Survival horror is a genre I’m quite a fan of. It’s not my favorite genre in the world, but it's one I have the utmost respect for. Seeing the terrains developers take it next and trying to see how they can evolve it. In recent memory there seems to be more strides within the indie scene rather than the Triple A space we’ve grown to cherish. The last good mainline Resident Evil title that wasn’t the remakes for me personally was Resident Evil 7 and that was all the way back in 2017. There was this year’s Alone in The Dark which I heard was alright, and that’s all I can really think of. Most of the good big budget survival horror titles recently were mostly remakes. Dead Space, System Shock, and the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake which has a lot of raised eyebrows right now. This leaves us with the indie scene which is somehow delivering banger after banger. We got Signalis a sci-fi lovecraftian time looping nightmare now considered a new high point for all of survival horror. Amnesia: The Bunker, an evolution for the Amnesia series as it mixed traditional survival horror mechanics with immersive-sim components. Tormented Souls and Alisa, two I haven’t exactly played yet, but heard great things.
Then you have today’s topic. Crow Country, a recent entry in the indie survival horror scene that was made by SFB Games. The same people who made Snipperclips and Tangle Tower, two other indie titles I’ve heard good things about. A lot of speculation surrounded Crow Country up until release. It was the most traditional looking indie survival horror game to come out in a bit. Like a game that could potentially come out in the 1990s on the original Playstation. It had the feel, the look, the style of gameplay of one such game, and the developers incorporated tank controls for survival horror veterans wanting Crow Country to play like the good old days. Crow Country had a lot to deliver on such a small scope, and thankfully it did not disappoint. Sitting alongside the critically acclaimed Signalis, this recent survival horror darling is now being heralded as one of the best survival horror games in years. Expertly crafted, atmospheric, well written, and doing what survival horror does best. Delivering scares through pure gameplay experience rather than having to stage it. This is one of the most well received indie titles of the year, and currently it sits with an overwhelmingly positive average review score on Steam. Meaning it falls within the very small percentage of indie games that are considered the best ever made.
Is Crow Country as good as people say it is? Does it live up to the hype? My personal answer is that yes it does live up to the hype. I was planning to save this game up for October seeing how the Halloween season is only one month away. However, I was tempted to pick it up and have managed to beat it within a single weekend. Crow Country is possibly one of the best survival horror games I’ve ever played. I say maybe, because Crow Country is also one of the simplest takes on the genre. It’s not gonna do anything to subvert your expectations in the same Signalis or Amnesia: The Bunker did. Yet, it’s such a well made game that I can instantly recommend to those who haven’t touched a survival horror game before. There’s a lot to love about this game, and even though it owes a lot to its nostalgic appeal it still manages to stand on its own. Today we’re gonna be talking about Crow Country and why it deserves your attention.
Story
The year is 1990, because what’s a game with an original Playstation aesthetic not set during the year said console came out. You follow a special agent named Mara Forest as she drives towards an abandoned theme park named Crow Country. She’s been hired to locate a missing individual, but upon arrival she finds the theme park in ruins. Two years prior to the game’s main event the park was shut down. Edward Crow, creator and owner of the park, did not reveal to the public as to why the park shutdown. He continued to work behind the scenes with some benefactors, and nothing else has been released since. Mara parks her car outside the park, loads her trusty pistol, and walks through the gate. Nearby she encounters Arthur Mole, a photographer, who has been injured from unknown causes. Mara helps Arthur back to her car, but eventually picks up a photo Arthur managed to take. The picture is blurry, but upon further investigation it looks to be some sort of meaty monster. Immiting tendrils and having limbs coming out where they shouldn’t.
Mara journeys further into the park to figure out each district has been shut down. She’ll have to solve the many riddles and puzzles lying about, and learn what happened to the park staff before. She uncovers notes of previous conversations and they all hint to something devious. The guests have begun to act strange. There was an operation that went horrifyingly wrong. The staff began to go insane with everything happening, and they were all told to shut it down. To not let a single person in or out of the park the day it all went down. The guests for which these letters address have begun to emerge and they are not like what you expect. Bleeding from every pore in their body, lengthy limbs, constantly screaming in pain, and unable to remember who they are. There is something gravely wrong at this park, and it’s up to Mara to figure out what it is. All the while running into other survivors and individuals who formerly worked at Crow Country. It's up to this special agent to uncover it all, and the truth hiding within.
Gameplay
I hope a majority of you readers are familiar with classic survival horror titles like the first three Resident Evil games, Silent Hill, Eternal Darkness, and much more. Crow Country is a homage to such titles, but what makes it slightly different is that even though the game has an isometric view you can rotate the camera to a different perspective. Sure the game still has such elements like tank controls and aiming, but you can still rotate the camera to get a view of what could or could not be lying off screen. It also helps considering there are a lot of paths and traps lying around in the game. Some paths are not going to be instantly accessible as you’ll need to find a key or solve a variety of puzzles to make it to those areas. Explore the world, read documents so that you may find some clues on what to do, solve these problems, and get to where you possibly need to be. Despite the path forward being linear the game is not gonna hold you by the hand, so it’s your job to know everything. If you do get lost though you can find a journal located in one of the many save rooms in the game. Enemies don’t follow you into other rooms, so you can use this to your advantage. Run past them if you’re ill equipped, or clear them out when there’s too many dangers in an area and you want to solve puzzles in said area to feel less stressful.
