I always have mixed / complicated feelings about survival games. They always seem like a great idea in principle, and I feel like I would really enjoy them for their methodical gameplay oriented around problem-solving (which is one of the reasons I also love classic survival horror games). But when I actually play them, they are often annoying and frustrating, and I have a miserable time trying to learn how the game works.
I think a big part of the problem is that a lot of these games, being modest indie titles, don't have robust tutorials and aren't very good at communicating their gameplay mechanics to the player in an efficient manner. Even when they have tutorials, those tutorials feel like they barely scratch the surface of what the player needs to know. And then you're shoved out into the deep end, having to learn the rules of the game world and the controls for navigating it, while your precious food, water, and energy meters are all depleting. These games are insanely difficult in the early sessions because every new threat or challenge feels like an unfair "gotcha!" from the developers. Once I learn the systems (through lots of frustrating trial-and-error), I find that everything I need is readily available, and most of the fun and challenge of the game gets optimized away, leaving only the tedious chores.
Case in point, figuring out how to save the game in my first couple play sessions with Green Hell VR was a very aggravating experience. I don't recall the game ever telling me that saving requires building certain types of shelters. I assumed the game would autosave every time I slept, and possibly also every in-game day, or every 20 or 30 real-world minutes. So imagine my surprise when I slept, closed the game, and booted it up the next day to find that none of my progress from the previous session had been saved. No, sleeping in just any bed isn't enough to save the game in Green Hell. You need to craft one of 2 or 3 specific shelters, or at a specific landmark.
Saving the game can only be done at dedicated checkpoints, or at a crafted shelter.
Initially, crafting these shelters feels like a relatively daunting task. You need large sticks and palm leaves, both of which are too large and bulky to be stored in your backpack. Scavenging around for them can be time-consuming. They always seem to be everywhere as I'm walking through the jungle, but then nowhere to be found when I try to set up camp. It took me a while to figure out that I could get large sticks by cutting down certain trees, and that palm leaves could be easily cut off of palm trees. I was initially hesitant to use my sharp stones or basic axe to try cutting down these trees because the durability of these tools is so low. So I would wander around looking for loose logs and palm fronds to carry back to camp, all while my health and energy are slowly draining. Logs and leaves were the bane of my existence in the first few play sessions!
I don't have a problem with limiting the ability to save, nor do I have a problem with tying the save functionality to a resource. I've praised Resident Evil for doing those very same things. But Resident Evil at least very clearly explains how saving works, and gives the player an opportunity to save your progress right at the start of the game. The typewriter and an Ink Ribbon are right there in the first room of the game. Green Hell, on the other hand, requires playing through to a particular milestone before you find the first save point, which (depending on how you play) might be hours into the game.
Starving in the jungle
Generally speaking, I feel like the player's nutrients deplete too quickly on the normal difficulty setting and take too much effort to replenish. The character is constantly groaning and complaining about being thirsty or hungry, and the heartbeat sound is constantly drumming in my ears because there's almost always at least one nutrient that is low. Some foods will provide multiple nutrients. Coconuts, for example, will provide some carbs, fat, and some water. But it's marginal amounts. Certain animals will give a large amount of protein and some fat. But it never feels like it's enough.
Maintaining full nutrient bars is a constant grind.
I could cook and eat 3 whole fish or an entire capybara, and still not fill up my protein bar. And I'm constantly picking up and eating almost every mushroom that I walk past in order to keep my carbs full. Whole in-game days have to be spent just setting up a new camp, hunting multiple animals, scavenging multiple fruit and mushrooms, and walking back and forth to water to fill coconut bowls and boil them. Filling up your nutrients basically requires an entire Thanksgiving spread! Every 2 or 3 days!
Fat was the hardest nutrient for me to keep full. It was almost always empty, and so the character was almost always complaining about being hungry. The raffia nuts quickly became the single most valuable item in the game for me. Whenever I found one, it was like Christmas!
