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S2 Ep100: RSS - Green Hell
80 Plays6 years ago
Join Ian, Dave, and Jake as they recount their experiences attempting to survive in the South American tropics in this week's episode!
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Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
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Transcript
Introduction & Conspiracy Jokes
00:00:44
Speaker
This is the first time I've seen this.
00:00:44
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going, Dave? That's... It's going okay. You know. That's good? Yeah. I'm doing pretty good, too, guys. Oh, it's good. That's good to hear. How did you get in here? They can't keep me out. They've tried.
00:01:11
Speaker
We literally started covid so that you would fuck off, but a lot. You know, it's funny. This isn't funny at all. Oh, geez. I actually had had heard in a podcast recently that that was a conspiracy theory in China was actually that the U.S. had spread the virus over there originally. Oh, yes. Right. And Wuhan. Hey, Noah riots. Hmm.
00:01:38
Speaker
But we disavow knowledge of that. For the soapstone, officially, we didn't do it. See, the real conspiracy theory is all about that 5G. Oh, yeah. What are the 5G's? Good. Gangster. Gangster. Ganja. Ganji. Good games give great Gan-tee. Have you been a good Ganji today?
Guest Introduction: Ian & Green Hell Overview
00:02:07
Speaker
Yes.
00:02:11
Speaker
But yeah, if it's not super clear, we're having another guest astode here, red sign soapstone. Ian has, I was going to use the word bequeathed us with his presence. I don't know if that's how bequeathing works.
00:02:26
Speaker
I feel like somebody has to die for bequeathment. Oh, all right. Well, I'll be right back. Raises eyebrows slowly. Yeah, we figured we'd have Ian back for this episode on Green Hell, which is another crafting survival. I almost said roguelite because it's a fun thing to put in descriptors that we're all doing together on multiplayer. Hmm.
00:02:55
Speaker
This one's not early access, though. They miss out on that one horseman of the apocalypse, but I think they have the rest. We'll get to it later, I know, but I almost feel like that would be a good buffer or excuse for certain things. I was going to say, this astounds me that it's not early access. I never noticed that. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to release it. September is when it had its gold release, but it wasn't early access prior to that.
00:03:24
Speaker
Alright, what's the stats? When did this boy come out? September. That's basically all I got. Let's see here. Looking up some numbers. Punch that in the calculator. Makes it a smiley face. September 5th, 2019 by Creepyjar, which is a good name for a company, I will say. It's got some fairly intense logo music too. When it comes up, it has that
00:03:51
Speaker
creepy sound like when you first start up the game. I wonder, like, how evocative of just Valve is that, though, right? It's not as good as Valve's. Valve is iconic at this point. But it's in the same headspace. Do you remember for which I remember the resource source to they have, like, are you talking about the valve one or the the green hell?
Green Hell & Game Development Insights
00:04:21
Speaker
In either case, I'm not going to accurately represent it. So please try. It's a series of tones for the valve one though. But for Dota two, I think was the first one they had it. So the guy with the valve on his neck actually like starts to turn his head. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Kind of like glitches back a little bit and then returns to neutral. Oh my gosh. Yeah.
00:04:49
Speaker
That Valve logo, really freaking good. I feel like they should try to use it more often.
00:04:57
Speaker
I would just like to see a big publisher like Valve get actually into the game making business because a lot of other publishers go out and make games. I think Valve really has the stuff to go out and make their own games. The wherewithal. Hey now, buddy of mine was just talking about the Valve Index and he's been playing some Half-Life Alyx a little bit. I've heard good things about it.
00:05:23
Speaker
Is he wealthy? Apparently. It's a good index for wealth. Getting their money checks, everyone should be wealthy. How much does an index cost? Roughly the same amount the government's going to give me.
00:05:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's not wrong. Oh my god, it is conspiracy So this is the United States government wants to get everyone into VR So that they can begin bombarding us with 5g waves Hmm
00:05:55
Speaker
Hey, have you tried like this chip VR extension? It makes it easier for gameplay. Cue the 5G. Done. Oh my gosh. I wonder if the index uses 5G. It's like, oh yeah, it's a wireless headset. We support wavelengths over 5G.
00:06:12
Speaker
If not, they're going to have to start adding to things. If I make a game, I'll say supported by 5G and 5G for those who still have them. Before you know it, protesters are burning Dave's apartment down. Great.
00:06:28
Speaker
Now they're too afraid to go outside still. As am I. It is pretty creepy out there. We had a masks only or a mask, a mandate basically to wear masks if you go outside for the state now. Pennsylvania is the state that we're all in at the moment for now. The state of terror.
00:06:52
Speaker
Mistakenly, I've been living in the state of arousal. My bad. That explains a lot. So you're saying it wasn't a gun. It was never a gun. Jeez. See, what I like about the video chat is that I can make these facial expressions just like the raising of the eyebrows. But I still understand that the podcast has always been audio only and nobody sees that but me. Oh, we see it.
00:07:20
Speaker
And we're unhappy about it. Okay. Because of the implication. The implication. But yeah, I guess other than basic introductions, we do talk about games sometimes here and there. Yeah, which is the game we're talking about today? Is it the blue hell? Yeah, it's a magenta heck. Oh, no, that was doom. Let's be honest. That's the indie game.
00:07:50
Speaker
I actually I'm proud of Dave for getting into the the description of what the game was and the genre the date released all that stuff prompting for that information because sometimes we straight up miss it we're just like you guys all know about this game let's go into specific things we like and dislike
00:08:13
Speaker
My constant fear is that somebody, this person doesn't exist, but they're listening to just podcast episodes in a row. So this one just comes up and they're not looking at the title. They have no idea what we're talking about. We're like, oh yeah, on level three, I really liked when they did this. I thought it was a pretty good design choice. And they're like, what's the game? What is a video game? Do games even really have levels anymore? I don't know. This one does.
Survival Mechanics & Challenges in Green Hell
00:08:42
Speaker
It has one level and that level is mediocre. So let's set the scene a little bit for people. What is green hell outside of, I think I mentioned survival crafty.
00:09:00
Speaker
That's it. That's it. Um, thanks everybody. Good night everybody. So it takes place. It's place in South America. Um, I know this because, uh, there's Brazilian wandering spiders in the game and I assume those are in Brazil. So it's less of a no when more than a more of a think, but that's my evidence.
