Creepy Jar’s Green Hell is among the survival games that forever changed the genre and the way indie developers are perceived. Green Hell was fully released in 2019. It was met with such a warm reception due to its excellent AI, setting dynamics, and enigmatic storytelling techniques.
Green Hell stands in a very special place in the survival scene. Its success has allowed Creepy Jar to grow and evolved ever since its release, and with them, Green Hell itself. They’ve even ported it to the PS4 and released a VR version of Green Hell, with a couple of prequels to it that go by the Spirits of Amazonia Part 1 and Part 2.
However, so many other games out there have stood to deliver a greatly similar feel when you think about their settings, mechanics, and survival dynamics. Here’s our pick of 15 similar games…
Green Hell Game Features
 Release Date: | September 5, 2019 |
 Developer: | Creepy Jar |
 Publisher: | Creepy Jar & Forever Entertainment |
 Platforms: | Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One |
 Genre: | Survival |
 Setting: | Jungle, Amazon River |
 Game Modes: | Single-player, Multiplayer |
1. Stranded Deep
Beam Team Games’ stranded deep is arguably the most similar game to Green Hell in terms of gameplay mechanics.
Conveniently, it starts with you aboard a plane about to crash into the ocean.
As soon as it’s underwater, you swim up to find a raft to take you to a nearby isle to start the game.
It’ll seem a bit grueling at first until you get to know the crafting, building, and leveling systems.
Stranded deep is an open-world survival game with a ton of crafting, building, and exploration. It’s a vast ocean setting with near countless isles to explore.
It’s a very punishing survival experience where you need to take into consideration every move you make from where you build your bases to the ground you step on.
There are numerous dangers in the forms of animals, flora, sea monsters, and the worst one of them all, the fragility of the human body.
Stranded deep is a harsh survival experience that puts you in very vulnerable circumstances where you calculate every move you make.
- Developer: Beam Team Games
- Publisher: Beam Team Games
- Release Date: January 2015
- Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch
2. The Long Dark
Hinterland Studio’s The Long Dark is one of the most creatively-structured games on our list. It combines traditional elements of the survival genre with a compelling story to motivate you to push through the hardship that comes with the freezing wilderness
Its narrative progression system and survival elements have a way of always leaving you on the edge of your seat. Green Hell’s narrative elements and incredible AI enemies often did the same.
Its storyline is in the form of an episodic structure. There are currently up to four playable episodes, with the fifth about to release in 2023.
The Long Dark starts with the pilot, Will Mackenzie and his passenger Astrid Greenwood flying above the Canadian Wilderness. A Geomagnetic event causes their plane to crash and the two are separated.
In the process of trying to survive and find shelter, Will stumbles upon Milton, a small mostly-abandoned town. This is where Will begins to actually understand the depth of the situation that found himself in.
The Long Dark is an authentic and serious survival-exploration experience. The game does its least to guide you, therefore, you must think for yourself.
Every ration you eat, every supply you use, and every time you walk out to the cold treacherous wilderness must be carefully calculated not to reach hunger, thirst, fatigue, or die of the cold.
In The Long Dark, you hunt, craft, explore, and map your surroundings while you carefully maintain your stats and survive the cold. There are many dangers to this wild world. But at least the game’s mesmerizing visuals style will give you warmth throughout your experience.
- Developer: Hinterland Studio
- Publisher: Hinterland Studio
- Release Date: September 2014
- Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Nintendo Switch
3. Rust
FacePunch Studios’ Rust stands among the elite survival games as its gameplay mechanics make way for the most dynamic multiplayer survival experience to represent its genre, theme, and setting.
The game starts with you on a mysterious island, naked and vulnerable as ever, save for a rock and a torch. From there, you must explore your surroundings, and gather resources to build a shelter.
Then, the real Rust experience begins as go out there into the post-apocalyptic world. It’s a very dangerous island where terror never sleeps.
Just like Green Hell, you can hunt, forage, scavenge craft, and most importantly, build a base of your own design by utilizing some of the most innovative building and crafting mechanics in survival genre history.
You even get to raid other players’ bases for resources or to send a “message”.
However, the players themselves are the element that gives Rust its real beauty (or bitterness in certain situations).
