In a word? Exhausting. In a few more words than that? Green Hell is a survival crafter that prides itself on its complexity and difficulty, and yet I believe those two things are at the core of why I dislike this game. Games that demand your full potential and the tenacity to overcome its brutal trials are fun and rewarding when they are done right, but Green Hell is a travesty of game design that fails to do this. It is overly difficult and multi-layered for the sake of pursuing a realistic survival scenario, yet this fact does not lend itself well to any meaningful or fun gameplay
The game does not hold your hand, only feeding you a sparse few crumbs of information. Just the bare minimum to keep yourself alive, while leaving room for experimentation and natural deduction. In theory, a great system that awards player exploration. However, the steps for basically anything are too complex for this to feel satisfying. Let's run through a commonplace scenario you might go through on your first playthrough. Say you sleep on the floor due to your body about to give out from exhaustion, and you acquire a worm in your arm. Great, just peachy. First, you gotta get a needle, crafted from a bone. If you don't got one, good luck, as you're just gonna hemorrhage your sanity until you go mad. Then you better hope you find a plant to turn into a bandage before it gets infected (good luck if its nighttime where you can't see the small flowers that surround this plant). If it DOES get infected, then you gotta find a carcass, pluck some maggots off it, shove them into the wound, let them eat it, and then cover it up in a DIFFERENT type of bandage to get rid of the infection. Otherwise, you will slowly bleed health until you die. ALTERNATIVELY, you can stash your items at home and throw yourself off a cliff to your death, respawning with filled food, health and sanity meters and most importantly, no infections.
When the ideal way to engage with your game is to not interact with any of the systems, and instead purposefully kill yourself to avoid the eight million steps required to heal yourself, your game is poorly designed.
I also had some issues with friends and trying to do the tutorial. Its required for you to play the story mode, but man trying to go through this was a nightmare. One friend got stuck at the tutorial for lighting a fire as the game refused to let them use the tinder they acquired (I used the exact same tinder they found, so I know its not them just using the wrong item). As for me, I finished the tutorial, got all the way to the end of the cutscene... and game crash. This didn't count as the tutorial being finished, requiring me to do this ♥♥♥♥ AGAIN. But oh no, now the game refused to launch in any capacity, instead freezing and refusing to open until I relaunch my computer. If this is the first thing players might experience, it doesn't instill any confidence in your game being a quality product. So again I went, going through the tutorial and fighting against the rigid, rough inventory system that frankly isn't the greatest. What a waste of my time...
But I will give the game one thing, the dense jungle is an excellent setting for a survival horror game. Where its nothing but plants, plants, and more plants, its perfect for enemies and pitfalls to hide in plain sight, obscured by nothing but foliage. And being unable to really observe anything really adds onto the horror, where animals constantly stomp around, crunching leaves beneath their feet. It keeps you on edge, and the game does a great job with that tension. That is, until you start slamming your head against the wall trying to deal with the survival mechanics.
Getting it on sale for a paltry three bucks CAD, I guess it coulda been a bigger waste of my money? Didn't feel that great to play, but maybe I'll change my thoughts on it in the future (assuming my friends even want to play it again)