00:09:27
Speaker
Yeah, definitely the heart of the rainforest, South America, you know, high chance of being Brazilian. Right. So it's a, like you said, tropical area. There's a bunch of hazards.
00:09:47
Speaker
I would say in the, in the wildlife and in the terrain. But basically it's a try not to die. The green Australia simulator where literally everything in the game at one point or another will manage to kill you.
00:10:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's surprisingly brutal in that regard too. Because like we were mentioning the wandering spiders, there's also poisonous frogs, which apparently if you just pick them up, you get poisoned. Sometimes you can just walk by a tree and get a scrape. That's something you have to deal with. I walked through a bush. Suddenly I'm covered in rashes. Not like a specific bush that I should have visually had a key to avoid. Just any bush.
00:10:29
Speaker
You're just an itchy individual. I feel like the scrapes happen if you like fall a little bit. It's probably something close to like a rock formation and height differential. I feel like the rashes are from ant hills. That's the only time I got them at least is if I got close. But unfortunately, you could have an ant hill completely occluded by bushes. So you just step through a bush. The ants are like, yo, what up? Yo, what up? It's your boy ants.
00:11:00
Speaker
Next thing you know, you're like Gulliver from Gulliver's Travels just tied down. The answer like, fight him. We got him now. Really get in there. See, I feel like the survival in this game has been fairly brutal because we're talking about like all these hazards and we haven't even, I feel, talked about like a, we've only talked about like a third of them so far.
00:11:22
Speaker
At the top of that, you have to worry about your sanity, how much fats you're getting, calorie intake, water, and forgetting some. Yeah, the macronutrients, the fats, proteins, and carbs are your three types of food. Instead of just a food bar, as pretty much any other survival game would do, they make them specific here. And if you're deficient in any of them, it corresponds to a reduction in your max health.
00:11:54
Speaker
So if you're just like, hey, it's kind of like, you know, in Minecraft, when you're all playing Minecraft, it's like, all right, day one, survival is a problem. Okay, we got to get some food, got to get basic necessities, got to dig down three blocks and put a block above us. The basics. And then you like make a wheat farm and you're like, food is done.
00:12:15
Speaker
Let's just cross that off the list. No one goes hungry. But in this, you can do spear fishing and small pools. There's other ways to get food. If you focus on just one aspect of that, it's only going to cover a small part of your macronutrients.
00:12:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think the best you can do is if you really go into hunting and cooking, you can usually take care of your protein and your fats, but your diet has zero carbs. Yeah. What gives you carbs? Fruit. Mushrooms. Okay. Was there a way to grow something that we didn't explore into? Because a lot of times I would go and grab random Brazil nuts or bananas or mushrooms while doing other hunting.
00:13:04
Speaker
I don't know if you could grow mushrooms. I think there's a way to grow Brazil nuts, but I'm not sure on that one. I think it has to be like the full Brazil nut. They're small and large planters. And Ian, I know you set up some planters at one point. Yeah, the small planters. I know there was like the tomato looking bush that gave fruit that had carbs. And eventually we discovered that one bush was not enough, so we expanded out to like four.
00:13:32
Speaker
And then we began losing interest in the game. I mean, but it did admittedly take care of the need once we got it scaled up. Yeah, it takes a while to grow fruit. Yeah, like you can. Carbs are also the easiest thing to get if you just go out into the jungle because you're just like. For all the ways the game wants to kill you, eating random things is actually.
00:13:58
Speaker
surprisingly acceptable. There's one type of poisonous mushroom. Everything else is beneficial. It looks wildly different from other mushrooms and has like a lattice dress and you're like, yeah, one kind of stands out. And sometimes sometimes the game will actually like have dead creatures around like things. Oh, implying that like that's good design. Yeah, it was kind of nice.
00:14:28
Speaker
I mean, other times there's dead creatures for no reason because the game's just like, we got to get them feathers somehow. So here's the parent. Yeah. But yeah, I really liked hunting in this game. So I feel like getting tools initially was a little bit of a pain until I understood what to do because I initially skipped out on single player tutorial. It's like, oh, we'll jump into multiplayer, figure it out.
00:14:56
Speaker
And I have like this pile of sticks and like how make weapons. But once I had like a four pointed spear, I would run around, sneak up and I would like poke things. Or if you throw it, you can kind of like charge it for accuracy and you eat it out. Anytime you got a headshot, you could instantly kill anything. I was like crouch walking near this jaguar for like 10 minutes because I was like, I don't want to see me. It'll fuck me up.
00:15:22
Speaker
And then I shot my shot with a spear, got it in the head, and it ragdolled immediately. Yeah, if you don't get the head shot, though, then you get to partake in the chase. The chase music's amazing. Yeah. I feel like a jaguar probably would just charge you instead of running away. But everything else is a chase, right? Ian, how would you describe the chase music
00:15:51
Speaker
I mean, don't ask me to do some sort of rendition because it's not playing in my head right now at this very moment. But it's this super upbeat music. It's like you stalk something, you mess up your headshot. So it's also your spear sticks in them. So maybe you've spent the last hour of game crafting this spear out of, you know, MacGyvering materials out of the woods.
00:16:14
Speaker
And you throw it in this, you know, capybara and it books it over the hill. The chase music starts up. Your hunter instincts come on. You chase after it because you're like, damn, I want that meat. And more importantly, I want the spear. I worked my ass off. It's also it's I would describe it as like upbeat bongos. Yeah. Like.
Nostalgia with Zunes & Green Hell Crafting
00:16:37
Speaker
That's what it sounds like. Distinctly tribal.
00:16:41
Speaker
Can we say Australian Bush music and call it that? Yeah. It's like junker talent from Overwatch. Thank you. You just lost all of our viewers. Geez. Oh my gosh. But like there's definitely a didgeridoo in there. That's all I'm saying. Yeah. It also is, um,
00:17:00
Speaker
The amount of time it takes the animal to like bleed out is based off of the quality of the spear. Cause eventually I got a, um, a metal spear in my single player. And instead of like a one minute chase or like maybe like a 40 second chase or something like that, it'd be like throw spirit capybara. And then the music starts. It's like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
00:17:22
Speaker
I was like, and then it runs five feet and dies. Music stops. See, that sounds exactly like my trips to the gym, but without a spear and without dying, or at least not actual dying. And different music playing on Ian's Zune. First off, no, it is that music. Secondly, I don't use a Zune. That was me. I used a Zune. There's always one.
