Green Hell is a Survival Sandbox game and the first project by the small Polish team known as Creepy Jar, set in the Amazon Rainforest. Players must survive in the harsh jungle environment against hazards such as malnutrition, thirst, diseases, poisonous animals and plants, hungry predators, hostile natives, and more. The game appeared in Steam's Early Access program and saw a full release in September 2019.
In the game's story mode, players take the role of medical researcher and survival author Jake Higgins. Something really bad is happening in the outside world, so Jake and his anthropologist wife Mia have ventured to the depths of the rainforest to seek help from the Yabahuaca tribe, who may hold the solution. Because of the tribe's distrust of the modern world, Mia goes alone to live with them while Jake remains behind at base camp. After a little over a month, Jake receives a panicked distress call from Mia and runs to the Yabahuaca camp only to be attacked by unknown assailants. After falling into a river, Jake loses his bearing and all his supplies, and also comes to realize he has amnesia of the past few weeks. Now he has to find out what happened to Mia while surviving lost and alone in the Green Hell.
Episode 1 of a new campaign, Spirits of Amazonia, was added on January 28, 2021. Serving as a prequel to the main story campaign, it follows Jake's original search for the Yabahuaca tribe and their miracle cure, and has a more sandbox-like focus with Jake helping a series of Yabahuaca villages after an attack by the hostile Waraha tribe. Episode 2 was added on June 22, 2021, adding a new map (actually the map from the original main campaign) and a new village that Jake needs to assist. Episode 3, the final episode, was released on March 29, 2022.
Tropes:
- Acquired Poison Immunity: If you're paying attention, you'll find some notes early on about the Yabahuacas injecting themselves with frog poison. It's why they can consume the miracle mushroom without contracting the disease it carries.
- Alliance Meter: In Spirits of Amazonia, Jake must gain the trust of the Mu'agi village, the progress of which he records on a journal tab. Treating the wounds of scattered injured hunters, freeing the women who've been taken captive, escorting fled children back to the village, tearing down Waraha war camps, and returning certain trophies and artefacts to the Mu'agi all help to build that trust. Story progression gates are unlocked as thresholds of trust are reached.
- Artificial Stupidity: Even if you leave a massive amount of evidence of invasive activity, like having a gigantic mud-mansion sticking out like a sore thumb in the jungle, having a bunch of trees torn down, or leaving a bunch of trash laying around, none of the natives will get suspicious and try to hunt you down and tear down your shelter just as long as you yourself stay completely out of their sight.
- Author Avatar: The art designer and top-billed credit for "game concept" is Creepy Jar employee Kryzsztof Kwiatek. In the game, the CEO of Omolu is "K. Kwiatek."
- Baby See, Baby Do: Occasionally when you find a lost Yabahuaca child, you can hear them sing the Wahara natives' song.
- Bittersweet Ending: In the "good ending", Mia is revealed to have been Dead All Along following the events at the airstrip, but Jake has found the cure for the disease and will be rescued and returning to civilization. Jake and Mia's spirit share their last goodbyes before Mia fades away and a plane is seen flying across the sky.
- Body Horror: Everything from leeches regularly attaching to your limbs, to worms burrowing under your skin and forming a writhing bulge if you fall asleep on the ground.
- Boring, but Practical: Set up a camp near a river. Put a drying rack under a simple roof, and set fish traps and cage traps in the water. Bait the traps with maggots, spiders, and scorpions, then leave to do other things and come back later to discover a bounty of fresh, delicious protein. Any excess can be hung on the drying rack and left to cure. Plant a few banana trees and nuts in the ground near the water and you have a place you can count on to stock up on consumables.
- Bottomless Bladder: You have to manage your protein, carbs, fats, water, and sleep, but never have to actually worry about using the toilet.
- The Cartel: A drug cartel apparently had a cocaine processing camp and an illegal gold mine operating in the area where you are. They're long gone by the time you arrive, but you can raid their camps for supplies and use their facilities.
- Chased by Angry Natives: Mysterious skull-painted warriors have appeared in the area near the Yabahuaca village and prove to be hostile towards you. The U.I. identifies them as Waraha Warriors after you kill one.
