Ever wondered how you would live alone in the mighty Amazon jungle? That’s exactly the question I asked myself when I saw Green Hell coming to VR on the Meta Quest. I’m relatively new to VR games and haven’t played the original, so surviving the green hell of the Amazon jungle seemed like a great opportunity for a novel VR experience. As it turns out, Green Hell VR does a good job of letting you experience the struggles of jungle survival, at least initially, at the cost of a ton of actual nausea.
The original Green Hell came out in 2019, and the Meta Quest version is very similar. Both have a story mode and a survival mode. The game’s storyline is simple but effective: you play as Jake Higgins, a well-known anthropologist, who visits the Amazon rainforest with his partner Mia. Mia went alone to contact one of the indigenous tribes, but after several days of radio contact, things went awry. You start helping, but are attacked. After you fall from the waterfall, you end up alone in the jungle and a large chunk of your memory is gone. Since then, you play to find out what happened to Mia while trying to survive the hardships of the jungle.
The first thing I noticed when playing Green Hell VR on the Meta Quest was that the game looked really good. Considering the game runs on mobile chips inside the Quest 2, this is clearly one of those VR games that takes full advantage of the headset’s capabilities. I compared the game to the recently released PCVR version, and to me the most obvious difference is the PCVR jungle has wind effects and better lighting in the foliage. Overall, the Meta Quest version doesn’t shrink the graphics too much and offers a ton of visual immersion.
As you play Story Mode, you’ll gradually learn the basics of survival. There are sticks, stones, vine ropes and leaves to craft weapons and shelter, as well as herbs and other plants to treat jungle fever. Depending on the difficulty level you choose, you’ll also need to consider food, disease, and external hazards. I chose a higher difficulty level, which meant I needed to keep collecting food like bananas, coconuts, mushrooms, and hunting wild animals to survive. Clean water is another important resource. At any difficulty level, you use three things regularly: First, your watch monitors your fitness and fatigue. Second, you have a notebook that shows objectives, craftable objects, edible effects, and a game map. Finally, you carry a backpack for bananas, coconuts, herbs, and building materials. The good news is that in VR, these aren’t keyboard or controller buttons this time around, but you’ll actually be looking at your arms and grabbing the backpack from your back.
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This story guides you on how to build things like fireplaces, using your tools to chop down trees to make sticks. When I made my first stone axe, I felt a little clumsy, but I got used to making it easily. I also had to look up some stuff online as I couldn’t find how to make some weapons. Chopping down trees, harvesting resources and hunting animals are all the joys of VR control. It even makes you sweat sometimes, just like in reality. After finding the first village where Mia disappeared, I spent half an hour chopping down trees, picking up branches, tying strings to sticks, and searching for leaves to build my first shelter. All this walking, crafting and building can be very tiring. Initially, I couldn’t even play for more than twenty minutes because I got sick from the many moves. Fortunately, this gets better every time I play. When I was walking in the game, walking on the spot seemed to say a lot.
On the plus side, hunting and scavenging time flies very fast when you’re busy crafting. There’s a lot going on even next to the storyline. Any scavenging trip can lead to snake poisoning or vomiting from eating the wrong mushrooms. There is a series of challenging missions and chores found in many survival games. The storyline adds additional gameplay variety, including psychedelic journeys and incentives to propel you toward risk and exploration. So the initial playthrough of the game is pretty fun. In survival mode, the sense of purpose in the storyline is missing, but it still adds replayability and you can do whatever you want.
Unfortunately, Meta Quest games have more limited survival modes than PCVR games. This is because the more complex building materials and structures in the PCVR version are missing in the Quest version. There is no dirt to make bricks, so the possibility of building a mud house on the Quest is also out of the question. From my experience playing survival games like ARK: Survival Evolved, you can spend hours building your own primitive shack in the jungle. In Quest, you can only build stick and leaf huts, which somewhat reduces the replayability of survival mode. On the other hand, keeping it simple means the game is more accessible to a variety of (casual) players, possibly for the average Quest player. However, if you’re faced with a choice between the Meta Quest 2 or the PCVR version, here’s something to consider.
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Is there something I don’t really like about this game? Aside from the initial nausea, one of the things that annoys me a bit is that the locals in the game all look very similar. I see them mostly in the game’s cutscenes, occasionally encounter them while playing, and there seems to be only a limited set of characters in the game. Watching a bunch of clones by the fireplace was the only thing that disappointed me. So I feel the game falls short in this regard, but that may be due to the limitations of running the game on a VR headset.
Coming back to the more positive things, I’d like to mention that the game’s weapon handling and combat are areas where Green Hell VR has vastly improved over the regular gameplay experience. The spears, axes, bows and arrows you craft can be used in a variety of ways to hunt and fight hostile natives. Especially when stumbled upon locals, the VR combat got my heart rate up quite a bit, dodging their attacks while hitting them with my machete. Especially since you put so much effort into all the other difficulties, you want to make sure you survive the battle too. For example, much more than a normal shooter.
All in all, it’s a good thing that Green Hell VR is coming to Meta Quest, as it provides the platform with an immersive jungle survival experience and impressive graphics. Just by completing the main storyline, you’re sure to gain many hours of gameplay with a nice balance of survival, crafting, exploration, and the occasional battle. Compared to the PCVR version of the game, the game’s survival mode is the only part where you can say you’re missing out on the more complex gameplay. This is because you can’t make more complex structures like mud houses, but for the average Meta Quest player, this might not be a huge problem. If you’re looking for a fresh VR experience with an interesting storyline on the Meta Quest, don’t skip Green Hell VR.