00:17:50
Speaker
I was trying to think of something that was even, like, sadder, but I couldn't come up with something. I had to refurbish. The MP3 players were just like, MP3 player. Just no other name, no brand. Zooms were great. I had, like, one with, could play video and audio and all that stuff. It was refurbished. Oh, it could do audio? That's cool. Yeah, it could do audio. It only did video, but it didn't actually have audio associated with it. It was just one of those, you know,
00:18:21
Speaker
Silent movies only. They had a cool player, though. The library for Zune was like way better than Windows Media Player or iTunes. But I mean, everything's better than iTunes, let's be honest. I've had an iPhone for like 10 or 15 years, and I'm going to agree with you. Everything's better than iTunes. Yeah, I'm in the same boat. So we'll count that as another con against the game. iTunes. Yeah, too many iTunes.
00:18:51
Speaker
Yeah. So what did you guys like doing in the game? Cause for me, it was all about hunting stuff. I think it was apparent as soon as we loaded in and I immediately started constructing things and then ordered Dave to take care of my basic needs. Like Dave, you like to hunt, right? Yeah. Well just keep bringing me food cause I'm going to do other things and I'm not going to focus on that facet of the game. Yeah.
00:19:16
Speaker
It definitely, especially at first blush, it feels like a survival game where you could have a fair amount of vertical progression. It's like, OK, here's your basic, you know, wooden tools, stone tools to kind of get you going initially crafting. It's like, oh, here's a rock and I smash rock together to make a rock knife and then I lash it to a stick to make a axe.
00:19:45
Speaker
And then it kind of fizzles out after that. It's like I make slightly better racks. That doesn't actually advance me anywhere. Just does things more efficiently. Yeah, there's like so I guess all of the tears, correct me if I'm wrong. And we're.
00:20:02
Speaker
We would stone metal and obsidian. There was some lateral with bone. Wait, did you say bone? No, you said wood stone. I didn't. Yeah, I miss bones in there. I think it's roughly the same strength as stone. But no, it seemed to me I actually I couldn't tell you if obsidian was better or worse than iron. But again, that felt pretty equivalent. But after that, there was really nowhere else to go.
00:20:31
Speaker
Yeah, and it's not like Minecraft where. Actually, I'm going to contradict myself. It is pretty much like Minecraft where there's just a copy of the same like piece of equipment for each tier. You had to do more to get metal. Yeah, there's a full forge. There's a process to refine it from the lower. That was actually one of my favorite asked like favorite mechanics in that game is the whole forging like process actually
00:21:01
Speaker
It had some weight to it that it felt cool to be like, OK, I've done I've melted the ore. I now have raw ore. And I'm going to combine that with a mud form to make like the actual piece. And now I'm going to lash that to my stick. And suddenly I've got an iron axe. Like it felt better than dropping three sticks and a single two pieces of iron in Minecraft. I'm going to get hung. It's not three sticks. I can't remember what it is.
00:21:31
Speaker
Two sticks. It's two sticks and three pieces of iron, I think. It's a three by three, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting how early it seems to cap off, because if you look through your book, your survival guide, you kind of have up to level 100 in each of these different trees, like fishing, spearing.
00:21:57
Speaker
collecting things from animal parts, crafting and other stuff. And it seems like, oh, there's really a lot of opportunity as I kind of grind this out to make things more efficiently or be quicker about it. But I feel I could be a little bit grindy to get there for how early it kind of peaks as far as tech. Yeah, even in the single player where I put in like
00:22:22
Speaker
probably around 30 hours, something like that, to beat the game. I didn't come close to maxing out, I think, anything there, but it's sort of unnecessary. They're sort of...
00:22:35
Speaker
It's cool that the skills are there, but it's a little bit of a trap and they don't really need to be because they don't do that much. Like, yes, you know, fire starting, having a higher skill in fire starting makes it so it takes less time. I would love anything towards fire starting because that is such a huge pain in the ass. Yeah.
00:22:57
Speaker
But that's basically it, though. It's like, OK, now that I put a bunch of time in the game, now, even if my stamina bar is a little bit lower, I'll still be able to start the fire before my guy gets exhausted. It's like it's not huge. And then crafting gets you just like better durability. That one's nice. That's probably my favorite. If you're crafting skills up and you make a new tool, it has more uses. I think it's worth noting that this is like
00:23:26
Speaker
Elder Scrolls Oblivion style skill improvement where you get credit towards your skill up for doing the skill, not like you get skill points. So it's not something you can't really spec into something, it's just do it enough and eventually you don't have to do it as much anymore.
00:23:43
Speaker
Yeah, which is why I'm always jumping in those games. I've got to get that up. I've got to get those boots in Springhill Jack. Acrobatics. What was it called in Oblivion? Was it athletics? I think it was athletics or? I don't know. I just played Oblivion actually. I played Morrowind in Skyrim. I just know that if you cast Fortify speed on a horse, you quadrupled its speed and then you could move.
00:24:11
Speaker
Yeah. Whereas I would just punch the horse to get unarmed combat points. Or stand in the fire and cast restoration spells. It was a beautiful game.
00:24:22
Speaker
as God intended, or as Todd intended, sorry. But yeah, Green Hell's skills, they're all right. They're okay, not a huge impact. We've already actually covered a couple of things without mentioning bugs related to those though.
Bugs in Multiplayer & Sanity Effects
00:24:42
Speaker
The Forge, for instance. I know we encountered a bug where we couldn't place things in the receptacle for the Forge, right?
00:24:52
Speaker
Yeah, the Forge had like two inputs, one for fuel and one for like, put iron and get thing out. And if you can't drag anything into the Forge, it's suddenly worthless.
00:25:07
Speaker
Yeah, I thought it was like a multiplayer bug, where it was just like, oh, this belongs to Ian's character. You can't use it for some reason. And then I encountered the bug in single player. I had to quit to menu and reload in order. You guys just couldn't cook things to the forge at all because it wasn't accepting a drop. There's just no input for it, which is really dumb. And the other bug, since we're talking about skills, was the deprivation of those, right?