But these troubles were partly my own fault. Somehow, early in the game, I fell under the impression that coconuts only provide carbs. However, eating the coconut meat does, indeed provide both carbs and fat. I was avoiding holding onto coconuts in my backpack because they are heavy and take up a lot of space, so I missed out on plenty of opportunities to top off my fat, and was only making the game harder on myself. I still don't understand why bananas don't also provide some fat (in addition to carbs).
In any case, I felt like I was always eating in order to keep these meters full. Part of the problem is that animals have no sense of self-preservation and are too easy to kill. The aforementioned fish will swim in tiny circles, a few feet wide, in groups of 2 or 3, making them easy to kill with any melee weapon. They don't scatter if you get close or kill one of their group. Same with birds, which will fly in tight circles directly overhead, land on the same tree branches for a minute, then take off and fly in more circles. They don't fly away if you kill one of them or miss one with an arrow. Yeah, sure, they are hard to hit when they're flying, but just wait for them to land, and they're easy-pickins! And rattlesnakes will just sit there shaking their rattle while you line up a shot with a bow and arrow, or just throw a rock at it. It never slinks away or hides under a rock. And the other animals just wander around the same small areas too.
Animals basically camp in one spot, in small groups, making it easy to "hunt" and kill multiple animals.
Animals can't really run away from the player, because no matter which way they run, they'll hit a wall due to the constrained nature of the game maps. Because these animals always group together, wander in tiny areas, and don't vanish into the jungle if startled or attacked, they are easy to kill and eat. The ease with which animals can be hunted upsets the entire game's economy! The restorative properties of everything has to be scaled down in order to prevent the player from being able to trivially top off your nutrient meters every time you kill a tapir or capybara. And everything spoils very quickly in order to prevent the player from being able to stockpile weeks' worth of food. The ridiculous amount of food that the character has to eat becomes tedious to constantly find, cook, and maintain.
If the developers couldn't have programmed more self-preservation instinct into these animals, or made all the levels bigger and more open so that animals actually have somewhere to run away and escape to, then, in my opinion, the better solution would have just been to reduce the amount of animals in the game. Make them appear fewer and further between. Make them more difficult to hunt and kill. But then make them much more rewarding when you do successfully hunt, kill, and cook one. Maybe animal spawns could even be made into an adaptive difficulty feature, in which animals rarely spawn, or quickly run away of the player's nutrient levels are high; but they could be more likely to spawn when the player's nutrient meters are low. This would provide an illusion of scarcity, and of finding and successfully hunting an animal just in the nick of time. In the meantime, you would be forced to scavenge more off of plants and mushrooms, which could be scaled to provide more nutrients. Or maybe the player could be allowed to mix various plants, mushrooms, and herbs with boiling water to make stews -- kind of like what you do to make the tribal dream-inducing tonic.
The developers could have also added a mechanic for being "full", and continuing to eat past that point could cause the character to throw up and lose most of the nutrients you had gained from whatever you ate. This would put a cap on the player's to gorge themselves on small foods until a nutrient bar is full.
Rate of nutrient depletion is customizable.
Generously, there are a lot of customization options. It would be nice if I could set each individual meter's depletion rate, so that I could slow down fat depletion, while speeding up water depletion. But either way, these settings cannot be changed in-game, and it will take multiple hours, across a few play sessions, before the player probably starts to realize how much of a grind this all is. At which point, sunk cost kicks in, and the player will either give up on the game, or just try to grind it out to the finish.
From point A to point B
Thankfully, the tedious grind of hunting, cooking, and eating food does not drag on indefinitely, or without a sense of forward momentum. Green Hell VR is a very linear, structured, and purposeful game. It's objectives are fairly clear, and the maps are surprisingly linear. Basically, the map is made up of mostly-linear corridors with a few branching paths attached to central hub areas. The sides of the paths are lined with rocks or cliffs. So you pretty much always know where to go, since there's usually only one place to go.
The linear nature of the game actually helps alleviate the problem of optimizing the fun and challenge out of the game. Even if I create a badass camp with a nice sheltered bed, covered fire (that won't get extinguished every time it rains), water catchers, and meat smokers, I can't just live there forever. I have to leave that camp behind and progress to the next milestone. Often, the time and effort it takes to build a full camp means that it's better to just create a campfire to cook some food and simple bed, sleep there for the night, and then move on.
