Nostalgia is a funny thing. It can cause us to look back fondly on games and experiences that, if judged by today’s standards, would fall far short of what we have come to expect. There has been a surge in indie titles that lean into gameplay and design aesthetics from the early days of 3D gaming. Personally, I find most games from the Nintendo 64 & PlayStation 1 era have not aged particularly well. These games were undoubtedly important in pushing 3D game design forward, but those first baby steps could be a little awkward at times. Despite this, those old school, clunky graphics and controls hold an important place in my heart. I grew up in the 90s playing the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation 1. So, when I see a new release that plays into that retro aesthetic, it pulls on my nostalgic heartstrings and immediately grabs my attention.
Crow Country is a game that capitalizes on this. It encourages you to don your rose-colored glasses and step back into the glorious era of PS1 survival horror. Games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill are clear influences, and this is a great thing. Developed and published by SFB Games, a small London-based studio run by brothers Tom and Adam Via, Crow Country released on May 9th, 2024, on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox.
Thankfully, Crow Country doesn’t just emulate the past but builds upon it, creating a memorable retro experience that has been updated with some modern fixings, resulting in a fun, albeit short, experience. Crow Country takes flight by delivering a polished take on classic survival horror gameplay, and I am happy to say I greatly enjoyed my time with it.
A Dark Retro Ride
The game takes place in an abandoned amusement park called Crow Country. The park consists of three distinct areas: a fairytale land, a haunted house, and an underwater adventure theme. The overall map isn’t very large, so it doesn’t take much time to travel across. Which is a good thing because Crow Country, like other games in the genre, requires lots of backtracking as you acquire new items that allow you to unlock previously impassable doors and puzzles. Once you find the required item, you’ll be checking your map and trying to remember which locked door or puzzle can now be tackled. Thankfully, the game helps in this capacity by circling important rooms that require an item to progress. You can also check all of the important notes you’ve collected, which usually contain hints on how to solve the various puzzles. There are also plenty of less obvious secrets hidden throughout the game, so it’s always worth going off the beaten path and exploring rooms carefully.
The Crow Country amusement park is overrun by an assortment of pixelated monstrosities. As you progress further in the story, it becomes increasingly overrun, upping the difficulty and forcing you to choose wisely which enemies to use your precious bullets on. Most enemies move at an incredibly slow pace, so entirely avoiding most encounters is an option. While this makes it easier to conserve ammo, I would have preferred the enemies to feel a bit more threatening. But sprinting past enemies also poses it’s own danger in the form of traps. If you aren’t paying close attention, you’ll likely trigger a trap, the most annoying being chandeliers that drop from the ceiling. For some reason, I never noticed these until the last minute, and they take a good chunk of your health. I think I cleared the whole map of them by dropping each one on my head by the time I beat the game. If you are more careful than I, which honestly will be pretty easy, you’ll be able to use the environmental traps to your advantage to dispatch enemies and conserve ammo.
The game offers the option to switch from a more modern control scheme to old-school tank controls. My nostalgia only carries me so far, so I opted to keep the more modern controls, although it was nice that the option was provided for the purists who want a true retro experience. Unlike other games of the era, you have full control to spin the camera 360 degrees, which is important for revealing items and secrets throughout the environment. To aim your gun, you have to stand still, hold down R1 (I was using a PS5 controller) to aim, and then use the joystick to control where you’ll shoot. This means you can not shoot and move. This was admittedly a bit clunky. There were frustrating moments where I felt I should have hit an enemy but didn’t. This became even more of an issue when an enemy was near the corner of an obstacle and somehow seemed to be protected from my bullets by an invisible barrier, even if they were clearly in my line of sight. I didn’t mind these issues on the whole given Crow Country’s retro trappings. If anything, you could argue it adds a bit of authenticity to the experience.
There really isn’t much inventory management to do like other games in the genre, but you do need to be careful in how you conserve your special ammo and health recovery. Thankfully, you won’t run out of ammo for your basic handgun as you can always return to your car for more, but you do definitely need to be more conservative with the special weapons you find. This ammo is much harder to come by and should preferably be saved for boss encounters.
