Crow Country

If you’re a guy who has talked to me in real life ever, you’ll know I enjoy the classic horror games of the late nineties and early 2000s, most exemplified by the Silent Hill and Resident Evil series on the PlayStation and the PS2. So, when the Super Flash Bros, developers of everyone’s favorite Switch launch title Snipperclips, announced a throwback game to it that showed well in trailers, I was interested. And hey, the Silent Hill 2 remake has yet to come out and Resident Evil is more action-focused at times, so a deliberate throwback may scratch an itch for classic “”””analog””” horror. Thus, I played through all of Crow Country in a night, and I have some thoughts.

Crow Country’s gameplay and plot will really come as no surprise to anyone who’s into the genre. A young woman shows up at an abandoned place to find a person, will have to avoid monsters as much as they do fight them because of limited supplies, and must find a crank of some kind to put in a crank-shaped hole or whatever. Specifically, Mara Forest shows up at the titular theme park to find the owner and discover the mysterious reasons behind the sudden closure of the park years ago. You roam around the park, find papers on the floor that tell you hints about puzzles and in-game lore, and collect items to unlock new parts of the park. All the while avoiding or fighting gross monsters and unlocking new weapons to do so. If you want any major point of difference between it and the games it's riffing on, it is that Crow Country has free aiming and full 3D camera control instead of a fixed camera angle and auto aim. 

I thought Crow Country was fine. Gameplay-wise I think it satisfyingly gets the itch for looking at papers on the floor and solving bizarre puzzles that always lead one to ask “Why would anybody build anything like this.” For example, If you accidentally locked yourself in a control room you wouldn’t build dice-faced pressure plates into the floor to step on in a particular order to get out. All that’s par for the course, but my two biggest gripes with the gameplay are the enemies and traps. Littered around the park are wall spikes, chandeliers of spikes, foot traps that release toxic gas, standing traps that release toxic gas when you walk past them, etc. Most of the time I was damaged it was by these things. They are everywhere and my issue with them, emblematic of the game as a whole, is that it is not scary. Traps that just spritz green febreze at you and need an antidote don’t really make me jump or create an interesting environment that feels hostile at every turn, it's just annoying. 

Similarly, the monsters are more annoying than scary. Their designs and functions are pretty rote and I never found them to be fucked up in the way I wanted. And by that, I mean, with one exception I never fought or engaged with, I never asked myself “Oh god what is that? what does it do? And how dead am I being near this thing?” That’s a great feeling for horror games. Every time there’s a new Lethal Company update, for example, I love playing with my friends, seeing a fucked up-looking thing, and going “Oh what the fuck is that!” I never felt that with Crow Country and you can avoid so many of the monsters. I found them to be more annoying than scary. Furthermore, the monsters don’t evolve really. 40 minutes in, of a four-hour game, so do that math however you want, I felt confident I had seen every monster design the game has and that any new one wouldn’t be a heavy enough deviation for me to be scared or interested or thrilled. Even the ones you do see never deviate from a red-goo look that at the end of the day just kind of looks like nothing.

The same goes for the environments, more or less. Horror, of any medium, lives and dies on pacing. The mastery of the genre is in build-up and intrigue. For example, in Resident Evil 2, by the time the player has been through the map enough times, the player becomes comfortable with moving around in it. It no longer is as scary as it was. The game solves this by throwing an indestructible monster after you. Silent Hill starts having transitions to an alternate dimension where the map's layouts change and the plot rises to have footage of burn victims kept alive by psychic hatred and characters bleeding to death spontaneously in front of you. My point is, you get the layout of Crow Country’s map pretty quickly and the game never sufficiently throws in new threats or cranks up the horror of the plot as time goes on to compensate. This is exacerbated by the upgrades you’ll get trivializing combat that is otherwise perfectly functional. Not to mention if you’ve been paying attention to the memos stapled to dogs or whatever, none of the story beats will come as a surprise. Even some plot twists you’ll probably see coming from anywhere as soon as 60 minutes in. By the end, without spoiling anything, I was confused about what the game was trying to accomplish emotionally with the story. 

Look, I know a lot of this seems harsh, and it is, but I did like some of Crow Country. The gameplay updates to the formula, like a third-person camera felt like smart ways to get the most out of the environment by having the player really look for ammo and health pickups around every corner. The controls having a dedicated slowly step backwards button was smart and the free aiming allows for more nuance in combat even if I found myself wasting a few shells trying to aim. The soundtrack and sound design are also strengths the game has. There are appropriate horrified moans and squelching where need be, and while I don’t know if I’ll be listening to the soundtrack while I study, it worked for the areas it was in. Finally, for every complaint I have about the game plateauing really early on, there usually is something interesting to see as the game goes on even if minor. 

Sometimes after I’ve written a lot of these reviews, I’ll read reviews posted by sites people actually read to think about any aspects of the work I failed to consider. Gamesradar’s title in part read “...it's [] the perfect game for a total genre newbie” which I think is extremely fair. If you’re someone who typically hates horror games and turns away from the screen in the scarier sections of non-horror titles, but want to start giving the genre a chance, this is a good game to get your feet wet. And if you’re a veteran to these games this may satisfy the itch of finding a game with a smaller environment, shorter run time, and playing the piano keys in the right order to open a bookshelf kinda thing. AAA games have mostly abandoned this formula so it makes sense you would want to see these kinds of games come back in some way. But if your interest in the game is to be scared, thrilled, or invested in a complex story that feels like a worthy successor to the classics, I am afraid you’ll come up short here. 

3/5

Eh