As you explore the vast island, you’ll stumble across more than a few players who you may want to outsmart and take care not to let them get the better of you.
In Rust, being friendly is a luxury reserved only for your clanmates. This multiplayer-only survival game is one that demands you utilize your cunning, brutality, and consistency in order to thrive in its savage post-apocalyptic world.
- Developer: Facepunch Studios
- Publisher: Facepunch Studios
- Release Date: December 2013
- Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4, and Xbox One
4. 7 Days to Die
This post-apocalyptic survival hybrid is not your typical zombie-fest. The Fun Pumps presented us with a cocktail of genres in 7 Days to Die and so, they’ve created one of – if not the – most innovative zombie survival games of its generation.
7 Days to Die puts you in either the preset setting of Navezgane, Arizona or a randomly-generated world of similar designs, both would be vast open-world settings with a ton of content and locations for you to explore.
Your goal here is to survive for as many days as you can. This day-counter system also exists in Green Hell, but granted, in 7 Days to Die, it’s a way bigger world with way more obstacles for you to overcome and hordes of zombies.
Speaking of zombies, there are literally hordes of them in this game. Just like Green Hell, you can either choose to fight and run or build a base of your own design and fortify it to fight off those hordes. I’d choose the latter option if I were you.
You can also have other players in your game. As far as multiplayer goes, you may stick together as there is strength in numbers, or raid other players and make extra enemies.
7 Days to Die offers you all of the above and more with over 500 crafting options, farming, hunting, looting, and vehicles to build yourself that make world traversal easier for you. There are even trader NPCs who sell and buy goods from you and offer your special quests to embark on.
It’s a true hardcore survival game fit only for genre enthusiasts. It’s a do-it-yourself game where the player makes his own experience.
- Developer: The Fun Pimps
- Publisher: The Fun Pimps
- Release Date: December 2013
- Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4, Xbox One, and Xbox Cloud Gaming
5. DayZ
The standards for immersion in zombie survival games were drastically elevated when we were introduced to DayZ back in 2013.
This multiplayer survival game gave was among the first games of the past generation that gave players near-absolute autonomy over their narratives and the nature of their playthroughs.
In DayZ, a bio-weapon goes off in the fictional post-Soviet state of Chernarus. In a matter of days, most of the residents get infected with the virus and become rampaging lunatics with only a cannibalistic instinct to sustain themselves.
You are one of 60 players who find themselves in this predicament. Your goal? Well, it’s to survive for as long as you possibly can.
As for how you choose to survive, it’s all up to you. You can choose to lone wolf it and avoid getting backstabbed by other malicious-intent players. Alternatively, you can join up with a group of fellow survivors and see for how long you lot can walk the undead Russian wasteland.
DayZ is an open-world survival game where all of the above is only enhanced by the extensive immersion that is provided to you.
This game inherits all of the traditional mechanics that are showcased in survival games, including even fishing, trading, and base-building.
Plus, the fact that DayZ does not give you any certain questlines or critical paths allows you to speak and act for yourself in the game. It’s also only appropriate due to you needing to constantly maintain your health stats while at the same time looking out for everything and everyone that wants to kill you.
Your zombie apocalypse storyline is yours to create.
- Developer: Bohemia Interactive
- Publisher: Bohemia Interactive
- Release Date: December 2013
- Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4, Xbox One, and Xbox Cloud Gaming
6. Subnautica
If you thought being stranded on the island full of cannibals and mutated monsters in Green Hell is bad enough, try surviving on a whole other oceanic planet where the depth of the ocean is virtually limitless and gargantuan sea monsters are out to get you.
Subnautica is a game that preys on your mind by putting you in unsettling environments and against the unknown while you have almost no weapons of the traditional sorts to give you comfort.
Subnautica is an open-world survival game that takes place on an alien planet called 4546B in the late 22nd century.
Because of a mysterious energy pulse, you crashed on planet 4546B on board the “Aurora,” a ship that was sent to investigate the disappearance of a colonizer ship called the “Degassi.”
You were lucky enough to escape the Aurora in a life pod before it crashes. But it doesn’t stop there as you must search for other survivors of the crash and finish the investigation of the Degassi.