You won't stay at any one camp for long.
This means that I'm never too comfortable. The jungle remains threatening and ominous throughout the entire 15-ish hours of the campaign. Unlike, say, Stranded Deep, I'm never able to create a well-oiled factory of a camp that I can regularly return to in order to restock my food, water, and other supplies. Every camp in Green Hell is temporary and the security that a well-established camp provides is fleeting.
Food also spoils very quickly. Even dried or smoked meat will only last a couple days. It's frustrating to go to the effort of crafting a smoker, hunting animals, and waiting for the meat to get smoked, only to have it spoil before I can actually eat all of it. It takes a long time for meat to dry or smoke, and there's little for the player to do while waiting for this stuff to cook. I usually use this time to catch up on journal entries, craft some extra weapons or arrows, or taste test some unknown flora to find out what its effects are. Thankfully, food that is left on a drying rack or smoker won't start to spoil until it's removed, so if I do wander off to find out what's ahead, I can leave the food on the smoker or dryer indefinitely and come back for it later.
The jungle is a series of linear corridors
with occasional branching paths.
That is, if I ever come back for it later...
The linear nature of the map means I'm rarely (if ever) going back to a previous camp. It would be nice if there were more branching paths that would loop back around, so that I could set up a camp, start food cooking on the campfire or smoker, explore a little bit, and then circle back to that same camp to collect my cooked food. There really isn't any true exploration in this game. If I'm leaving the safety of a camp, it's usually to get to the next milestone, which is often just a matter of travelling through the one and only path opposite from where I came. Some of the later stages get a little bit more open, but not by much.
There's also a structed narrative. I'm not simply lost in a jungle and have to find my way back to civilization. The player retains radio contact with the character's wife, and there is actually a specific reason that you are in the jungle to begin with. Though I could have done without the whole amnesia thing. I get enough of that from horror games; I really don't need it in my survival games too!
The narrative also has some minor themes of environmental preservation, and also seems to advocate for protecting indigenous tribal people from "civilized" interference. Interfering with the native tribe is depicted as dangerous -- not just to the tribe itself, but also to the rest of "civilized" society. Unfortunately, the danger presented to society by the native tribe and its practices gave off some strong anti-vaxxer vibes. This game definitely feels like it was developed with the anger over pandemic lockdowns and unfounded mass-vaccination fears being fresh in the creators' minds. So while I can totally get behind the environmental and tribal protection sentiments, the broader anti-vaxx message of the plot was a bit off-putting (but not so much that it ruined my overall enjoyment of the game).
Am I nauseous from the blood-sucking leeches? Or the VR?
From what I've read, the non-VR versions of Green Hell are much more open, and have more sophisticated crafting and base-building mechanics. In fact, the version of Green Hell available on PSVR2 appears to be a direct port of a last-gen VR variant of the game, which was reduced in scope in order to be playable on those older VR devices.
This has me a little worried that maybe the PSVR2 is going to start to feel dated very quickly. If games have to keep making technical concessions to be playable on the PSVR2, and I can't play the full experience, I might not want to keep playing VR games. And if the PSVR2 can't run games that are more technically demanding than last-gen PC VR headsets, then the long-term viability of the PSVR2 might be in jeopardy.
The non-VR Green Hell has much larger, more open maps.
But then again, the PSVR2 can play the full Gran Turismo 7, Resident Evil VILLage, and other such current-gen games. So maybe the dated nature of Green Hell VR isn't an indication of what the PSVR2 is capable of. Maybe we'll get an upgrade to the full Green Hell game in VR at some point? If so, would it be a patch or update for the current Green Hell VR title that I bought and played? Or would it be an update to the regular, non-VR Green Hell game that is also available on PSN? Or will it be a completely new game that players would have to buy separately?
