Crow Country Review

This was a pretty interesting survival horror game of sorts, as far as indie games are concerned, it's not as good as Tormented Souls and Signalis but still a pretty good game in it's own right. I randomly heard about the game and since it had a console and PC release, I decided to give the game a shot.

The best way of describing Crow Country is that it's the original Resident Evil but on a theme park rather than a creepy mansion. There isn't many horror games that I'm aware of that even take place on theme parks so the setting alone is enough to make the game stand out a good deal all though like many of the these recent horror games, there is some Silent Hill inspirations like the monster designs, the fact you have unlimited inventory space and an emphasis on puzzles. The asethetics are much like a PS1 Final Fantasy game particularly FF7.

Good things about Crow Country is the level design and unlike many horror games of it's type pretty much of all the game takes place on the aforementioned theme park, areas of interest, puzzles, and items to collect that might be relevant early game might be more important more so the furthur you go into it. There is a late game puzzle in the theatre that you actually discover early on in the game but can't solve until the final few sections. You can even do many of the sections in a random order, once you get the silver key, you can unlock many of the games optional resources before you even touch a major section of the game. You can do the power generator area and get some secrets and the game doesn't really slowly start to wrap up until you get the Gold Key and you can many of the secrets before then. There is also a lot of shortcuts and a decent amount of routes to get from place to place on the map. Level design is the most impressive part.

The map is pretty useful and is better than Tormented Souls' map at least. For one, on PS5, you can look at the map by pressing the touch pad as opposed to TS where you need to multiple presses just to activate. One thing I didn't like was that trying to find secrets on the map required a second button press on the map screen and I discovered this late game unforunately, but credit where credit is due. I even got most of the secrets by the end of the game too, but I needed a walkthrough for that.

Story is surprisingly engaging, I'm glad it isn't mostly hidden behind notes and the story is surprisingly direct for a horror game, cutscenes give you enough information on what is going on and while I would've liked voice acting, the characters are okay, I wouldn't call this story anything super amazing, I did pay attention to it a lot more than I was going to.

Issues I have with the game is that combat is a little too easy, on the medium "survival horror" difficulty, enemies go down within less than 10 shots, I don't want this kind of combat to be too challenging but I argue games like Tormented Souls did a better job at feeling underpowered but powerful enough that you are barely scraping by since in TS, the player character moves a lot slower and enemies take more shots with melee being a good way to save ammo but also risk getting attack by enemies getting up from the shots you gave them. Enemies in Crow Country including the final boss barely put up much of a geniune fight, the only hard part is aligning the analog stick fast enough and make sure enemies don't come too close since you can't move while shooting, most enemies will go down with a few shots from the pistol and shotgun, I only used weapons like the magnum for fun. Grenades make the already easy combat even easier even if I accidently throw them from time to time.

The biggest threat in Crow Country are going to be the traps since many of them you will not see coming and will happen to hit you out of nowhere a lot of the time. This where the bulk of your healing items and antidotes will be used on more so than the enemies.

I also found the game a little too puzzle heavy, this might and I dislike to use the term here, "subjective" but I'm not big survival horror puzzles and I'm more in it for the level design and the barely scraping by action, this might not be an issue for others, but the biggest challenge of Crow Country really comes from how much patience you are willing to put up with regarding puzzles and getting hit by traps.

Overall, Crow Country is a solid game in a line of well made indie survival horror games. If you already played Tormented Souls and Signalis and are looking for more, Crow Country is worth looking into.