Crow Country never attempts to shy away from that which has inspired it, gracefully navigating the choppy waters of nostalgia bait to produce a game that is exceptionally memorable for its imaginative take on classic survival horror.
Crow Country is not a game meant for anyone who would look at it and think, “ew.”
The blocky, polygonal characters. The scanlines eerily misting over the screen. The crunchy sound effects. It’s meant to shove players face-first into a nostalgic bath of PlayStation 1- and Nintendo 64-era trappings. When I was a teenager, I freebased this stuff.
“The asylum I grew up in?” Raccoon City. Gallowmere. Silent Hill. Space Station Silicon Valley.
In a year or two, that joke will probably be as dated Squall’s face but it’s meant for the kids, the youths. Those who see something like Crow Country and think, “what?”
Pardon my ignorance but I’ve yet to touch a Five Nights at Freddy’s game. But I think most would understand I more or less get it. It’s YouTuber bait right? A simple premise of creepy thing making loud, sudden noise that popular content creator globs onto and makes famous. My apologies but I never saw a modicum of the appeal. Shorter attention spans perhaps require the instant dopamine or adrenaline rush of an unwarranted scare that has no build-up, no gestation.
The amount of games manufactured in the coal furnace of bargain bin digital titles hoping to latch onto a sliver of attention that Five Nights got feels crushing. During PSN sales I see almost a dozen squares for dirt cheap featuring a bloody doll face or a creature with black, hollow eyes. Click on one and watch a trailer or scan through screenshots and your eyebulbs are exposed to hideous–actual ew–visuals and what looks to be a character walking around a place trying to escape from or discover a thing. Cool.
This nonsense is PG-13 horror at its worse. The Bye Bye Mans and Wish Upons of the world. But I’ll admit effort to a bubbling if not gurgling cascade of Backrooms-alikes. You know, that Creepypasta-esque YouTube series that became a viral slow burn and is now a pincushion for imitators.
Art is, often, imitation. We consume the world around us. We taste it, touch it, hear it, see it. Many of us digest those sensory experiences into a song or a painting or a video rant or a video game. Countless game developers have likely thought to themselves while playing another game, “What if I did that… But differently?” FromSoftware didn’t suddenly invent boss fights or challenging games but they damn near perfected it. I’m sure Todd Howard played some Dungeons & Dragons before cooking up Elder Scrolls. It just works like that, sometimes.
Crow Country is an original piece of gaming. But it’s also like a chemistry lab. One where players can see every ingredient swirling through thin glass, how they cook and boil in a Bunsen burner, the end result distilled into a measured flask. Crow Country is equal parts the original Resident Evil trilogy, Silent Hill, and Nightmare Creatures. But there’s a peppering of Final Fantasy VII, a vial of Alone in the Dark, heated to 64 degrees.
Strip away some of its more complex machinations and quality of life tuning, Crow Country is a game from 1998.
And believe me, I’ve looked back on many of those games and thought “ew” as my heart fondly swelled with memories, face cracking into a smile.
Decades of watching horror movies and playing scary and violent video games have tempered my resolve a bit. I don’t consider jump scares terrifying, more “oh no I was startled because everything got quiet and then super loud.” Crow Country thrusts a few earned sudden scares on the player but the game is more atmospheric in its ability to instill a constant discomfort. As Mara Forest, players have arrived at the abandoned theme park Crow Country to seek out its owner Edward Crow. Greeted by an abandoned car blanketed with debris and a locked gate, little feels right. And for the remainder of Crow Country, the lingering disquiet persists.
Being a weak-willed person at times, I couldn’t help but walk through the unoccupied ticket booths of the amusement park and have a momentary “oh no” thinking I was going to be trapped in some Five Nights hellscape. Since seeing footage of Crow Country for the first time, I was sold on what developer SFB Games was offering. It was obvious what the game was and what is was going for but my brain didn’t make the connection to murderous mascots. Thankfully, my fears found no purchase. The game’s setting at an amusement park riddled with mascots is a tangible location for horror, not one that is a static, hollow shadow.
SFB Games is pulling from a well that is ripe with opportunity. It isn’t about how many times a space or a locale could be used, it is how that world is implemented and fleshed out for the player. I’m confident that Crow Country could be set in a grocery store, a mansion, or a mall. But there is something uniquely fascinating about the prominence of crows. Soon enough, players begin to pull at threads indicating that Edward Crow was up to something. After all, the reason for the park’s closure seems to be that a young child was injured in a strange way. And I imagine a rich, partially maniacal, partial megalomaniac person with the last name of Crow could have aspirations of a theme park featuring the bird of their namesake. But it’s still such an odd little bird to focus on, right? No symbolism there.
After seeing a group–not a murder–of crows pecking at a puddle of blood in the main entryway of Crow Country, it’s painfully obvious things are amiss.
Like any good horror game, Crow Country manages to piece out its narrative and exploration in digestible chunks that make the player feel more claustrophobic than confused. Initially, we are meant to understand Mara is a Special Agent, providing the justification of her combat prowess and ability to work out complex puzzles–it’s definitely not because of the person controller her, of course. But as one revelation about the park plants a seed only to be watered by the player’s curiosity and notes found scattered around, another question arises about Mara to slow-burn.