- Cool, Clear Water: Downplayed with the water in this game. Drinking unsafe water does have a negative effect, but it’s never anything worse than a couple of intestinal parasites, whose only detriments are draining your nutrients slightly faster and can be immediately cured by red mushrooms or soursop fruit, and there’s also a chance that drinking unsafe water won’t have any effect at all note . Played completely straight with the water near Jake’s tent, the only area in the game with perfectly clean water.
- Dead All Along: As hinted at throughout the game, and finally revealed in the ending, the real Mia was last seen by Jake on a ventilator in a hospital in Brazil, with the Mia that he's been interacting with the whole game being a hallucination inside his head. Given the amount of time that has passed since then (weeks if not months), the real Mia is likely dead from the virus; though, given that Mia implies Jake was infected as well, it might be possible to survive the virus for that long, though likely not in the state Mia was in.
- Disc-One Nuke: A bow and a handful of arrows pretty much lets you deal effectively with any threat you might encounter in the jungle short of a full tribesman war party, other than accidentally stepping on a poisonous spider or snake. However, you have to figure out the recipe for crafting one on your own (though it is very simple).
- Evil Corp: Omolu Corp. jealously preserves the secret of its life-saving panacea so that it can profit from it, forcing desperate people to come to Brazil and wait in huge lines for a chance at receiving it. Letters from Omolu are noticeably blunt and authoritarian.
- Extreme Omnivore: Jake, though mainly out of survival rather than enjoyment. In addition to the variety of unconventional jungle food he can eat, he can also eat leaves, charcoal, and even animal dung. Granted, not everything will agree with him; a lot of food can give you food poisoning or parasites, or cause so much disgust that it'll deplete your sanity.
- Foreshadowing: One of the first things you learn in the game is that the Yabahuaca are immune to to poison arrow frog poison through the practice of Mithridatism
. This is a hint about why they are immune to the disease that killed all the other people who take the panacea. - Giant Mook: "Spirits of Amazonia, Part 2" introduces the Waraha Thug, a large tribesman who dual-wields stone axes, wears a large, heavy mask that renders them immune to headshots, and can soak tons of damage before going down. Despite their large size, they can also charge you at impressive speed.
- Grimy Water: In the Spirits of the Amazonia expansion, there are a few bodies of water that are polluted with toxic waste. Swimming in it or washing yourself with it will give you a rash and fever, while drinking it will fatally poison you.
- Guide Dang It!: Basic survival in the game requires knowing what the various plants and bugs you can find laying around the jungle do, how you can use them to treat different injury types, and what's safe to eat. If you only stick to foods that are obviously safe (i.e. cooked animal meat) you're going to die of rabbit starvation pretty quickly. Making it past the first couple of days generally requires several deaths before you learn what mushrooms and plants are edible and can be used to treat parasites, venom, fever, and other ailments. Not to mention the huge clusterfuck trying to figure out a reliable source of potable water without reading a FAQ is.
- Harder Than Hard: Green Hell difficulty is the same as the game's hard mode, with the addition that the game will wipe your save file if you die.
- Hard-to-Light Fire: A game mechanic. Lighting a fire requires several things: several sticks of various sizes, dry tinder, a tool to cause ignition, enough stamina to use the tool, and shelter from any rain that might be happening. Fire is necessary to cook meat or sterilize water, so the player can't long go without making one. However, they may not have enough tinder on hand, they have an ignition tool on hand, and they're not so exhausted that they don't have the energy left to actually operate the tool.
- Hollywood Healing: In spite of the general realism for the video game, Jake heals with superhuman speed and never suffers any long-term effects from any injuries, including scars. Given the revelation that Jake has spent quite a while in the jungle locked in an amnesia loop, it's surprising that he bears no visual clues that he's been there so long.
- Hollywood Natives: The Wahara, who behave animalistically and wear skeleton face paint, and serve as enemies in the game. Averted with the Yabahuaca, who are more intelligent and sympathetically portrayed.
- Hungry Jungle: You're lost in the Amazon rainforest with no supplies and Everything Trying to Kill You.
- I'm a Humanitarian: You can harvest flesh from killed hostile tribesmen and even make it into stew, but eating it will heavily drop your sanity. Making stew from their bones doesn't penalize your sanity, though, as the game makes no distinction between human bones and animal bones.