Subnautica is an adventurous survival experience in a vast ocean full of surprises, both pleasant and unpleasant. It’s an alien oceanic world where you either kill or you’ll be killed by the sea monsters lurking in the deep.
- Developer: Unknown Worlds Entertainment
- Publisher: Unknown Worlds Entertainment
- Release Date: December 2014
- Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Series S, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Nintendo Switch
7. Subnautica Below Zero
The 2019 sequel to Subnautica isn’t exactly a direct follow-up. Although it takes place two years after the original game on the same planet 4546B, you take the role of a new protagonist with different motives and goals.
You are Robin Ayou, a Xenoworker who came to planet 4546B to find out what really happened to her sister after Alterra Corporation (the same one that sent the Aurora in the previous game) reported her death.
That’s not the only difference from the original Subnautica though. There are so many new biomes for you to explore, both underwater and above it, from Delta Island to the Crystal Caves.
Of course, along with new biomes, you’ll also find new alien species to study with your PDA, exploit, hunt, and awkwardly try to escape from.
Subnautica Below Zero gave us a refreshing extension to the original game with characters, goals, voice-over, vehicles and tools, secrets to investigate, and mechanics.
- Developer: Unknown Worlds Entertainment
- Publisher: Unknown Worlds Entertainment
- Release Date: January 2019
- Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Series S, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Nintendo Switch
8. Dead Island
Before Dying Light, Techland’s greatest achievement in the form of a zombie game was Dead Island.
In Dead Island, you’re on a vacation in a resort on the island of Banoi. A zombie virus causes an outbreak that takes over the island.
You must choose to play as one of four people who realize that they’re immune to the virus and decide to protect the remaining survivors.
You utilize melee combat and upgrade your skill tree to hack and slash your way through the open-world island to explore, survive and protect your people.
Dead Island is the game that redefined the zombie survival genre back in 2011. It has even been fully remastered now in its Definitive Edition where every aspect of it has been revamped, including its co-op mode.
Moreover, a direct continuation was released in 2013 by the name of Dead Island: Riptide. You’ll easily sink close to sixty hours into these two games combined and you won’t regret it.
- Developer: Techland
- Publisher: Deep Silver
- Release Date: May 2016
- Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Xbox 360, and Xbox one
9. Ark: Survival Evolved
If there’s one thing that can’t be disputed, it’s that Ark: Survival Evolved is the biggest survival game of all time in terms of scope and content.
Ark bears a mechanical resemblance to Green Hell as it has the traditional mechanics of the survival genre that are hunting, crafting, building, and the obligation of having to maintain your stats to stay alive.
However, while Green Hell’s building and crafting mechanics give you the ability – to some extent – to customize your items and the structures that you build, Ark provides you with loads of individual items to choose from for crafting and building.
You unlock several of those items by leveling up. But brace yourself for quite the grind because Ark’s leveling system is no joke. It progressively demands more work and time with each level. Plus, being in such a hazardous environment full of prehistoric monsters does not make things easier.
Ark: Survival Evolved is an action-adventure survival mega game. You (a clone) are sent back to earth after it became infested with dangerous prehistoric animals to clear as many of them as you can.
There are twelve maps in total to choose from, and only half of which are official. You will also find that there is quite a variety of content in Ark in terms of creatures, environments, and overall open-world content.
You get to craft, build and hunt. To even the odds a bit, since we humans are no match to the dinosaurs, dragons, and mythical beasts that roam the world of Ark, you could even tame beasts of your own and ride them on your journey.
- Developer: Studio Wildcard
- Publisher: Studio Wildcard
- Release Date: August 2017
- Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series S and Series X, and Nintendo Switch
10. Dying Light
Dying Light was a big deal when it came out in 2015, and rightfully so. Techland’s great promise was of an open-world game that would revolutionize the zombie survival genre and much like Green Hell, scream innovation. And boy, did they deliver!
In Dying Light, you play the role of Kyle Crane, an undercover agent sent to Harran, a zombie-filled middle-eastern city under quarantine. Your main goal in Harran is to find and bring back a sensitive file that could cause political collapse if it got in the wrong hands. But of course, things aren’t going to be as simple as that.
