Crow Country Review
“A modern take on an old style” Written by: Hunter (@ReaperHunter23)
Crow Country is a game that I didn’t learn about until it was released back in May. It did not take much to capture my interest though. A passing glance at the launch trailer was all I needed for the game to be put on my to-do list. Crow Country presents itself as a throwback to the PS1 era of survival horror games. Thankfully, it seemed to have enough of its own spin on the genre that I felt it could be really worthwhile. So let’s take a look to see if this ride was as exciting as I believed it would be.
Image Credit: SFB Games
Crow Country follows the story of Special Agent Mara Forest. She arrives at the titular Crow Country theme park in search of the owner of the park, Edward Crow. Crow mysteriously disappeared following the sudden closure of his park two years prior to the events of the game. It's not long into Mara’s stay at the Crow Country before she starts to uncover layer upon layer of the mystery of the park.
I actually really enjoyed the story of the game. I think it made an effective use of the different memos and other documents to provide a solid breadcrumb trail to guide the player through the mystery. It also does a good job at introducing questions at a nice pace. For example: One of the things you’ll be doing a lot of to move forward with puzzles is inputting a four digit code on a keypad. This is relevant because one of the first 4 digit codes you see can’t be punched in. The keypads have buttons for 1 through 9. The code in question has a zero in it. This left me wondering what the use of that code would be for several hours.
The game’s limited cast was a lot of fun to interact with. Mara is a fun protagonist. Her inner monologue when examining items and scenery throughout the park provides a lot of opportunities for her personality to shine through without it ever undercutting the tension of a given situation. She’s certainly not as straight laced as one might expect a Special Agent to be.
The rest of the cast is entertaining as well. Whether it's Crow’s shady business partner, the photographer who was trying to catch a glimpse of the monsters in the park, or the lawyer that’s determined to serve Crow his legal papers, everyone that Mara meets brings an appropriate amount of intrigue or levity to the proceedings. I especially enjoyed all of the memos between the park employees. There was something rather comical about reading the efforts of all of these people trying to hold together this unraveling park by undergoing tasks that likely far exceeded their pay grade.
Image Credit: SFB Games
As mentioned before, Crow Country is a survival horror game that is styled after the classics of the PS1 era. The nice thing about Crow Country is that despite it clearly being a throwback sort of game, it has a lot of modern quality of life features that keep the game from being overly frustrating. For starters: At first blush it may look like it has the typical fixed camera pre rendered backgrounds that you would expect a game like this to have. In reality, you are actually able to move the camera around. Your inventory isn’t locked to a set number of 6-8 item slots. All of your ammo types get their own stack in the inventory and have their own limits to how much you can carry. Key items also get their own row, so there’s not any frustration in that regard either.
Combat manages to be tense without being overbearing or frustrating. Your maximum ammo capacity is not that high and enemies pop up en masse pretty frequently. The enemies take just enough damage and show up just often enough that it was able to make me sweat. I was finding ammo pretty frequently but I felt like I was using it just as often as I was finding it. The actual mechanics of the combat are also a nice spin on the typical kind of classic survival horror combat. You have free aiming when shooting rather than being at the mercy of an auto lock and doing your best to tilt your aim upwards for a headshot. The environment will constantly be dotted with hazards such as bear traps and breaker boxes that you can take advantage of.
This puts the onus on the player to be aware of their surroundings when choosing to engage in combat. I felt myself paying much more attention to things like how I’m positioned when playing this game. Usually in older horror games I would find myself doing one of two things depending on the game. 1: Swing wildly at most of the standard enemies if there was a viable melee option. 2: Stand at the very edge of my gun’s effective range and shoot until I hear a body drop or need to back up. I only ever died a couple of times, but when I did it always felt like it was my fault rather than being screwed over by an unfortunate camera angle switch or something of the sort.
Crucially, having more control over my fate in the combat didn’t trivialize the danger I was in throughout gameplay. The previously mentioned environmental hazards work both ways. Mara is as vulnerable to a bear trap or exploding barrel as one of the nightmare creatures she is fighting. Those aren’t the hazards that would give me trouble though. At around the halfway point, the game starts dropping these crow shaped poison spitters into the areas. These things along with the busted chandeliers that started showing up in the interior areas were probably the main source of damage that I took in the game.
The game also had a variety of puzzles for you to solve in order to unlock more of the park. This ranged from the typical “Find Key X by going to this spot and using item Y” but there were other ones that involved a bit more thinking. Something I really enjoy is that quite a few of the puzzles can be bypassed if you are clever enough to spot the shortcut.
Crow Country is a very well put together game in regards to the level design. All of the major areas were distinctly themed and the rooms within those areas also stood apart from one another. It made remembering where I would need to double back to when getting a new code or key item really easy. I only used the map for the occasional reference rather than a navigational crutch. It also led to a lot of organic discovery of the extra collectibles in the game such as optional weapons, ammo capacity increases, and med kit upgrades.
Image Credit: SFB Games
Crow Country has such a cool aesthetic. It perfectly captures the old PS1 block visual style while bringing the actual visuals forward enough to make it really cool to look at. The environmental backdrops are all quite detailed and the character models looking like toy figures gives the game a lot of charm. The setting itself is also incredibly atmospheric. Abandoned theme parks are inherently filled to the brim with atmosphere and I think it is a rather underused setting for horror games.
The sound design in the game is incredible. Many of the creatures you encounter have some kind of distinct noise that they make which is enough to put you on edge when they aren’t in the camera’s view yet. The one that stood out the most to me was the wail that the tall gangly creature would let out any time they were in the room. Other sounds such as ominous crow cawing, distorted park ambience, and the squelching of Mara’s shoes through puddles of blood were all bits of noise I came to appreciate. The game’s music was great as well. There were a number of tracks I enjoyed. The save room theme, the themes for the Haunted Hilltop and Fairytale Land, as well as a particularly moving song near the end of the game were all stand outs to me.
Image Credit: SFB Games
Summary
Crow Country is a gem of an indie horror game. It is an easy must play if you like horror games or are feeling particularly fatigued by the Triple A space’s approach to the genre. And despite its presentation as a throwback to a previous era of horror games, I would say it has enough modern sensibilities to be approachable for someone's first time with an older style horror game. And as of the time of writing, the game has a hard mode for anyone who thinks that all of the game’s more modern sensibilities make it too easy. I think most importantly, despite the fact that Crow Country clearly calls back to genre classics, it feels distinctly like its own thing. It takes a lot of previously used horror elements and still manages to make its own unique flavor out of them. The gameplay and story provide a fun and foreboding ride through a truly excellent setting to create an exciting experience that I will continue to think about and probably return to sooner rather than later.