- Inventory Management Puzzle: Combining Grid Inventory with Critical Encumbrance Failure. Food and miscellaneous items take up space in their respective backpack pouches, and if you don't have room for an item in the proper pouch, you can't carry it. Some items stack, some don't. On top of this, you have a 50 pound carry limit; past this, your movement slows down considerably, and it's impossible to move if you're too encumbered. Storage boxes also have a grid inventory similar in size to the backpack pouches.
- King Mook: The "White Demon", one of four local legends encountered in "Spirits of Amazonia part 1", turns out to be a giant albino caiman. It's larger and has noticeably more health than a regular enemy.
- Last-Second Ending Choice: Once you find the cure for the outside world's pandemic Jake has an inner monologue where he questions whether or not finding the cure was worth all the hell he's gone through, and you actually have to answer yes or no, the answer determining how Jake's story ends.
- Like Reality, Unless Noted: Unlike The Forest, Green Hell lacks explicit physical supernatural horror elements (although drug-induced dream sequences and sanity loss-induced hallucinations do play a big role). Even the hostile tribesmen behave in a more realistic and "human" manner compared to the cannibals from The Forest.
- Loincloth: The Yabahuaca wear practical loincloths while the skull warriors wear rather "boastful" wood codpieces.
- Machete Mayhem: You start the game off with one, only to lose it after the tutorial. A somewhat less effective (but still way better than a stone knife) rusty machete can be found at an abandoned camp somewhere in the jungle.
- Masochist's Meal: Tarantulas and scorpions are, even if fully cooked, disgusting enough in taste or texture that they reduce your mental condition to eat, and contain so little protein that they're hardly worth the effort to even do so. However, they can be used as bait for large fish in areas where those fish swim, which tend to give much better returns for the effort to catch them.
- Meaningful Name: The pharmaceutical company Omolu Corp. is named after a healing spirit in the mythology of native Nigerians.
- Mushroom Samba: Drinking ayahuasca to have dream visions is how the plot moves forward.
- Nature Is Not Nice: The rainforest is filled with many different kinds of hostile wildlife, including caimans, jaguars, panthers, and rattlesnakes.
- Negative Continuity: Jake still has his watch in "Spirits of the Amazonia", despite the fact that it was given to him as a gift by Mia in the main story campaign, which takes place after "Spirits of the Amazonia".
- Never Smile at a Crocodile: South American black caimans roam the large bodies of water in the jungle. They're slow, but very tough, and can absolutely shred you if you try to fight them in close combat or, even worse, if they catch you in the water.
- Nobody Poops: For a grittily realistic survival game, this is bizarrely zig-zagged. Jake never has to worry about digging a toilet pit despite all the other structures he can build. He also vomits if he eats something bad and gets parasites from dirty water, but is never shown or implied to get diarrhea. On the other hand, you can come across animal dung on the ground which can be used for fertilizer, although no animals are seen defecating.
- Noob Cave: Jake's Tent and the area surrounding it, which has clean water, plenty of food, no enemies and the only danger you face is the occasional high cliff. You also start with a machete which you quickly lose after you're thrown into the more dangerous areas of the jungle. This is where you start during the tutorial mode to help you get used to the controls and learn the basics (such as first aid and fire-starting). Later on, you can revisit the tent, albeit it's abandoned and overgrown at this point.
- Pacifist Run: The "Pacifist" achievement/trophy involves surviving on King of the Jungle or higher without killing animals, humans, destroying bee nests, and interacting with traps.
- Precision F-Strike: For some reason, Jake gets very frustrated when lighting embers and will swear explosively after barely a second of effort.
- The Reveal: Jake and Mia obtained a cure for cancer from the Yabahuaca tribe some time ago; however, one of the ingredients for the cure, an underground fungus, contained a virus that infected everyone who received the cure, eventually leading to a pandemic that killed millions. With Mia terminally ill from the virus, Jake was sent back into the Amazon to search for a cure for the virus, but went insane after the expedition was canceled due to lack of results, fleeing into the jungle and hallucinating that Mia was with him.
- Robinsonade: You're lost without tools or supplies in the middle of the harsh Amazon rainforest, while searching for your wife and seeking a secret that might be able to save the world from slowly impending doom.
- Sanity Meter: Your sanity will gradually slip as you go through traumatic events such as leeches or worms feeding on your body, resulting in various detrimental effects such as insane whispers or being attacked by hallucinatory enemies. Eating gross things will also lower your sanity, while eating tasty things, like candy and cooked meat, will restore it.