The city of Harran is a very large setting where you get to execute your parkour skills to traverse it and fight the endless crowds of zombies and other special kinds of infected.
Dying Light is one of the biggest zombie survival games with dozens of weapons, crafting recipes, and challenges for you to complete. It also has a very unique narrative with many secrets for you to uncover by interacting with characters and roaming the city.
- Developer: Techland
- Publisher: Techland
- Release Date: January 2015
- Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S and Series X, and Nintendo Switch
11. Alien: Isolation
A modern survival game focused on Ridley Scott’s Xenomorphs and Aliens franchise was always bound to happen.
Alien: Isolation, set roughly fifteen years after the events of the first movie, was unjustly bombarded with some bad reviews when it initially came out back in 2014 but here’s the deal.
Not only does it have solid well-paced storytelling, but the amount of fear and desperation it instills in you as you roam the hallways, vents, and such of the Sevastopol space station is overwhelming.
In short, Alien: Isolation is the one video game installment in its universe that stands to master its job perfectly.
It’s a first-person survival horror game where you play as Amanda Ripley (yes, it’s our beloved’s daughter) as she investigates the mysterious disappearance of her mother.
In the process of it all, she must scavenge, craft, and maneuver her way around Sevastopol. It’s a really fun game with similar narrative mechanics to Green Hell.
- Developer: Creative Assembly
- Publisher: Sega
- Release Date: October 2014
- Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch
12. Dying Light 2: Stay Human
This year has been quite the year of long-awaited sequels for the video game industry, and perhaps, one of the most anticipated of them all is Dying Light 2.
It takes place 22 years after the events of the original Dying Light. Along the way in 2021, a mutant strain of the Harran virus breached GRE containment, which led to the virus taking over the whole world.
Everything is overhauled in Dying Light 2. The open-world map is four times the size of the original. Combat is also one thing that stands out as a definite overhaul from the first game, with even more diverse and creative ways to kill both human and undead enemies.
Perhaps, however, the most attractive, completely new addition to the franchise is its choice and consequence system. For the first time ever, you get to have a say in how the city changes and its communities evolve in Dying Light 2.
- Developer: Techland
- Publisher: Techland
- Release Date: February 2022
- Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S and Series X, and Nintendo Switch
13. Scum
This is the quintessential multiplayer zombie survival game, and – just like scum – it holds that mantle due to its attention to detail.
It has unprecedented levels of character and inventory customization that only add to its depth of immersion.
From managing your character’s metabolism to having to personally find out what’s wrong with a gun when it jams and how to repair it, Scum offers you some of the most realistic survival mechanics in a post-apocalyptic zombie survival game.
Furthermore – and needless to mention – Scum offers you the traditional survival mechanics such as crafting, building, and foraging, with the addition of an array of vehicles that you can use to traverse its vast open-world servers.
However, what makes scum a truly living, breathing survival game is its community. Every server holds a host of players that roam this mysterious prison island. You can make alliances or mortal enemies of them. One thing’s for sure, it’s that you must be wary of your surroundings at all times. You rarely ever know when someone (or something) is stalking you.
- Developer: Gamespires
- Publisher: Gamespires
- Release Date: August 2018
- Platforms: Microsoft Windows
14.Minecraft
We can’t possibly have a list of open-world survival games without including the most famous of them all.
This game needs absolutely no introduction. Ever since its release in 2011, it has been amassing millions of players throughout the years and to this day, it bears one of the biggest numbers of active players in a multiplayer game.
Minecraft is a survival game where you create and break a variety of blocks of numerous qualities and effects to build and survive. Its environment is almost fully interactable and breakable.
Of course, you must manage and maintain stats like your hunger and continually gather necessary supplies in order to keep going, but perhaps the most defining instances of its survival aspect come at night.
Minecraft has also one of the most famous day-and-night cycles where waves of zombies and other mysterious creatures come to claim your head.
- Developer: Mojang Studios
- Publisher: Mojang Studios
- Release Date: November 2011
- Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and Android
Conclusion
That’s about it, fellow survivalists! This is our definitive list of the top survival games that you should play if you enjoy Green Hell and its in-depth attention to detail and immersion elements. Are there any other games that come to your mind when thinking about Green Hell?