A Carnival of Challenges
Where Crow Country really shines is in its puzzles. I’ll admit there were a couple I struggled with, but mostly everything felt very fair and solvable without outside help. If you are really stuck on what to do next, you can use a fortune telling machine that provides you a maximum of 10 hints throughout your play through. I really liked having this option, especially if I came back to the game the following day and forgot what I was doing. I didn’t need to use all 10, but I was happy knowing I had the option if I couldn’t progress. You can also re-read every note you’ve picked up in the safe rooms to look for clues. One annoying thing is you have to manually flip through every page you’ve collected, one by one, to find the note you are looking for rather than the game providing a navigation menu. It’s a minor thing, but it can be very frustrating when you are trying to find a specific note amongst many. I also think forcing the player to return to the safe room to do this is a little tedious and unnecessary. I would rather have had this information on hand with me when I encountered a puzzle.
While the puzzles in Crow Country were great and rewarding, the combat left me wanting. The game offers two difficulty levels: survival and exploration. Exploration removes all enemies from the game so the player can focus on the story and puzzles rather than combat if they so choose. Survival is the default game mode, which includes enemies. At the start of the game, combat is laughably easy, and you can simply avoid the shambling enemies to avoid taking hits. Thankfully, as you progress further, all regions of the map get more populated with monsters and traps, making things a bit more risky. This includes areas you’ve already visited, so you must stay alert when backtracking. There isn’t a ton of enemy variety, and they don’t offer varied challenges. I rarely found the need to clear an area of monsters and usually found myself just avoiding them.
The Flock Thickens
The story opens with Mara, a mysterious purple haired woman, arriving at the front gates of Crow Country. The park shut its doors to the public a few years prior after a young girl, named Elaine, vanished while visiting with her parents. When her family finally found her, she was bloodied and wounded. But the story she had to tell about her disappearance made no sense. She claimed to have found a man in a cage while she was lost, and he attacked her. The park and her parents didn’t know what to make of it. Elaine later fell ill with an unidentifiable illness that doctors were powerless to cure. Following Elaine’s sickness, the park shut its doors to the public and has been shut ever since, with the owner, Edward Crow, vanishing from the public eye.
Mara has arrived to search for Edward, her reasons becoming clear as the narrative progresses. During her search she encounters a number of other characters. Some have their own motivations for breaking into the dilapidated park, while others are employees whose purpose for remaining on-site is a mystery to be solved. As the story progresses, you slowly piece together how all the characters fit together in a larger woven narrative.
I really enjoyed the story in Crow Country even though some of the writing didn’t quite land for me. There seemed to be a mismatch in tone. The art direction, music, and story were dark and gritty in the best possible way. Yet the dialogue between characters sometimes was light, chipper, and felt detached. It never felt like anyone appropriately addressed the gravity of the situation of things that were happening in the story. There are moments where the game uses humor that just didn’t fit. This pulled me out of the narrative, which is a shame because the moment-to-moment discovery and plot points were great.
The game does offer some level of replayability by unlocking further challenges once you complete the first playthrough. But without any variance to the puzzles, I don’t feel any need to return for a second playthrough. Where Crow Country shines is its puzzles, exploration, and discovery. Now that I know the solutions, there isn’t much incentive for me to return, particularly since the combat itself isn’t terribly engaging.
Crow Country is an excellent tribute to Playstation 1 survival horror that manages to capture the spirit of what made those games so fun while including modern updates to ensure it doesn’t feel dated. The puzzles were my favorite part and provided a good challenge that felt fair and fun to solve. While combat and some of the writing may not have fully landed for me, the overall experience was very enjoyable and kept me hooked the whole way through.
All in all, it took me about 5 hours to complete. I do think this felt a bit short, and I wanted more once the credits rolled as I was still uncovering secrets and upgrades for my weapons right before I triggered the final scene. There were upgrades I wish I had a chance to use, but, sadly, there was no more game left for them to be useful. Still, if you’re a fan of classic survival horror, Crow Country is definitely worth checking out. It lived up to all my expectations and hopes, and I absolutely recommend it to anyone interested.
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