Crow Country [Review]
PSX-inspired Crow Country is the perfect classic survival horror experience.
Crow Country. Credit: SFB Games.
I’ve been hyped up for Crow Country for a while now, and I’m pleased to report that the game is excellent. It isn’t just a love letter to its PSX era inspirations such as Resident Evil. While the excellent Alisa, another throwback to that era, successfully executed the genre as if it was released during the period, Crow Country lovingly emulates the genre in a way that elevates it to the Platonic ideal of what it should have been had the technology been a little better. The perfection of its execution makes it stand out among similar recent games.
Taking place in the late 1980s, the game begins with Mara Forest arriving at Crow Country, an amusement park outside of Atlanta that has been shut down for some time. She’s there to find Edward Crow, the founder of the park, who has been reported missing. Carrying only a handgun, she ventures into the park and soon discovers she isn’t alone—there are monsters. Undeterred, she continues to investigate.
Crow Country. Credit: SFB Games.
The game’s story is actually pretty good, kind of a rarity in the retro survival horror games I’ve played recently where the story is only really only an excuse to set up the protagonist’s predicament. Mara’s investigation slowly uncovers the history of the park, the crimes of its operators, and the cause of the disaster that shut it down. It proves to be a compelling story with satisfying twists, told through notes, files, newspapers, and other characters that you discover are in the park with Mara. Refreshingly, none of it relies on overly long dialogue or messy lore.
Crow Country nails the ambiance with spooky music and ambient sound design that set the mood, along with clever limits on visibility. While you’re given the illusion of a wide view with a freely rotating camera, the angle is fixed vertically to keep it just claustrophobic enough so that running will cause you to be surprised by what’s ahead. As the game goes on, time passes and visibility gets worse—fog, rain, and later pitch black night fall on the park; when coupled with era-specific low resolution and fuzzy CRT noise filter all of this does a great job of keeping you on your toes.
Crow Country. Credit: SFB Games.
You really have to pay attention, because as you progress, traps and new enemies will spawn in areas you’ve visited previously. You don’t need to kill everything or disable all the traps, but if they remain they’ll make your life more difficult when more things spawn later. It kept me on my toes, making even areas that became familiar scary again, and I loved that about the game.
Crow Country’s graphics make me think of what Final Fantasy VII might have been like if its environments were rendered in real time. FFVII’s environments had a slightly cartoony feel that fit well with the proportions of its simplified, chibi-like character models. The world of Crow Country has that same slightly outlandish feel to it, and also uses similarly simple, cartoonishly proportioned, flat-textured, low poly characters. The difference here is that Crow Country renders all of it in real time with modern lighting, and the effect is wonderful.
Crow Country. Credit: SFB Games.
While Crow Country has a gameplay vocabulary similar to the original Resident Evil games, the modernized control scheme coupled with the more agile third person camera make Crow Country feel much better to play than the classics it references. Optional tank controls exist, but the game is best played with dual thumbstick movement/camera controls. One thing that Crow Country keeps from those games is that Mara can’t move and shoot at the same time—she stands still to aim. This still feels more natural here, because when you aim, you actually move a reticle around the screen to fire at specific spots. The game uses that precision of aim for both combat and puzzles.
Like Resident Evil, Crow Country is also an adventure game with many puzzles to solve. Some involve using a series of items from your inventory, others are about flipping switches or interacting with the environment in a particular way, and others involve figuring out keycodes for locked doors or safes. None of the puzzles are unfair, though some are more difficult than others; there are always clues around to find. Some of the more difficult puzzles are optional, since they reveal skippable “secret” items. Some of these are really fun, so I’d recommend making the attempt. Finishing the game with a high ranking opens up some bonus items useful for a second playthrough to find all the game’s secrets.
Crow Country. Credit: SFB Games.
Crow Country isn’t just a throwback to a bygone era. It succeeds at making a better version of what it set out to emulate. The game feels like it should have existed in the late 1990s even though it couldn’t possibly have been made, yet ends up being superior to most games of its kind from that period by smartly updating the formula and then executing it perfectly. It’s an ideal version of classic survival horror.
Crow Country is available now for PC (Steam), PlayStation 4/5, and Xbox Series X|S.
Overall Score: 10/10
Played on: Steam Deck
