Green Hell VR (Jungle Exploitation Actual Survival Horror)
I heard the legends of the original first-person survival co-op Green Hell when it initially dropped and always intended on reviewing it, or having a writer do it for the site, but simply got caught in other releases and forgot about it. That was, however, until the VR version was announced by Polish developer Incuvo, which is soon to receive a much-anticipated co-op mode in 2024. Since this is the survival game for VR currently, with slight horror elements much fitting to the themes, it’s about time we delved into the dark greenery of the Amazon, where skull faced natives threaten our existence because colonizers doing “research” suck. Are there scary natives with a justified fear of outsiders? Yes. Are they presented as primitive in the backwards sense instead of the tribal sense? No. Taking it’s cues at least partially from jungle horror films that exploited the shit out of everything such as Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Green Hell VR immerses you in all that is nasty about the jungle. Will you die? Uh, yep!
Taking the role of anthropologist Jake Higgins, who finds his girl Mia apparently taken by natives and then himself lost without supplies and in the middle of a merciless jungle, you have one primary goal, survive. If you choose the story mode there’s a rich plot, but the primary point of the game is to craft and stay alive. This involves finding food, learning how to heal yourself from poisoning, arming yourself against beasts like jaguars, and, of course, how to handle the variety of natives you’ll come across, most of who want your “I’m here for research” ass out of there or just dead. Green Hell VR is rather straightforward with what it does, but wow is it immersive. From your first pitiful attempts to just take a damn nap where you suddenly find yourself dying from a scorpion bite or vomit blood from ingesting a raw snail out of curiosity, it’s clear this game is meant to mimic what it would probably be like surviving in a goddamn jungle. You’re constantly moving your around to see what’s coming next, paying close attention to the weather, daylight, and everything else. Eventually a simple twig snapping scares the shit out of you and a slight slip on a log leads to bleeding tear in your leg you can’t come back from. This shit is no joke. The Steam version recently got some flack due to supposedly a lack of dev support in favor of other versions, including the Quest 2, which is how I was given the chance to check it out, but regardless, Green Hell VR is currently the only survival game of its type that matters. Lots of details, and just the right amount of terror without overdoing the effect.
Written by Stanley, Devourer of Souls
Green Hell VR
Incuvo (developer and publisher)
4.7 / 5