Save rooms usually have supplies and a source of fire where you can save your game. If you die while exploring or in combat you get sent back to your last save. No autosaves or checkpoints whatsoever, so play carefully or efficiently depending on the scenario you are. You have a pretty big inventory compared to most survival horror games, and with it comes the tools you need to survive the dangers that stand before you. At the beginning of the game you get a pistol, but with time you get a shotgun which is powerful up close. A flamethrower to burn foes if you can spray them long enough, and a magnum which is more powerful than a pistol but the ammo for it is quite rare. In fact, both the magnum and the ammunition are hidden behind secrets so that’s why you want to look around carefully. There’s a lot of secrets in Crow Country. Some of which are upgrades for your guns. Look around the environment carefully as sometimes the resources you need to survive are cleverly hidden. Combat is fairly straightforward. You hold down one button to aim and press another to fire. You can’t move while aiming and aiming is a tad bit flimsy. That’s why you want to line up your shots just right and reposition yourself when enemies get too close. Outside of that there’s not much else I can say. It’s the survival horror experience you have come to expect, but shortly we’ll discuss why it works. Now into the bowels of hell you go.
Thoughts
Much like a lot of indie games I love, Crow Country doesn’t do a lot of things new for the genre it hails from, but it certainly does a lot of things really well. It simplifies survival horror to the basic roots and offers one of the most streamlined survival horror experiences out there while still getting your brain flowing with its tricky puzzles. I really like the puzzle design in this game as it requires a lot of memorization and looking around the world carefully, but it’s not going to pull something mind bending in the same way as something like Signalis. There’s a keypad that’s locking the door forward. May want to try one of the four digits you found earlier while reading notes, or maybe the one you found written with blood on the ground. That owl keeps hooting five times in a row. The bell to the door is colored the same as the owl, so why not try ringing the bell the same amount of times? The water is filthy, better go clean up that water. Interacting with the water talks about your reflection, but maybe by looking at the water carefully you’ll find the thing you need to interact with. The puzzles get you thinking, but they’re not so absurd that you have to sit there banging your head wondering what the heck to do. It’s the puzzle design I like and I want it to stay that way. In some ways it reminds me of click and points in that once you get the solution down you feel like a genius. It’s just good puzzles and I love it.
There’s a lot of running around in Crow Country, but what I love about its level design is that it is fairly compact. You don’t have to struggle running from one end of the map to the other. Areas are small, easy to navigate, and if something like an enemy seems like it’s gonna block your way you have choices on how to deal with it. One of the game’s greatest strengths is also one of its biggest weaknesses. Combat can be entirely ignored outside a few bosses. You can either nail down every foe you see, use environmental hazards to kill them quickly or in bunches, or just make a run for it. You can necessarily beat the game in a non-harmful pacifist way. Even the first few bosses can be ignored as long as you are the solution to opening the door forward. I expect the speedruns for this game to be crazy seeing how condensed the world is and how even though a few bosses hold the passwords to escape all you have to do is memorize. There’s even an item that allows you to run faster, and I expect agile players to use.
Which is another I love in that secrets feel wonderful to uncover and upgrades you get are quite splendid. There’s a secrets map you can pick up later on to help find the fifthteen secrets hidden throughout the game, but some of these can be found early if you know what you are doing. One of the earliest ones involved me running into a dead end. There was no other path in this room so I decided to go back, but then I noticed the wall looking strange. It was a curtain and I decided to pull it back to find a laser sight for my pistol. I didn’t even need the map, just careful analysis skills. The upgrades are simplistic and it should stay that way. While I do enjoy the leveling up systems in games like Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 sometimes all I want is simplicity. A gun mod that states its purpose and at times changes how the weapon works. The game eases you into the tank controls and combat very well. Enemies are dangerous, but they’re not gonna hound you from every side like a lot of modern horror games. They’re slow and allow you to quickly plan out what to do at that moment. Kicking back the biggest strength/weakness of fight or flight response. Headshots are lethal meaning skilled players can make difficult fights easy. My only complaint is that if you have grenades they can cheese a couple of the boss fights.
The story is quite good. It’s fairly straightforward to follow if you pay attention to all the notes lying around, and the plot twist at the end leaves a lot for you to think about. It’s not the deepest story in the world, but it’s one I still like for how entertaining it was. The characters are great, well written, and there’s good moral questioning. One that’ll give you dread, which is weird cuz even though the gameplay had its fight or flight moments I never found myself scared. In fact, I found Crow Country to be more relaxing than scary which is a weird feeling to get from a horror game. This isn’t a downside though. I like how cozy Crow Country feels at times and it’s not due to the nostalgia and graphics. Atmosphere, music, how every character has this cutesy look that somehow reminds me of Anodyne 2 a few months back. It’s lovely and I wish there were more games that would handle this feel the way these games do. Where something should be unsettling, but you just learn to accept it and vibe with all it has to offer. You can instantly tell I’m gonna strongly recommend Crow Country and as of right now it’s one of my top five games of the year. The only flaw I can think of is that the game is easy. At first there were only two difficulty settings. Explorer mode for those who don’t want to deal with combat, and the basic survival mode which is normal. Ammo and healing supplies are always plentiful, and the few times I died was from recklessness. The game is forgiving, generous, and patient with you.
I remember seeing a few people complain about how easy Crow Country was during the week of its release. Which led to the developer responding back and adding a hard mode. Which I haven’t tried yet, but I will if I plan to play this again in the future. Crow Country has a good amount of replay value and the unlocks you get depending on your performance add more reason to go back for another playthrough. You get a crow themed rocket launcher. Isn’t that awesome? The game is easy, but I honestly don’t think that’s a problem. I’m kind of tired of how extreme and “petal to the metal” horror games have gotten. Why does everything need to be a viscera fest with horror? What happened to the more laid back experiences? The horror games that master silence, pacing, and tone? That’s why I love Crow Country so much. Easy to digest and fun to play. It only costs twenty dollars for this lovely little game and I cannot recommend this masterpiece enough. In the end I give Crow Country a 9.5/10 for being superb.
This critique was written by the single man at Review on. Stay tuned for more content and feel free to check more reviews out over at my site
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