In any case, Green Hell VR runs fine on the PSVR2 and looks OK. The visuals are fairly crisp, the framerate seemed steady, and I didn't run into any major technical problems outside of the usual wonky physics that are common in VR and motion-control games. Except for this one specific camp late in the game that seemed to drag down the framerate and make the game all choppy. I thought my headset might be dying, but whenever I would leave the area, the performance would stabilize. Other than that, objects will clip through other objects, and sometimes get stuck in the map geometry, plants and foliage don't react to the player's physical presence, and many flat textures stand out even more in VR than they would on the TV screen.
I've had recurring problems in which I accidentally pour some of the water out of a bowl whenever I try to pick up said bowl. No matter how carefully I try to pick it up, I almost always seem to pick it up at an angle and spill some precious water. Once, I picked up a bowl of water that was boiling next to a campfire and accidentally spilled the water over the fire, which extinguished the fire. Then when I tried re-lighting the fire, I guess I accidentally hit it with the flint and stone, which destroyed the pile of sticks. This happened when my character was close to starving, and I was in the middle of cooking some meat. None of the crafting materials were reclaimed when the fire was destroyed, and I couldn't find sticks and dry leaves in a timely enough manner. So I ended up starving to death and had to reload from an earlier save. But I hadn't built a shelter at that camp yet, so my last save was quite a ways back, and I lost almost an entire play-session of progress.
The bow and arrow doesn't always line up quite right.
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I also struggle a lot with the character grabbing holstered items when I'm trying to pick up materials off the ground. And when multiple items are clustered together (like, say multiple coconut bowls full of water, and a piece of meat all cooking on a campfire), it can be very hard to grab the specific item that I want.
A nice usability concession is that the backpack can hover in the air. It doesn't have to be placed on the ground or held open with one hand. This gives the player better visibility and access to the backpack while standing up, and also frees up both hands to pull items out and use them for crafting.
Aiming the bow and arrow can also be tough sometimes. Even if I turn sideways, the bow never seems to be lined up close enough to my eyes for me to easily line up the shot. So I miss a lot of shots, including easy ones against stationary targets only a few yards away. Thankfully, arrows can almost always be retrieved whether they hit the target or not. So as long as the target I was shooting at didn't happen to be a jaguar that is charging at me, it was always easy enough to pick up my arrows, find the animal (since they never go far), and try again.
Sometimes my real-life hands can't reach
the leeches on my virtual arms.
It's also annoyingly hard to pick leeches off my arms sometimes. The halo around the controller will sometimes hit my real arm well before the in-game hand is close enough to the virtual arm to interact with a leech. I often have to contort my arms every which way in order to pick off leeches.
But none of these problems are game-breaking, and (as I said) they are all problems that are typical of VR gaming and motion-controls in general.
Overall, I enjoyed playing Green Hell. It was much less frustrating than some other survival games that I've played, and the immersive quality of VR really did help make the jungle feel more intimidating and threatening. Despite the sharp learning curve, there are actually a lot of small design choices that really help smooth out the experience.
For one thing, every threat in the game has some distinct audio cue that warns the player that danger is nearby. Obviously, a rattlesnake will shake its rattle, but if you're walking carefully and deliberately, you can also hear the pitter-patter of spider feet over the crunchy forest floor, or the steady breathing of a predatory cat stalking you from the bushes, or an ominous musical cue if a crocodile is approaching. As long as I'm paying attention and not playing recklessly, I never feel like a jaguar or poisonous spider is just jumping out of nowhere and killing me.
Objectives are clearly signposted. And, honestly, the confines of the map makes it so that you really can't miss important objectives or points of interest. The maps and level design will naturally funnel you to where you need to go. So I never really got lost, and was never unsure of where I was supposed to go next. Which means I never found myself aimlessly wandering the jungle, with all my survival meters gradually ticking down to death.
Really, once I figured out that I can cut down trees and palm bushes for sticks and palm leaves; figured out how to craft shelters to save the game; figured out that coconuts do, in fact provide fat; and figured out how to use rocks to bang poles into place for shelters, water stills, and other such camp infrastructure, it was mostly smooth sailing. But figuring all that stuff out took a lot of time and patience.