WWE 2K25 released earlier this year and added a new 2K Showcase focused on The Bloodline, while Persona 5 Tactica serves as a turn-based strategy spin-off for the main series. Green Hell is a brutal survival experience in the Amazon, and Fate/Samurai Remnant is a new hack-and-slash title offshoot co-developed by Omega Force of Hyrule Warriors fame.

Crow Country is an acclaimed PlayStation One-style survival horror inspired by Resident Evil and Silent Hill. PS5 owners can also check out sci-fi adventure The Invincible and top-down survival horror Conscript. Meanwhile, Premium subscribers will have access to Legacy of Kain: Defiance on both platforms. As a new title in the vaunted action-adventure series, it features both Kain and Raziel as playable characters.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl

Developer GSC Game World brought the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series back into the limelight with the recently released Heart of Chornobyl, which undoubtedly represents the peak of the series. It takes what worked in prior entries, and creates something that’s bigger and better in almost every way. It blends a modern gameplay framework with the brutal survival mechanics of past entries, and that culminates in an experience that’s sure to stay with you long after the credits roll.

This War of Mine

A game to endure rather than enjoy, This War of Mine paints a harrowing picture of survival inside a war-ravaged city. Overseeing a small band of survivors you’ll take sanctuary from the chaos outside during daytime, cooking, crafting tools, healing, and upgrading your hideout. Under the cloak of night time darkness your survivors must venture out in search of materials, resources, and medicine, encountering NPCs both friendly and hostile. Whether you choose to trade, rob, or kill those you meet depends on the desperation within your group; all morals go out the window when you’re besieged, fighting for survival. This War of Mine tells an intimate tale laced with guilt and shame, with the mental wellbeing of your survivors just as important as the food in their bellies and roof over their head.

Green Hell’s current-gen release will be accompanied by updates 17, 18, and 19 – which were previously only available to PC players – also become available for console players. That said, Creepy Jar has confirmed that cross-gen cross-platform multiplayer will not be supported, while save transfers from last-gen versions to current-gen versions won’t be supported either, which means everyone is going to have to start fresh. 

Additionally, support for the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game is being dropped. With Creepy Jar turning its attention to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, Green Hell’s last-gen versions won’t receive new updates and patches going forward.

Check out the announcement trailer for Green Hell’s PS5 and Xbox Series X/S release below.

Prey

While they can be turned off, Traumas add much more to the experience in Arkane Studios’ Prey. Concussions can cause blurry vision and reduce psi capacity. Fear reduces firearm accuracy and impacts your vision. All of these require treatment with different items or from visiting a medical operator and reinforce the importance of, say, Thermal Shielding to prevent third-degree burns or Fear Shielding to reduce the duration of, well, Fear.

Sons of the Forest

Sons of the Forest is a brutal survival game that tasks players to hold their backs against cannibalistic primals with only a limited few resources to spare. It presents its brutal world with gorgeous graphics and striking attention to detail, and the gradual process of collecting resources and becoming more powerful is one that will keep you hooked for dozens upon dozens of hours. Add to that the ability to enjoy exploring with friends, and Sons of the Forest becomes a great option for a co-op open-world experience.

Of course, adventures that would otherwise be impossible – like surviving in a jungle and searching for ancient treasure – become all the more tenable in a video game. So let’s take a look at 10 games that had great forest and jungle settings along with what made them so unique.

Far Cry 2

The sequel is more popular – and responsible for establishing the current formula of the series – but there’s just something so appealing about Far Cry 2’s setting. As a mercenary sent in to hunt The Jackal, an arms dealer contributing to both sides in the war, players navigate through sweeping forests, plains and intricate jungles with a wide range of vehicles, from boats to hang gliders.

Malaria is also a factor, requiring the player to treat it with medicine or risk death, and there are limited healing supplies. The world itself feels alive with various animals roaming about, and physics influencing the environment, like fire that spreads naturally to surroundings. It’s not the most story-driven experience but the survival mechanics coupled with simply exploring the world as your Buddies lay out the next objective is still fairly unique.

The third part of the storyline will see the conclusion of Jake’s journey with the Amazonian tribe, which started back in January last year. Apart from that, the game will receive additional new content, such as a new Amazonian fishing tribe called Habukku, three new trial arenas, a completely new region, four new legends, two new weapons, and more.

A trailer has been released to offer a quick glimpse of the update, while also confirming its release date. Green Hell – Spirits of Amazonia Part 3 will be available later this month, on March 29. Check out the trailer below.

If you’ve ever played a real survival game from the last ten years or so then you basically know what to expect here. You will be dropped into a hazardous world with a handful of metrics to manage, terrain to familiarize yourself with, resources to gather, and of course, plenty of antagonistic forces to contend with. Of the many things that need to be constantly managed are Jake’s health, fatigue, hydration, and a balanced diet. It can be done, but don’t expect to come out of the gate swinging without making a lot of mistakes at first. Some mushrooms are good for certain situations, and some are not. Water is easy to find but must either be filtered or gathered from rainfall to be safe to drink. Weapons don’t require much to craft but the stones needed to make good ones are not super easy to find, and will change location on every spawn. Every inch of this world wants you dead, so every move you make in it needs to be purposeful and calculated. So, while Green Hell’s requirements of you are fairly simple in nature, they are not by any means easy to achieve.

"While the tone of Green Hell’s story and setting might remind you of Eli Roth’s Green Inferno, don’t let the superficial similarities lead you to think they are somehow related to one another. This is certainly a similar sort of tale that you would see from the tribal cannibal movie crazy of the early 80’s but it is also very much its own thing and it’s a story worth seeing if you can survive the game’s many treacherous obstacles – both intended and unintended ones – long enough to do so."

