Green Hell, a survival video game available on Steam and Nintendo Switch, is being turned into a board game. Publisher Galaktus Games announced the project Wednesday, which was accompanied by a brief trailer. In it, developers show how they’ve translated key parts of the digital experience to the tabletop. A crowdfunding campaign, hosted on Kickstarter, is expected soon.
In the video game Green Hell, players take on the role of Jake Higgins, a white man lost in the Amazon rainforest. To escape, players must micromanage their resources, craft tools, and interact with the native population — and their psychoactive ayahuasca tea. According to the gang at Rock Paper Shotgun, the game’s not all that bad.
“It’s reminiscent of a smarter, more human, more grounded Far Cry,” said RPS reviewer Nic Rueben, “one written by and for people that have a frame of reference that extends beyond other video games, and also people that aren’t afraid to explicitly condemn their shitty protagonist when necessary.”
Players take on the role of rescuers searching for Higgins. Each one will have a different set of skills, so the Survival Expert, Medic, Guide, and Scientist will all need to work together to save him. Just as in the video game, scavenging is key to survival. You’ll roll dice with puzzle pieces on each face, and only by combining partial symbols into whole ones will they be able to gather raw materials from the environment. Then there’s a bit of inventory Tetris to fit everything into your pack, plus another set of dice to roll when you hallucinate on tea.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the game, however, is who is producing it. The project is being led by newly-formed Galaktus Games, part of the Galaktus PR agency, which was founded in October of last year. Its first Kickstarter campaign, for a board game based on the niche turn-based strategy game The Phantom Doctrine, was unsuccessful in raising the minimum of $69,373 and had to be canceled.