- Scary Stinging Swarm: Brazilian wasps, which give you a painful rash and eventually kill you if you stand in their proximity. Fortunately however, they provide honeycomb, which is a great source of carbohydrates and sanity, and provides a treatment for rashes.
- Self-Surgery: No one is around to treat Jake's injuries other than Jake himself, and self-surgery is a critical gameplay mechanic. Often this involves knowing what treatments to apply to what injuries and having the materials on hand to administer the treatment. For example, certain kinds of leaves can be used as bandages, and certain kinds of additives (tobacco leaves, honey, etc.) can be applied to those bandages to help them treat specific kinds of injuries.
- Shout-Out: You can find a familiar-looking volleyball near a river.
- Shown Their Work:
- Armadillos make a raspy screaming sound when you go near them. This may seem bizarre to players who are not familiar with zoology or haven’t been up-and-close to an armadillo in real life, not only on the fact that they actually do make noise, but also scream when they’re frightened.
- The game averts The Coconut Effect for most jungle tropes, with coconuts actually being green instead of brown (although they turn brown when you hit it with a weapon), and the ambience being more realistic to what you would find in South America, rather than Jungles Sound Like Kookaburras.
- Armadillos make a raspy screaming sound when you go near them. This may seem bizarre to players who are not familiar with zoology or haven’t been up-and-close to an armadillo in real life, not only on the fact that they actually do make noise, but also scream when they’re frightened
- Spikes of Doom: The "Spirits of Amazonia" update introduces the aptly-named "Spike Tree" note which gives you a venom wound if you try to cut it down.
- Story Bread Crumbs: Dream sequences and notes found at various abandoned camps throughout the jungle indicate that something very bad is happening in the outside world, but you have to play through the game to figure out exactly what is going on.
- Story Difficulty Setting: The special "Tourist" difficulty setting removes almost all of the game's game mechanics and lets you explore the map and the main story quest at your leisure.
- Title Drop: "This is your home, this Green Hell!" is one of many crazed phrases the voice inside your head screams out when your sanity is at rock bottom.
- Video Game Caring Potential:
- In Spirits of the Amazonia, you have the opportunity to carry out various good deeds to help gain the Yabahuaca people’s trust, including bringing back lost children, saving kidnapped tribe members, and tending to tribe members’ injuries.
- As of the “Animal Husbandry” update, you can now keep certain animals such as capybaras as pets, allowing you to gain their trust and even be able to pet them.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential:
- You can try to steer clear of any skeleton warriors upon hearing their chanting... or you can raid their camps and slaughter them. And if that's not enough, you can also harvest and eat their meat.
- You see those adorable capybaras and tapirs scurrying about the jungle? You can brutally kill them with weapons or maim them in traps. You may have to do it if you want to keep your protein and fats meter up.
- Weird Moon: The game has a seemingly normal moon, except it’s always full no matter what day of the month it is. Especially egregious as this game has actual calendar time in it which is shown on your watch.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Jake receives a rather harsh one from a reader of his book in the form a letter, as he is criticized for drawing attention towards Yabahuaca tribe."I have read your book and I am mortified to say that no self-respecting scientist would ever write something like this."
- With This Herring: After a short tutorial in a comfy WHO base camp, you're thrust into the depths of the jungle with no supplies or tools. Locating the remains of a Yabahuaca village gets you a bone knife, which you'll have to use to harvest supplies and craft everything you need to survive out there.
- Wizard Needs Food Badly: There's four hunger meters: Carbohydrates, Protein, Fats, and Hydration. All four tick down over time, reducing maximum health as they get depleted.
- Whole-Plot Reference: The game's overall plot beats are remarkably similar to those of Escape Dead Island.
- White Male Lead: Jake Higgins is a white man in the Amazon. His whiteness is contrasted with Mia, who is Hispanic and drops Spanish words into her speech.
- Worthless Yellow Rocks: You can pick up a sack of gold at the illegal gold mine. It serves absolutely no in-game purpose, thought Jake notes he could sell it online if he were back in civilization. There's an achievement for finishing the game with it in your inventory.
- Your Mind Makes It Real: Hallucinatory enemies can kill you dead just as effectively as real ones. As noted in the Nightmare Fuel tab, this might be a case of Jake self-harming in a delirium as he fights enemies only he can see...