00:25:39
Speaker
I think that hit both of you. Yeah, it sort of reminds me, um, do you remember when we were playing satisfactory and like you join in someone satisfactory world, you can pick up items and then you'd log off and then the next time you log in, you wouldn't have those items. Yeah. It's the same sort of logic in that it seems like every time you join on the host game in green hell, it's like, what's your name? Ian, have you ever been here before? Yeah.
00:26:08
Speaker
I don't remember yet. Here's a new character. Let's squints at you. Doesn't seem familiar. What was your health like when you logged off? You know, I was almost dead and I was starving to death. Well, you know what? I don't think you're the same person. So enjoy full stats. Yeah. That's not the only time that happened. I mean, I know you saw that a lot because you were getting kicked from the server a good amount of times.
00:26:34
Speaker
That was just one day, and that was a bug in the Steam update process. I'm not going to crucify Spooky Jar for that one. Yeah, we had an invalid file, right? Yeah. When it updated over the course of a day while I was at work, not at work or something, I don't even know where the hell I was. But when we went to play it that night, it was the second time we went to play it, literally the next day. It updated overnight, and it somehow missed a file on my side. So every, like,
00:27:03
Speaker
Every time Jake went to do something, or every time I went to chop down a tree, the game just has a mental hiccup. And it's like, we got to close. I don't know what to do. It let you join, though. Yeah, it let me join. It had to be something graphical related. It would call something that wasn't there and then just implode on itself. But even dying, we would lose items. I'm not sure if that was a built-in mechanic for the game.
00:27:34
Speaker
It does. That part does seem intentional. There's a chance you just lose items when you die. We would habitually be like, I'm hell slow or I'm poisoned. We had this pile where it's like, hey, drop all your shit. And then you kind of go back and like it was like a lost image now and basically get a spear, had some meat, had some feathers. Yeah. Instead of the leave a penny, take a penny, it was like leave a stone axe, take a stone axe. Uh huh.
00:28:01
Speaker
One of the main causes of death that I had while we were working together, especially in the early game, was actually the hallucinations. Because every time a co-op person dies, I think that they may have to be somewhere near you, not 100% sure on that.
00:28:20
Speaker
It was actually, no, it hit me. I think it's pretty cool because I would run off on expeditions and trip and then Jay would be like, why is my sanity so low? The reefer madness makes the base six miles away.
00:28:36
Speaker
But yeah, if, I don't know, it's kind of the latest in a trend of mini games to just introduce sanity. Like, Don't Starve has it, this has it. I feel like Don't Starve's mechanic should be food, and pretty much just food. That would make sense. Core gameplay loop, don't starve. You're right, I didn't. Game over. I win. GG, refreshing that game. Close it off.
00:29:00
Speaker
But at really low sanity, or at a minor hit, you start hearing auditory hallucinations, right? Which was weird to me at first, and then hilarious. Because shouting ansel is like, not going to make it. You suck. I hate you. Never make it. Never, never make it. You're never going home. I love the talking back to yourself. That's the best. Shut up. Yeah, it's the protagonist voice. It's your character's voice.
00:29:30
Speaker
But the medium sanity is fun, but it's when you get to like real true insanity that things get wacky. Right.
00:29:40
Speaker
I'm maybe we're skipping ahead here, but kind of our penultimate thing the last time we played involved all of us Chowing down on raw human flesh because that just had a great sanity penalty so gave really good other stats though and it's Cannibalism is penalized but not as heavily as one might do and you know reasonable society
00:30:04
Speaker
But once all three of us were sufficiently tripping balls, not only did we have the auditory hallucinations, we had like the visual effect, everything black and white and kind of fading in and out. And you get these hallucinatory tribal savages that jump you. And they die after one hit, they kind of burst into red mist and fly away.
00:30:33
Speaker
But it's hysterical to watch like everybody around you hallucinating punching the air as they're fighting off their literal demons.
00:30:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's fun because nobody else can see them, but you so you feel crazy. But there are are also like tried people who like will show up and attack you occasionally as part of like the game challenge that look exactly the same. You have to be like, do you see that guy? I see that guy. Do you see that? Yeah, that was that was some of the best moments. This is like, hey, hey, Dave, you see that dude across the river there?
00:31:09
Speaker
No, no. OK, good. It's just me hallucinating. There was also a bug. So I was hosting this where it seemed like all of the guests, both of you guys could see enemies, but they just didn't exist to me. Yeah. So I was actually enemies that were attacking myself and Ian. Yeah, they were hallucinations because like Ian, I would see him like inter declaring and he's like holding the spear at the ready. I'm like, what are you doing?
00:31:38
Speaker
That's a little bit weird. And then he like stabs the air and there's a spurt of blood tribesmen just appears on the ground. Yeah. When they die, their corpses would actually appear, which is great. Yeah, that's fun. It also led into some of the funnier bugs, like randomly T posing tribesmen, like standing in the woods, like some sort of demented scarecrow.
00:32:07
Speaker
Has got to be like one of my favorite things because it seems like as soon as there's more than four of them in a clearing, the AI just kind of breaks. Yeah. It's like, OK, I can control three of them at a time. The fourth one just stand there. It's on standby. It's calling the shots. The sign of leadership is the T-pose in battle. I remember in Star Wars, Kashyyyk
00:32:34
Speaker
when Yoda was leading the Wookiees and he was just standing there over the battleful miniature T-post. It's great seeing. Really inspiring. Yeah. Yeah, the tribesmen are kind of, they're an interesting mechanic. Like we've played other survival games where they are antagonists, right?
00:32:56
Speaker
Obviously, going back to the Minecraft example, you have all the monsters, the nighttime monsters. But those will kind of aggress if you get nearby them. But in something like the forest, they were like, I know where they're at. I'm going up to fuck their shit. They'll attack your base. That was one of the weird things is like it seemed to be different in single player. They would like at day 10 attack your base in single player, but it was like day two in multiplayer and we were getting hit.
00:33:28
Speaker
The the other thing about the the tribes people there was they were jerks like they would just straight-up run at us and attack Not us but our stuff like they were attacking our agriculture plot yeah, we actually never got to grow a full banana bush or tree because we planted them and
00:33:48
Speaker
and then immediately got attacked.
