Since I’m a fan of survival games, I’ve been following Green Hell as well for a long time. But is the port Nintendo Switch up to standards and still worth playing?
Survival with an excellent story
Green Hell is an open-world survival simulation game set in the Amazonian rainforest and rather unique setting for a survival game.
It features a story mode explaining why you ended up in the Amazon in the first place. The game features excellent voice acting which is always a nice feature. The Yabahuaca people living in the Amazon are the key and the only lead as to why you have ventured out to the Amazon. Mia, your wife, goes to live with them but something goes wrong. Mia calls for help but isn’t responding anymore. It is now your job to find Mia and found out the mystery surrounding the game. In a cutscene you’ll find their camp but get chased away, resulting in you falling off a cliff and getting knocked unconscious. Here is where the introduction of the game ends and where the surviving begins.
Besides the story mode, there is also the classic survival mode and challenges to complete, these have you do specific tasks within a limited time.
Realistic survival
As you expect from a survival game there is a lot of macro managing of different elements. Gather food, plants and other needed supplies. Each plant and food item has its own stats and effects, like anti-parasitic properties. Proteins are hard to obtain by gathering so you’ll need to hunt as well. Of course, this is no easy feed. Place traps, go spearfishing and try to sneak up on the wildlife. Finding a consistent source of clean water is also important because clean water is often hard to come by.
The game also has something they call body inspection. You are able to get parasites, wounds, rashes etc. on specific parts of the body. Find the spot on your body that has a problem and cure it to your best ability. This with things like food poisoning, wound/parasitic infections and snake bites are some of the things you’ll be facing. Your character will also lose sanity, which makes identifying reality harder. So not only your physical health is a worry but also your mental health. Sleeping anywhere other than a proper sleeping place can also be detrimental for your health and sanity. So a proper shelter is really important.
Atmosphere
The atmosphere the game has is absolutely breathtaking. The game has brilliant ambient noises, the buzzing, humming, chirping and animal noises of the rainforest. This with the dynamic weather effects, makes the environment feel really convincing.
The menus are clearly made for the PC. Going through the menus is really counter-intuitive and slow because you use the control sticks to move your cursor through the menus at a snail’s pace. Since this version is a PC port the graphics have suffered quite a bit. The anti-aliasing, pop-in and textures are pretty rough but all these things are expected when porting it to a less powerful system.
A Challenging difficulty for all
Surviving in Green Hell is no easy feat. It has a real learning curve to what you need to do. The difficulty of the game is fair but challenging. It can be overwhelming at first, due to the harsh realism. Your carrying capacity is limited, food spoils, etc. When you get used to the mechanics and learn what to focus on it will get to the point of being challenging yet manageable. The game also features a plethora of difficulties for an even bigger challenge or to take it down a notch. These range from tourist, a peaceful mode with no hostile attacks or dangerous animals, all the way up to green hell which has more hostile enemies, increased sanity- and nutrient depletion and features permadeath with you losing all your progress. If you can’t find the mode you want there is also custom which lets you tweak every individual parameter.
Conclusion
If you have access to a PC, that is the best option to play this game. The PC build has the things that lack in the Switch port, like multiplayer, better navigation of the UI, and better graphics. The PC build gets about 1 point more than the Switch port. All and all the Switch port is still really enjoyable. It features great mechanics, a compelling story, atmosphere, and hard but fair difficulty.
