Stick with its slow start and you will be engrossed in no time at all. It says a lot that I would love to gush about Green Hell’s story, yet I have to refrain as its narrative is something that you should discover all for yourself. Just know that you will go through the wringer as you try to get Jake back to the woman he loves, a relationship which is bolstered by some superb voice acting from Brandon Fague and Marta Da Silva that more than holds a candle to the similar walkie-talkie relationship seen in Campo Santo’s Firewatch. To elaborate further on the plot would be to utterly spoil it I can’t hint at or reveal anything beyond the basic synopsis for fear of letting the cat out of the bag. Before long, the pair are separated and it’s up to you to return Jake to his wife and discover some of the jungle’s mysteries along the way. You play as Jake Higgins, a researcher who ventures deep into the Amazon with his wife, Mia, to make contact with a tribe. The biggest addition for the full release is the Story mode, which may be the best and most affecting narrative you will ever experience in a survival game. With 1.0 and plenty of updates preceding it over the past year, Green Hell has softened the effects of its humid nightmares somewhat, though it’s still more Apocalypto than George of the Jungle. The insanity mechanics made every step tactical and regularly with anxiety, almost to the point of the game being purely masochistic. Instantly bringing to mind a more tropical and even more unforgiving version of The Forest, Green Hell promised a mature and deep survival experience with a learning curve far steeper than many of its peers, so much so that it could be called “hardcore”. Green Hell is an Early Access graduate that showed plenty of promise from day one. And then we walked out of camp by five meters and ended up getting bitten by something, leading Jake to die a very slow and frustrating death. With a little bit of TLC and a lot of leaves, he was as good as new. No bother: I knew what they all were and how to fix them, to bring Jake back from the brink of insanity and stop his limbs from looking some very upsetting shades of green.
After I’d guided him through an uncharted area and encountered all manner of obstacles, my HUD was flashing with enough warning symbols to send a power plant into a panic. Things weren’t looking too great for Jake Higgins.