Crafting System & Deforestation in Green Hell
00:33:50
Speaker
We're watching the AI for the first time and we're like, hey, I think we can just stand up here and the tribesmen will attack us. And then he hits the banana plot once and it just shatters. Oh my gosh, yeah. And it took effort to put that stuff together. Oh, yeah. Well, I think that's one of the cool things in the game is I'm going to go off on the crafting system a little bit here.
00:34:12
Speaker
When you need to craft a building or something or some sort of structure, you first have to drop the blueprint from your journal. Not a pain in the butt. It tells you what it needs. And then it puts the holographic outline up. And then you have to put each specific ingredient where it would go inside the form. So if you were building like a wooden frame, it first says, oh, first you're going to have to put up four
00:34:40
Speaker
uh four logs and then it'll be like okay now you need to put up four long sticks and you have to individually place each one it's a little bit of a long pain but it does lend it like a certain amount of weight and pride to what you build like when we finally had a roof to put over a fire so the rain didn't put it out every goddamn five minutes there was actual cheering
00:35:04
Speaker
I think tears in Dave's eyes. I was really happy to be able to cook all that meat I had brought home. I was rotting in my backpack. It's it's definitely like I do like that part of it. Yeah, there's there's a trade off between. You're putting effort into it and it's good to get something out of that. It lends to the sense of pride and accomplishment, as you would put it. But
00:35:34
Speaker
then walls were super expensive. And like we would be deforesting. Deforestationing? Deforesting.
00:35:41
Speaker
committing genocide on the forest. In an area surrounding our base, we would run out of trees and not be able to finish our walls. Yeah. It's not like all trees were destructible. It was a certain type of tree that had just enough width to be like, oh, my axe can break through it. And you cut those down into logs or sticks. But the other big jungle trees were just kind of there.
00:36:06
Speaker
So you'd have to keep going further and further out to grab the resources you needed to construct something, or to go hunting, or find fruits and veg. After spending like, I don't know, what did we spend on multiplayer 10 or 15 hours probably? Maybe 20? All together.
00:36:24
Speaker
So after like 20 hours deforesting the Amazon, I kind of have a lot of sympathy for real world companies that deforest the Amazon. There's lashes and ants and snakes and apparently angry tribesmen. Like I get it.
00:36:42
Speaker
To be fair, I hope they have some good machinery to do it. You know, they're not all doing it by hand, you know? Just drop a guy in the forest with a wood max. See what you can do. Go to town, get us as many logs as you can. Just imagine a bunch of guys in hard hats with the little wooden axes, all of them hallucinating and hearing the voices. You're never getting home. Shut up.
00:37:08
Speaker
Oh my gosh. The other thing is if you want something big like logs or big rocks, you actually had to carry them physically. They couldn't really go in your inventory. Certain things you could stack like, oh, I can have a bunch of long sticks. Think up to like five or six. But you had to carry them back and then drop them. Yeah, actually, that was another system that I actually liked how it was implemented because it
00:37:36
Speaker
it gave weight to going out and gathering firewood it's like yeah go out which is just by the way there is a weight system in the game that never came into play except one time when jake was trying to bring back every rock in existence but
00:37:51
Speaker
I felt it more in single player, but yeah, multiplayer hardly. It would come down to like, oh, I've gone out. I stacked all these regular sized sticks on top of my backpack and a number of small sticks. And on top of my shoulder, I just loaded up these five huge branches. And now I got to waltz my way back to camp and try not to get destroyed by a jaguar. Or a rattlesnake. Yeah, those are.
00:38:20
Speaker
They're stationary, but if you walk close to them, they'll bite you. And it was just another, like, debuff thing. You'd have to have, like, health poultices basically prepared in advance so you could stop the venom. Similar deal if you get scratched.
00:38:36
Speaker
Because if you leave any hazard untended in Green Hell, it kills you eventually. It's just like, ah, I'm thirsty. Dead. I don't know the necrotic wounds when it's like, oh, your wound has rotted and you take a look at it and you're like, oh, yes, it has. Your arm looks like something out of a World War II documentary.
00:38:57
Speaker
That is actually something I like about the game, is that when you do get injuries and stuff, you can check on your body to be like, where's that at? And you can kind of turn your arms and legs back and forth and be like, oh, I have a leech over here. I'm of two minds about it, because I think it's the coolest thing to be able to look down at your body and be like, okay, do a visual inspection. Where is the pain? On the other hand, I had to check for leeches every 30 seconds for 30 hours.
00:39:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's a bit grindy on the number of things that are trying to kill you and fuck up your stats. But it was nice that you could like, like, oh, you have some leeches on you and just go up to your buddy and just mash E on him. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely added that to the player and co-op. That being said, co-op is the the secondary citizen here.
00:39:52
Speaker
It was added after multiplayer was done. The game was launched. Co-op was a fairly recent development. And it's clear. There's a warning when we started playing. It's like, hey, consider doing the tutorial on single player first. I'm like, why would I do that? What are the casuals? Yeah. As it turns out, we do that. Just do that. The game doesn't tell you how to do
00:40:20
Speaker
simple things that make survival much easier. So just turning a large rock into two small stones with the right click menu. And we just wasted a lot of time. I think it's a fairly conservative estimate to say we spent the first 45 minutes of that game wandering around trying to find small rocks when we just had, we were like, damn it, we found another big rock. And none of us tried right clicking on the big rock to see if we can make small rocks out of it.
00:40:50
Speaker
It was the moon landing when someone discovered that. Yeah. It's just like, oh my gosh. Like I really want macaroni, but if I keep getting these useless, easy Mac boxes, there's nothing I can do. I wanted peanuts.
00:41:13
Speaker
I didn't like my discovery portion though. Like it felt cool to be like, oh, is there something we can do now? But like you said with the tag, I felt like it kind of tapped out kind of early.
00:41:25
Speaker
Yeah, I was myself because I'm the tech tree junkie. Like in whatever crafting game we play, that's my first priority. And so I'm going through and I'm making things. It's like make a rack to put sticks on. I'm like, this seems like it'll make our life easier. And it did. And we built like a small hut.