At around 8 hours, Crow Country is generously paced. In that first hour acknowledging the size of SFB Games and likely the scope, I had a sense the game would be over relatively fast. Surprisingly, the length isn’t buffered by winding, confusing puzzles. As auto-saving isn’t a thing here, players can lose chunks of time if they die in between safe room visits. There is some built-in backtracking that can amount to small pockets of frustration when players misremember the location a newly acquired item might go. Despite a growing map that also indicates unsolved secrets, it doesn’t reveal everything to the player.
Crow Country handles its real estate immaculately. Released from fixed camera angles, SFB Games chose enough quality-of-life measures to make the game generously more palpable to players. A faint crosshair shows where a bullet will land but a quickly discovered laser sight improves visibility. Mara can run, do a 180-turn, and down enemies with explosive barrels and traps. But the amusement park tucks away a wealth of items that often require wall-hugging or camera rotation. Presented in an isometric-like 3/4 perspective, players won’t be able to see completely down a dimly lit hallway but have just enough view to gauge where upcoming threats might be.
Combat is simple with Mara’s arsenal consisting of a pistol, grenades, a shotgun, and a magnum if found. The closer to an enemy, the more damage bullets will do but a headshot also has a chance of causing the skull of enemies with actual heads to burst like a cantaloupe. Space exists for players to often dart around a threat but as the game progresses, enemy density does increase. I never found Crow Country to be stingy with items and, in a pinch, Mara’s car houses a full clip if she’s dry. Healing items and antidotes serve their purpose as players can monitor health just like in Resident Evil, though Mara will visually show signs of damage, capitalizing on homage.
Yet SFB Games provides players with an option to literally wash away enemies in a difficulty that focuses on storytelling and puzzle solving. That option is fine and undoubtedly would not reduce the escalating narrative dread but would strip some of the tension inherent in a survival horror. But sometimes you don’t want to be stressed out by a game and that’s fine! Still, there’s a certain delight in walking back to the previously vacant entry to the amusement park and be greeted by the long, skeletal legs of some enemy that hasn’t detected you yet. That creatures fills the room with a constant sickly, guttural rattling sound until its killed. And while combat is relatively simple, there’s enough decision making into spending four or five bullets into an enemy before it goes down. Certainly if a player chose to do so, they could run back and forth between the car, breaking boxes and containers for items and killing enemies. Would it be fun? For some, sure.
The secondary strength of Crow Country is its puzzle solving. While no solution is absurdly complex, there are environmental elements that build over the course of the game, a few are even hinted at that won’t be discovered until much later. A set of keys unlock certain doors. Statues must be turned in the proper direction. Piano keys need to be played in the correct order. Power needs to be turned on to activate objects. These seem basic but Crow Country often integrates one solution into the other. A handful of shortcuts and secrets are unlocked with thorough exploration and smarts but it was most important that nothing felt too challenging.
I’m not sure why intricate puzzles became such a standard for the genre back in the mid-90s but I almost feel like you can’t have a true survival horror game without one elaborately turning statue or blood-scrawled code. And, like the best of its kind, Crow Country works enough to have much of these puzzles make sense in the game’s world. Yes, there are loads of notebooks laying around with diaries and employees literally explaining solutions but in the context of a mysterious amusement park, it works.
And the game also capitalizes on a narrative meant not to evoke just fear but humor. SFB Games outlines Crow Country with a core mystery, riddled with death and grotesque elements. But there’s a cheeky levity to a large portion of its writing. Mara will make light of her situation often or brush away an unfortunate circumstance with an “of course” kind of attitude. What this manages to do is have many of the horror elements visually present but also lingering in the back of the player’s head. A cooler attitude allows players to glide along more comfortably until a sudden scare, new character, or uncomfortable moment brings them back down to earth. In horrific situations we might not always panic, always be afraid. Instead we may try to laugh just a bit to stifle the pain.
Being so inspired by the past allows Crow Country the hindsight to play to all the strengths of its peers. It tinkers with them. Rather than mocking a gripe or issue cemented by decades of video game improvements, it celebrates them. Crow Country splatters enough enemy variety and enough environmental variety that it feels bountifully constructed. I expected to feel some kind of budget or inexperience poking through but no.
In fact, the game’s prominent, easily identifiable visuals speak to a quality that I think would be hard to match. Yes, Crow Country looks like it has a mist of pea soup fogging over its action, preventing things from looking “high def” but that’s intentional. To make any element too bright or too well-defined would cause it to look and feel out of place. Players are meant to think they are on an old CRT TV when playing Crow Country because it’s evoking that graphical moment in time. Sure, Silent Hill‘s pervasive fog was a kind of technical crutch but it also had narrative purpose. Crow Country isn’t hindered by tech but SFB Games is purposefully designing a game to perfectly fit in a catalog of discs enclosed in a jewel case. Most will note how Crow Country‘s visuals look close to those of Final Fantasy VII‘s chibi-like characters and really, it’s the perfect comparison.
This kind of “imitation” and how easily identifiable it is might feel insulting to some. However, I imagine that SFB Games is astoundingly proud of the work it has done to replicate a time, place, and mood. Certainly it is easy to mimic these things but often it can lack soul. Crow Country is stuffed with soul.
Crow Country is the perfect kind of nostalgic trip, one that doesn’t bait players along in hopes of being more of the same thing they remembered. The best games of its type work to wedge themselves into the library of classics they were inspired by. Crow Country looks, sounds, and plays similar to old 32- and 64-bit games because it is, not because it wants to be.