By design, there will almost always be something going horribly wrong. Maybe you’re away from your camp but also become so thirsty that you are forced to drink dirty water to buy you some time, which will almost certainly result in you ending up with internal parasites, which will also have to be dealt with. So, for every problem you solve, there will almost always be a new one created. This is how survival games work, but it’s particularly intense in Green Hell, both in terms of the speed at which things can deteriorate, and the sheer number of variables to keep a constant eye on. In a way, it can feel that this particular breed of hardcore survival game can conflict with the idea of progressing through a narrative. Given that my hands were always so full with problems that required immediate attention, it was hard to carve out short moments where I actually felt confident enough to move the story forward. All of this is of course even more pronounced in the beginning, as the short training section at the start does very little to initiate you to Green Hell’s numerous facets and how they impact each other. None of this is necessarily what I would call a flaw in an objective sense, as your personal appetite for punishment and hardcore survival situations will profoundly affect how much fun this sort of thing ends up being for you.

One thing that did stick in my craw however was the somewhat obtuse menu systems and inconsistent manner in which certain objects are crafted. Some items are created on your crafting table, while others require you to select them from your notebook, pick a spot, and place items into that spot to make the item manifest. Both of these methods work well enough, and I eventually understood the differences between – and purposes of – the two methods, but I still think it would have made more sense to just apply one method to everything. Couple that with the menu systems feeling quite clunky and unnatural for a controller, and you have a game that challenges you with learning how to use its various functions almost as much as it does with its actual intended gameplay. Some games make graceful transitions to console with liberal adjustments to their PC-centric menu systems; Green Hell is not one of those. Despite my best efforts to see one, I never quite felt like there was any one consistent functional language across all of Green Hell’s processes and mechanisms. Instead of the game’s moderately complex actions becoming second nature to me like they have in other similar games, I consistently found my eyes darting around the screen looking for visual cues of what button I needed to press to tell the game what I wanted to do.

While I do think that Green Hell’s difficulty could certainly be seen as one of its stronger qualities, especially for the right players, I seriously doubt that wasting precious time fumbling around with incoherent menu systems while my health continues to decline is the inferno that the developer intended. You can play an easier mode that turns off the insanity meter as well as native attacks, and for newcomers I would highly recommend this – at least until you are fluent in the game’s many quirks. Playing online could also theoretically yield benefits I suppose if you’re lucky enough to come across helpful players who can give you some tips, but I had little such luck in my time with the game.

"While I do think that Green Hell’s difficulty could certainly be seen as one of its stronger qualities, especially for the right players, I seriously doubt that wasting precious time fumbling around with incoherent menu systems while my health continues to decline is the inferno that the developer intended."

That said, once you are able to dig yourself out of the deep hole that the game initially drops you in, you can start to see glimmers of a grander system that these many different interconnected elements ultimately add up to. There is a bigger picture here that is sure to satisfy those who like the rush of constant struggle and reaching for a north star of stability that they will rarely if ever actually get to.

The visual performance of Green Hell on the PS4 Pro is impressive in terms of the detail that they were able to pull off on the platform. Details on Jake’s arms and legs stand out nicely. The Amazon rainforest is aptly dense, and everywhere you look you’ll find color, movement, and life. Sun and moon light bounce off of wet dirt and leaves in a convincing way that might momentarily trick you into thinking it’s well-optimized, but sadly overall, not so much. Screen tearing and frame drops are sights you will be very familiar with in this version of the game, especially when chopping down trees or engaging in combat. It can also interfere with normal tasks like crafting and picking up objects as button presses might not register because of a lag in the game, which can be particularly annoying in tense situations, which is most of the time. Why these haven’t been ironed out for the PS4 Pro version when the base version has existed for over three years now is beyond me, but if you are particularly sensitive to this sort of thing, I would advise you to tread lightly with getting the PS4 Pro version at this time.

Music in Green Hell is largely nonexistent but there is a nice series of eerie sounds that slowly swell as Jake loses sanity and experiences hallucinations. This well-designed soundscape helps those moments feel far more alarming than they otherwise would, and that successfully ratchets up the tension in an already constantly tense game. Voice acting is also pretty good across the board, so as far as audio goes, the game has made a seemingly perfect transition from PC and should satisfy what most PS4 Pro players are expecting.

"Green Hell makes no bones about what it is and can’t be faulted for being a purposefully difficult game that knows how to keep your back against the wall. Even after you get your arms around everything that’s expected of you, it doesn’t really feel like it loses that edge over you, so for that, Green Hell accomplishes exactly what it seems to want."

Green Hell makes no bones about what it is and can’t be faulted for being a purposefully difficult game that knows how to keep your back against the wall. Even after you get your arms around everything that’s expected of you, it doesn’t really feel like it loses that edge over you, so for that, Green Hell accomplishes exactly what it seems to want. It’s a relentless test of your ability to plan, solve problems, and adapt. What it doesn’t do is give you a user interface that facilitates your already steep uphill climb of getting the hang of things, nor does it land on the PS4 Pro in a way that keeps the gameplay feeling smooth and responsive enough to praise this version very much as a port. Thankfully, the flaws of this version don’t ever quite stop it from being a fun challenge that manages to remain enticing despite the abuse it dishes out.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

WARGROOVE

Position itself as a spiritual successor to the fan-favourite Nintendo series Advance Wars, Wargroove had a lot to live up to, and for the most part, it met those expectations expertly. And among the many things that endeared Chucklefish’s strategy title to the masses was its difficulty- Wargroove is a challenging game, and nearly every fight, every skirmish in the game is an uphill battle. And while Wargroove does occasionally become a bit too harsh with its difficulty, by and large it maintains a pretty healthy and consistent balance.