00:41:47
Speaker
And I put up wooden walls. And when I say wooden walls, it's not so much wooden walls. It's like seven sticks that are roughly crisscrossed with clear foot-long gaps in between the sticks. It's more like a wooden cage or a fence than a wall. And I'm like, well, this feels kind of cheap. And then almost accidentally,
00:42:10
Speaker
I was in water and it's like, oh, it lets me pick up mud and I picked up mud and my journal updated with no less than 20 things that I can make out of the mud. And I'm like, oh, that's the next level. Yeah. And the single player doesn't tell you that either, to be fair. I discovered it like when I went to just retrieve mud to start making mud tech, there wasn't anything else.
00:42:36
Speaker
The way recipes are hidden until you either pick up the item itself, say from a tribal, or you discover it in one of their camps somewhere on the map, or you just go to the wiki and you looked it up and you make the thing. So it's like Animal Crossing DIY. You're like, I have an idea for mud. There was the interesting mechanic. I know Jake and I talked about it a bit. Whereas you're crafting things, there's little pips above the crafting grid.
00:43:06
Speaker
and they start to fill up and have empty ones left to show you, oh hey, I've put three ingredients together here and it lets me make an item, but there's a fourth ingredient slot open. What ingredient could I put into that fourth slot to make another item? And once that system is discovered and understood, it does become a little bit easier to start conceptualizing what would make sense in a fourth slot here.
00:43:34
Speaker
But again, that is not something that's ever explained. Yeah, we were basically done with the game when we found that out. And even then, it's like intuition only gets you so far in the game. If you're just like, I put a bone here and there's like six pick pips left, you're like looking at you different stone pickaxe and stone axe.
Crafting Challenges & Exploration Debate
00:43:58
Speaker
Second second bone. Oh, yeah. Some items you can only craft with things that can't be held in your backpack. Oh, my God. That was a nightmare for going back to the spears. Oh, yeah. I'd have to place a spear on a long stick on the ground. How do things my inventory look towards it and then kind of drag all the things together. But half the times I wouldn't actually be able to see the stick like I would visually see it, but I couldn't click and drag it in.
00:44:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's really weird. I don't know. I'm not a fan of, like we move past adventure games in the early 2000s where it's just like, here's your inventory, click thing, click thing, click thing, click thing.
00:44:45
Speaker
And some of the recipes are like that. Are you talking like a point and click adventure? Yeah, I'm just pointing. Like use fish on lock. I mean, like, ah, no. Okay. Use key on fish. Okay. That's not it either. You know, something like that. And there are some intuitive recipes like axes, spears. They're mostly the same, but you just change what the tip is. Cool. Awesome. That's a good implementation. More complex recipes though.
00:45:14
Speaker
Like we didn't know armor was in the game until we looked at the wiki and there's like four different types of armor. Yeah, it's we were at the point where we're making metal and iron spearheads and we take a look at the wiki and it's like, oh yeah, you could have just put banana leaves on yourselves and called it a day. Yeah.
00:45:35
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It's not the most intuitive for figuring out all the things. Because if you put just like a bone in the crafting thing, it's like, hey, six pips. But as soon as you put another item, it'll kind of dwindle down your options. So that number of pips may change. Like, wait, it was it was six, but now it's four. Remove stick.
00:45:57
Speaker
I will say I did enjoy once we got you know towards the point where we stopped caring about the game covering myself in the bones of tribesmen while I hunted them down did feel I got my kicks what's funny about this is the whole like
00:46:16
Speaker
I'm pretty sure one of the single player goals of the game is like, make people feel like the preservation of natives tribes people is important. And, you know, we shouldn't infringe upon their rights and their agency and all of this by like,
00:46:34
Speaker
going into their territory. But you actually deal with the tribesmen in the game. You're like, these guys are douchebags. Kill all of them. I don't care. They should have been fringed on my banana plot. Like the gloves came off at that point.
00:46:50
Speaker
I remember after we fought them in multiplayer a little bit, I started out my single player game and passed a point. They kind of just spawn out there in the world and they'll be singing, which is kind of cool. You can hear them before you see them most of the time and choose to move around them or whatever. But there was just one guy and I was like, I don't know if the game's going to
00:47:14
Speaker
make him an enemy or not, but he looks like an enemy based off what I know from multiplayer. So just like raise the spear above me, his back to me. I'm just like, no, we're just going to kill him now. And then there was a conversation. You have a little radio to call Mia, which is like the protagonist's wife. He's trying to save her. And he's like, he's like, oh, like I had I had to kill a tribesman.
00:47:41
Speaker
And she's like, oh my gosh, what happened? And there's like two choices where it's just like, I brutally slaughtered him and he attacked me. There was nothing I could do. And I'm like, second option. When it was, it was a lie, but they're all enemies. There are no like nice tribes people. I don't know what the game was trying to go for, but
00:48:07
Speaker
They're bad as far as the protagonist is concerned. But yeah, I think the game has, now that we've talked about the crafting and we talked about the combat and stuff, it has the juicy bits.
00:48:22
Speaker
It has an identity disorder, as I was going to say, where we could build a base, and we kind of did in our last attempt. But the game doesn't really want you to do that. It wants you to go out on this massive map and explore and find new things. So the base building is a trap, basically. In fact, I generated three or four separate multiplayer worlds.
00:48:49
Speaker
And I thought I was generating a randomly generated map every time because that's how big the map is, is I had never wandered into the same area twice when it randomly plopped me down somewhere. And it's this gigantic oblivion sized map. And it's in its defense, a lot of it's pretty the samey.
00:49:14
Speaker
Like, you know, it's hard to tell exactly where you are sometimes because, you know, trees. But once you start building up like your landmarks, you can navigate it. Like you recognize, oh, it's this stream. It's this river. It's this, you know, drug den. Yeah. Which is where we built our base last time. We pulled up all the cocoa bushes to make a house. Yeah. Yeah.
00:49:44
Speaker
My thing here obviously has to be like, we reviewed the forest previously. And that game that I will always sing high praise about, because it does have a bit of survival. It does have a bit of crafting. And the base building is more, I feel more of a fleshed out thing there. But it kind of encourages you to go out and explore based on how many things start attacking you. And you want to know why it's happening. And you explore these caves. And you find clues about an overall plot.
