out and you can track it down. There’s realistic healing and managing injuries, too. You can get hurt in different ways all over your body. You can basically inspect your injuries, which feels pretty slick. And really, I can’t emphasize this enough, anything and everything can and will hurt you

Or just screw you over. Take a bad fall, and you receive injuries. Get sick and get parasites, and you gotta cut ’em out. Pull leeches off your body. Get nasty gashes or gaping wounds. Get bit by a snake. Get poisoned. Start to go crazy. Anything you can think of pretty much can happen,

Down to like, no joke, if you eat with dirty, nasty hands without bathing yourself, you have the potential to possibly get sick. It’s tedious and annoying to some people, but deep and engaging and immersive to other types of players. All of these ways the game tries to kill you

Not only affects your health, but your character’s sanity as well. Get yourself in a bad state, and the game will use audiovisual cues to simulate your character starting to lose it, and that actually also kind of works with the story as well. It all just connects really well

By making the place feel extremely unnerving and dangerous. Everything you do can either, like I said, help you or completely screw you over, and the game walks it a razor thin margin. Everything is very hard to figure out, but in a satisfying way.

But the game is also creative and kind of realistic feeling with how you can help yourself, too. Some actual vague knowledge of things might help you in the game and just helps with that realism. Got a gaping infected wound? Look for something dead or some spoiled meat. You’ll find maggots.

Now, stuff some maggots into your wound to get rid of the infection. Then you have to treat it with a bandage, of course. But maggots can then also be cooked and eaten or used as bait for fishing. You’d be surprised how much you can accomplish

With just a notebook, a watch, a knife, an ax, maybe eventually a spear, and so on. There’s a lot. Everything has more than one use. Say you find a coconut. Split it open, drink the coconut water to get what you need, and then you save the shell and you can eat that,

And then you can save the outer husk for later crafting use. Finding a dead bird, too. Harvest it for feathers, but you can also get meat that you can eat. Same goes with larger animals with bones and different uses with those bones. Some of the crafting and stuff,

Even down to how to build a fire properly by tediously searching for dry leaves and everything that goes into all of that, all of it is pretty staggering and impressive. Sometimes, it does suck waiting to progress in the story because you’re looking for something

That just happened to spawn in a really inconvenient place away from you, but that’s the point of these games sometimes, the luck of the survival draw. “Green Hell” is appealing, not just for some interesting linear story progression, but also for how it can be extremely harsh and unforgiving

While still managing to give you enough to do to make you feel not completely powerless. It walks the survival game line extremely well, like I said, razor-thin margins, but at the same time, giving you some good story. And the presentation helps, too. It’s not perfect.

The voice acting is a bit here and there, but the sound design works really well. There’s always a creature making noise in a bush that you can’t see or the voices of some natives chanting in the distance and the desperation of your character as he fights,

Crafts, hunts, and messes things up along the way. It’s really satisfying to break an item and hear your character panic and start cursing a bit, kind of like how you would. Plus, visually, the setting looks great, too. There’s some technical flaws and some pop-in here and there, but multiple times a day,

The foliage and the lighting and the details and the water can look pretty stunning, especially at night when the moonlight bounces off the leaves of some trees. Visual and audio wise, it can all be unnerving and unsettling, but also kind of nice at the same time,

So I guess it truly is a green hell, huh, huh? Anyways, we’re only scratching the surface here, ’cause there’s also a co-op mode, where you and three other players can do the story mode cooperatively, and the game separates your saves by single or multiplayer, so it’s actually helpful to have someone around.

You can have someone else on your team pull leaches off your body after trekking through a stream. It’s gross, but it’s cool. “Green Hell” also features a regular, plain old survival mode with no story if you just really want to dive into the survival systems themselves. We prefer story mode.

That’s just more of our thing, but hey, I mean, this game has come a really long way. And it’s not done. Like I said earlier, it was recently updated, and the game is getting VR support, including Quest. The VR version or port is being produced by Incuvo, who also did “The Blair Witch”

And “Layers of Fear” VR version. So I guess if you want to be even more immersed than the psychological horrors the game pulls off, well, here you go. It was announced this summer and is apparently coming soon, later this year. They’re also making a board game.

It was on Kickstarter, and it was funded. So yeah, like there’s enough demand, seemingly, because people are digging this game. And that’s what we just wanted to briefly dive into here, talk about what it is, why it’s fairly realistic, and why people are truly enjoying it.

A lot of survival games are just not good to be completely honest, and we’re always on the lookout for ones that shake up the formula or try to do something interesting or of high quality within that framework. We’ve covered a couple of games like this with similar titles and topics,

And “Green Hell,” in terms of it just being a realistic and interesting and different survival game, it succeeds, big time. Thanks for hanging out with us for a minute as we dug into this game, and thanks to Andrew and Juan behind the scenes for helping with research and capturing. We’re really looking forward

To hearing what you think of this one, ’cause like we said, it’s not perfect. It’s definitely got some flaws, but in terms of just some elements like crafting and survival and then dangers and gore and story and presentation, there’s a lot of good stuff here,

So we’d love to hear your pros and cons, ’cause like we said, this isn’t really a Before You Buy-type video, so let us know your thoughts. Now, if you enjoyed this video and maybe learned about this new game, clicking the Like button’s all you gotta do.

It helps us out. We would really appreciate it. And if you’re new, maybe consider subscribing, hitting that notification bell, ’cause we put out videos every single day. But as always, thanks for watching, and we’ll see you guys next time.