izigame.me

I was on the verge of leaving a positive review, but I realized that 90% of the things I had to say about this game are negative. I then looked through the forum for those concerns, and it appears the devs DGAF about player frustrations because the point is for this game to be "hell".
Well, I enjoy challenge as much as the next guy... but there's a fine line between "challenging the player" and "intentionally neglecting basic QOL features to make the player suffer".
The Good:
The game does indeed present you with a compelling scenario of solo wilderness survival in the trackless depths of the Amazon. Note that I said "compelling", not "realistic" or "fun". The story of the main quest is a psychological horror thriller which is actually really well-written, well-voiced and avoids most of the tired tropes of the genre.
The Meh:
The difficulty curve is paradoxically difficult to learn but easy to master. At the start of the game, you have zero explanation of what to do or how things work - death is guaranteed. For instance, it took like five IRL hours to figure out that you can get small stones by "harvesting" big stones, which greatly inflated the early grind.
The inverted difficulty curve is largely because schematics for weapons/tools/buildings are locked until you pick one up, craft it by accident or - in the case of buildings - see an example firsthand. Schematics for armor - which is INCREDIBLY important - do not EVER get unlocked until you craft it blindly (or, more likely, read the wiki).
And when you do craft stuff, expect it to fall apart VERY quickly. I spent IRL hours smelting, then crafting "metal" armor and weapons... the best in the game... only to watch them degrade to nothing in a day or two of light use. Insult to injury: I'm pretty sure the metal spear is inferior to the "tribal spear" you get for free for killing one of an endlessly-spawning horde of howling natives.
But, once you figure out the basics, the game becomes trivial and the only challenge is fighting the annoying game mechanics, not actually surviving. For instance, i just ran into a patrol of 8 hostile natives and proceeded to headshot each one with a handcrafted survival bow without taking a single hit.
Hunting is functional, but completely unrealistic. The best way to hunt is by getting headshots, which any IRL hunter will tell you is breathtakingly stupid. Real hunters try to take down an animal with one hit to the heart, liver or lungs; failing that, they will follow the blood trail. In Green Hell, you either headshot 'em in one hit or kiss that animal goodbye, as it runs away far faster than you to die somewhere you'll likely never find (or just glitch out of the map) with NO blood trail. Hunting is marginally better with a spear than a bow, since even a non-headshot with a spear will kill an animal before they make it 10 yards.
The Bad
Surviving parasites, disease, hostile natives, hungry jaguars... none of that is difficult once you figure the game out. What's "difficult" is exploring the map (and the game doesn't even GIVE you a map until you randomly stumble across it) in the TWENTY FOUR EFFING MINUTES of daylight you have per day.
The ridiculous speed of the abstracted day/night cycle forces the player to rush through EVERYTHING. But, if you run everywhere, you're liable to get stung by an emperor scorpion... which is extremely difficult to see, but you can (somehow) hear. And, no matter what armor you're wearing, that sting will magically go right through it.
AND that will basically end your day RIGHT THEN AND THERE, because the fever caused by the sting will quickly sap your strength until you pass out... then wake up on the floor in the dark with blowfly larvae implanted in every limb. If you don't use one bone needle (gained by "harvesting" bones) to remove the larva (one needle each), you will quickly go insane. Then, if you don't bandage those four ghetto Amazonian surgery wounds immediately, they're going to get infected.
The first time I had an infected wound, i had no clue what to do with it because I didn't learn until later, checking on the wiki, that the only solution is waiting until meat in your inventory spoils so you can "harvest" maggots to eat the infected flesh. So wherever you go exploring, make sure you take a handful of maggots with you LOL FML I'M NOT KIDDING.
So, by not hearing the "scratchy scratch scratch" scorpion sound and immediately leaping backwards, you lose an entire day of exploring, 4 bone needles, 4 bandages, most of your food and ALL of your clean water. Did I mention that ALL the water in the game is infected with parasites and you can't boil water in a metal canteen? "Fun"!
Then you have to limp back to base... where there's even odds that a patrol of natives will be wantonly destroying all your stuff. Also they will spawn inside your walls, behind your traps. The devs knew this is an issue for years and have finally admitted it, but don't know how to fix it. Also I would have preferred fewer, but more dangerous natives over endless hordes of Amazonian orcs.
Oh yeah, and my mild annoyance with animal behavior turns to EXTREME annoyance when it comes to alligators. Unlike IRL, Green Hell alligators are extremely slow and go down after two arrows to the head. They do not rush out of the water to insta-kill you, which would be fairly reasonable. They see you and then leisurely chase you at turtle-speed across the entire map until you kill it. You'll hear a loud HISS, then five minutes later chilling in your base hear a CHOMP as a chunk of your health bar disappears.
Because there are rarely hints of where to go or what to do, the only way to progress the game is to search miles and miles of trackless jungle one inch at a time, 24 MINUTES at a stretch. And after about half an iRL hour of exploring, you'll need to trek all the way back to your base to reload on 3 different types of food and 3 different types of bandages.
Once you stumble across everything in the story by process of elimination - which takes about 20 hours if you don't spend much time having fun (i.e. building a barbie dreamhouse in a giant brazil nut tree and getting a pet capybara) - there is a mystery at the end that - if you even know it exists - allows you a path to unlock the good ending.
Oh yeah and in order to find the "good ending" mystery machine, you need to ignore the main path in the final area and swim off randomly into the river for REASONS. This is made more obnoxious by the fact that the MAP for the final area is in the same location as the mystery machine, so the only way to find it is by exploring blindly.
I admit that the solution for the super spoiler good ending mystery machine is kind of clever, but all the clues that hint at the solution are hours away from each other... or you can just look it up on the wiki. I briefly considered solving the mystery with my own very tired, very annoyed brain... and promptly chose the latter.
The expansion, Spirits of Amazonia, doubles down on all the things that were annoying about the main quest. Instead of one needle in a haystack at one time, you have to find like 3 dozen in the FIRST MAP (checking the wiki, the actual number of not-on-your map waypoints is OVER FORTY THREE FUCK ME).
I was dutifully exploring the SOB on the "Hard" difficulty and had discovered about half of the quest points in the starting map of SOA before being inspired to write this review... and I think I'm done for the foreseeable future. Maybe I'll do another run on Medium later. Or maybe I'll never touch this thing again. IDK honestly.
En Konklewshun:
My head hurts. I'm tired. I want to play a fun game instead.
I would be lying if I said I didn't get my money's worth out of Green Hell, but the entertainment factor is ultimately overwhelmed by the feeling that I wasted 112 hours of my life that I'll never get back.,