00:50:13
Speaker
But here, when you had a base, it felt like you were burning a lot of resources and time to go through it. And then you didn't really get much out of it from what you guys have described for a single player. And it all seems to be like they would put things in for the sake of difficulty.
Gameplay Critiques & Wiki Dependency
00:50:32
Speaker
like having all these resources you need to maintain, putting a shit ton of foliage everywhere, because every time I got bit by a snake or a spider, I did not see them because I'm kind of just running through the jungle chasing a capybara as you do. Right. But there's just so much stuff going on any time. Like, you know, talking about those leeches, those were not constant.
00:50:56
Speaker
Yeah. And it just seemed like they did it to obscure your vision to make it more difficult for the sake of making it more difficult. So you mentioned that we built a base, but I don't think it really conveys the level of magnitude of effort it takes to actually build any sort of structure that could accommodate more than one person. Because let's say on our second attempt, we built a base that was three by three. That's, um,
00:51:25
Speaker
nine times four is 36 logs. Every person can only carry three logs at a time. So that's 12 trips for all of us just for the logs. Then for each wall was seven large sticks. And that's, I'm not going to do the math right now, but yeah, thanks.
00:51:50
Speaker
nine walls times seven sticks is 56. No, it's not. I can't remember. 63. Thank you. 63 sticks of which again, we can only carry five at a time. And then every to mud reinforce it is like I think 10 mud per per wall.
00:52:11
Speaker
And you can only carry one mud at a time per person. And you can only craft six at a time, right? Yeah. So every every step of base building is arduous, which, yes, it makes you value it. But like you were saying, Jake, in the single player campaign, it wants you to like set down and then move out to your next camp. Why the hell would I want to invest an hour of my time to build anything?
00:52:39
Speaker
with these pretty cool building systems when the game is encouraging me to leave it behind. Yeah, it's not like you're going to go two clicks away and then go like, oh, I should go back to the first one to grab that meat that's already gone bad. This is tangentially related. How far is it click? I've heard this used in descriptions of distance. I have no idea.
00:53:04
Speaker
I think it's, you know, arbitrarily determined, although it might be a kilometer because they both start with K. I'm gonna go with that. Seems like it's pretty, pretty far. Yeah, the most like half of my single player time was doing all my initial base setup and stuff. And then as soon as I left, none of it mattered. Like I spent the other half actually just doing the plot.
00:53:30
Speaker
I'm getting a thumbs up from Dave. I think it's the kilometer. Yeah, Ian's correct. Oh. Nice. Good job. I'm so happy. Makes up for the math. I'm happy that you're correct, but I'm mad that you said because they both start with K. I'm correct. The word click is not OK. But yeah, I almost feel like my impression is now that I've beaten the game,
00:53:58
Speaker
Single player is actually not too bad. The thing I hate most about it is it has the needle and haystack syndrome, where it's just like you need one thing somewhere on this massive map in order to progress.
00:54:11
Speaker
Progress. I don't want to say progress. Progress. And your best bet is look on the wiki. There's literally a point where it's like you have to find an overturned Jeep somewhere in the world, literally, in order to progress. But the base, I almost feel like the base building was just added because people requested it while it was in early access. It's a survival game. You've got to have base building.
00:54:42
Speaker
Yeah. And as soon as they put the base building in, they're like, hey, we need to have like native attacks or something or else why did I spend all this time making a base? Why can I put like spike traps around? Yeah. So they throw it in as an afterthought.
00:54:56
Speaker
I feel like in the same way certain companies would be like, Oh, what's popular and big? Oh, we need to hit these check boxes and throw it in. And you're like, Oh, it constitutes the game because it has these check boxes ticked off. Um, it just felt like it was kind of picking and choosing things from crafty survival games, but not necessarily the good pieces. Yeah. Yeah.
00:55:20
Speaker
It the game would have been better, honestly, without the base building and more of a single player focus. And it's kind of dumb, but it would have been better without I don't know.
00:55:31
Speaker
I don't think it's a great multiplayer example of a survival crafty game. I would give it a higher praise if it wasn't so incessantly buggy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my favorite bug like that, it's one of these things where it's like, is this a bug or is this a feature?
00:55:50
Speaker
because it's in the rainforest so the first few days of gameplay every now and then it'll start to rain now rain has a big impact on what we're doing because it puts out any carried fires if you have a campfire out with food cooking on it and it's not covered it'll put it out and stop your food production campfires raise your sanity so they're good there and at night it's legitimately dark so you do need them well
00:56:17
Speaker
it just started to rain one day and then it never stopped. It was the biblical flood in the middle of the Amazon and by like, Jake and I had been playing for like three hours and after like an hour of it not stopping to rain so that I can cook some food, I was like, Jake, I think it's bugged.
00:56:40
Speaker
Yeah, I had the opposite in my single player. So I'm very confident it's a bug because otherwise the rain comes and goes on like a day by day cycle.
00:56:49
Speaker
But I had a week of in-game time where it didn't rain. And so all of my plants stopped growing. It was just they all stopped entirely. Agriable. It just stops. It did. It just stopped. You take a fish out of the trap, kind of shake it over the plant, go put it back in. Well, that's for getting water in the game. The game wants you to purify your water. It wants you to go out, pour it through a water purifier, let it spend time and get it.
00:57:18
Speaker
But in multiplayer, our answer was to just put bowls everywhere and let it rain. Or I could do that. I had to boil water and my single player because rain turned off as a feature. The other more efficient option is to get the mushrooms that remove parasites from your body and then just guzzle straight from the river. Yeah. Dirty water chase with the mushroom.
00:57:45
Speaker
Your guy remarks, too, when you drink dirty water. Or there's three tiers. There's clean water, which I think is only in one location in single player, like the starter area. Unsafe water, and then dirty water. And if you're not drinking clean water, your guy's like, nope, nope, bad idea, whatever. And I'm just sitting there just spamming the interaction. Bad idea. Let me do it again. Bad idea. Bad idea. Real bad idea. I'm just going to mushroom my way out of this. I think that's the part.
00:58:13
Speaker
In the same way, you can have either raw meat or something else that's not ideal to eat. And you might get parasites, but there are mushrooms to remove parasites too. There's a lot. So as long as you have some mushrooms in the jungle, you can get by. Yeah, mushrooms were really like the anchor food there. It's like, oh, there's a mushroom for it. Whatever I need. Yeah, it didn't really provide a lot of stats, but it was good for taking off negative buffs, debuffs.
00:58:43
Speaker
I think the real breadwinner in that game is coconuts.
00:58:47
Speaker
Because coconuts are really good. They're good for food. And then afterwards, you're left with a coconut bowl. And it's like, now I no longer need water.
Gameplay Strategy & Final Thoughts on Green Hell
00:58:54
Speaker
I'm just going to set you out under the eye. Oh, yeah. Under the eye. Under the sky. The eye of the sky. Do you guys remember that part in Lord of the Rings where the eye of Sauron just constantly paid attention to the rainforest? Well, actually, I cried. And we're collecting those tears and drinking those. That makes sense. Yeah.
00:59:17
Speaker
So my advice, if people do want to go through single player, just build the occasional shelter and campfire and stone tools and beat the game. Don't make anything else. Call it a day. Would you guys recommend the game at this point if it is just single player? No, not really. I mean, I would recommend it based on price, basically, and how much free time you have.
00:59:42
Speaker
Like, see, that's at this point, it's not even really a good recommendation. It's like, well, if you don't have anything better to do. Yeah, right. So if you find yourself actually on an eyeless, you could die playing this game. I enjoyed a whole bunch about it. We didn't mention it's really pretty. Oh, yeah. It's it has spent a lot of its budget on its art and its assets are all very well done.
01:00:11
Speaker
But in terms of its gameplay loop, I can't talk much for the single player. I gave up very soon after the tutorial. I didn't have the wherewithal to keep going. But from a multiplayer survival crafting standpoint, I'd say we got a solid 20 hours out of it where I actually enjoyed my time. It's just there wasn't anything beyond that to keep my interest or to ever have me go back to it.
01:00:40
Speaker
Like, I think that I'm more cynical though. If I, if I enjoy a couple hours of investment and then I get to the end of that and I don't have like that payoff, the close of the loop, then I'm just like, ah, you wasted all my time. Even if I had fun at the moment, right? Jake's enjoyment is a carefully stacked house of cards where just a single maneuver tears all of it apart.
01:01:07
Speaker
That's relatively true, though. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think I recommend it. If it was just the single player, you pretty much in order to actually have it respect your time, you have to consult the wiki. Which never feels like a game design to me. No. Yeah. The thing is, like, if you actually do consult the wiki, the story is relatively interesting. There's some cool stuff I'm not going to get into it, but
01:01:36
Speaker
A bunch of awesome things happen, there's some cool locales, and it all could have been accomplished in a linear game. So can we talk about the fact that I think this is one of the first episodes of the Soapstone where we don't entirely spoil the plot of the game. Sometimes we plan to spoil, but then we just opt out. Yeah, in the middle. We're just like, oh, spoilers. Well, we probably won't cover this one. They might want to play with it. Bruce Willis was dead the whole time.
01:02:05
Speaker
What? Yeah. Yeah. I've seen him in so many movies. Yeah. Hey, which was the the man on the island. Oh, we did have a head cannon joke that the protagonists, the co-op protagonists in particular of Green Hell.
01:02:32
Speaker
are the antagonists of the forest. So people who have listened to both episodes can make the connection. It feels like it. Yeah. I'm at the point where like.
01:02:49
Speaker
I did enjoy my time with it because of playing with these guys. Um, but if I was with a different group or if I was just in single player, I would lose interest very, very quickly. And also I'm instinctively comparing this whole thing to the forest every time. Um, and I feel like the forest does a lot of those things really well. And here it just, it kinda has some misses for me.
01:03:14
Speaker
right yeah we'll have to revisit the forest forest round two with context more context of the surrounding genre ian's never played it so that is true um yeah so it's a it's a middling maybe for me get it if it's free or five bucks and you have a lot of time to spend
01:03:36
Speaker
Or if they had significantly more better content. I mean, because with game development nowadays, it's a constant march towards progress. There's never a done game anymore. Yeah, it's always very iterative. If no man's guy can turn around, anyone can do it. You know what? Underdog story.
01:03:59
Speaker
Yeah, add dogs. We can eat the dogs. Oh, no. Don't give the green hell developer spooky jar any more ideas, because that is the next level of that game is getting attacked by wild dogs and then eating them. Tea pose pups. I'll leave everybody, I think, with my pro strat given all the time in the game. Separate yourself from your opponent, be that a jaguar or a tribesman.
01:04:28
Speaker
by any amount of water and you're good. For some reason, they just chose not to implement swimming animations or anything. So much like a vampire, they will never cross running water. You know, with that mental framework in mind, the game became much more interesting for me. Yeah. Do you guys have any final thoughts for it before we put it down?
01:04:54
Speaker
No, I think we I think I covered everything I needed to talk about. Like, I think Dave summed it up best. It's like, I really enjoyed playing this game with you guys. I think the moment with you guys is removed from that situation. I have to remove the rest of the sentence, too. Yeah, because I didn't enjoy the single player. And I don't think I'd enjoy a survival game without you guys either. So, you know. No, I agree. Solid. You can have 10.
01:05:25
Speaker
Maybe out of 10. If the bow consistently worked, it would definitely improve my score. Yeah. But sometimes I craft a bow and I just could not physically use it.
01:05:37
Speaker
If you bring up your watch, also, if you do play the game and you find yourself in a situation where you can't use tools, bringing up your watch seems to fix it for me on the several occasions that happened in single player. Can't use a bow with my watch. Oh, I'm hungry. I can use bows. All right. Well, thank you to our guest, Ian, for intruding on this episode. Oh, it's always a pleasure to intrude.
01:06:07
Speaker
Um, and as always, uh, if you guys have any feedback on this, got, uh, more guest episode ideas, you want to be turned down as a guest. Uh, you could send in your thoughts and ideas to soapstone podcast at gmail.com or join the discussion on Facebook. Um, which is facebook.com slash soapstone podcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one.
01:06:36
Speaker
Leave. Goodbye. Alright. Thank you for your service, Ian. Get out of here.
01:07:08
Speaker
so