I had this game on my radar for a while, since the specific games it's clearly influenced by (PS1 era survival horror ala Resident Evil/Silent Hill, chunky low-poly aesthetics ala Final Fantasy VII and other early games in the console's catalogue) just feel laser targeted to appeal to me specifically. I picked it up the day it came out, played through it in about three days, and it absolutely did not disappoint; in fact it even managed to subvert some of my expectations in pretty delightful ways.
Just to start off, this game is gorgeous and its vibe is immaculate. I love that the current generation of indie developers have moved past 2D pixel art as the only frame of reference for achievable visuals given small teams and limited budgets and have truly begun to embrace the early polygonal era, a look that was lambasted for a long time but that I've always felt has such potential for evocative atmospheres. This game is an absolute high water mark example of this. The environments in this thing are universally beautifully realized, taking obvious inspiration from the pre-rendered backgrounds of the aforementioned PS1-era RE and FF games but not limiting itself to pure homage. It has a distinct art style all its own that manages to be grotesque and unsettling but simultaneously charming and...almost cute! It's a weird combo but it works remarkably. Even the camera choices are a really elegant balance between old-school and innovative - while its y-axis is fixed at an isometric perspective, you can always spin it horizontally at any angle, which maintains the feeling of walking around little dioramas of level design, while giving you the freedom to fully explore their nooks and crannies.
Admittedly, in the first hour or two (which, for a fairly short game, was maybe even up to a full third of it) I was not entirely sold on the gameplay. The pacing and design decisions do make for a somewhat slow start. Take for example Resident Evil 2, which starts you off in some smaller environments to explore, and only lets you realize the true grand scope of the police station in retrospect after seeing individual chunks of it. Since Crow Country has you exploring a decidedly smaller environment than that (an endearingly dinky little amusement park presumably located in some midwest backwater), it makes the decision to frontload a lot of the environments and puzzles that pretty much the entire game will be focused on unraveling, right at the start. You'll be discovering dozens of notes that don't feel immediately relevant until you find the location or item that they're referencing, and walking through room after room where it doesn't feel like you can do much besides collect a couple items and try to make a mental note among a growing list of them of the puzzle the area obviously contains that does not feel immediately solvable.
Obviously, the loop of exploration, discovery, and backtracking with newfound information and/or inventory is a core part of adventure/survival-horror game design, but the balance in the early parts of this game feel unsatisfyingly off. It's made even more tedious by the fact that initially, enemies are not particularly intimidating. There are a few narrow hallways here and there where you're forced to make the classic RE calculation of using precious ammo on a monster in your way or attempting to skirt around it to the potential sacrifice of some health if you're unsuccessful in doing so. For the most part, though, environments are pretty wide open, allowing you to easily run past enemies without much thought about them at all.
Thankfully, the deeper you get into the game, the more these problems naturally resolve, and the more satisfying the gameplay loop becomes. Once I had the park mapped out and knew which areas were important to focus on, it became massively exciting to add a new piece to my limited inventory, knowing exactly where to utilize it. There were even a few great moments where, while in the middle of doing something somewhere else, the background cogitations of my brain suddenly came to a solution for a completely different area, and the frontloading of information that this game emphasizes feels intentionally designed to encourage those moments of inspiration, even if that made the initial impression a little underwhelming. Simultaneously, the danger of the environments gets amplified the deeper you get, with not only more numerous and powerful enemies appearing in previously tread areas, but also random traps like falling chandeliers and poison-gas filled landmines. The game still never felt genuinely hard (nor do I think I really would have wanted it to) but it did make backtracking increasingly engaging as I realized more and more how I needed to watch each step I made.
Maybe the area of the game that I found myself most surprised to be enjoying was the story. It has an interesting cast of characters, and I got pretty invested in seeing how it all turned out for them as the picture of what was going on here got clearer. The distribution of backstory throughout the game through newspaper articles and diary entries lying around is maybe not the most elegant of solutions, but it’s a genre staple, and it works. Similarly true to the genre, you spend so much time wandering the corridors, running away from fucked up creatures that it’s always a pleasant surprise whenever you find yourself in a room with another human character. The dialogue isn’t exactly brilliantly written, but it serves the characters well enough, occasional flat attempts at internet humor aside. Most importantly, it stuck the landing at the end, providing a satisfying conclusion along with a couple surprising twists, and also left some of the bigger questions about the implications of what’s hidden beneath Crow Country wisely open to speculation.
So yeah, not a perfect game I suppose, but a supremely charming one that I expect will stick with me.
Just to start off, this game is gorgeous and its vibe is immaculate. I love that the current generation of indie developers have moved past 2D pixel art as the only frame of reference for achievable visuals given small teams and limited budgets and have truly begun to embrace the early polygonal era, a look that was lambasted for a long time but that I've always felt has such potential for evocative atmospheres. This game is an absolute high water mark example of this. The environments in this thing are universally beautifully realized, taking obvious inspiration from the pre-rendered backgrounds of the aforementioned PS1-era RE and FF games but not limiting itself to pure homage. It has a distinct art style all its own that manages to be grotesque and unsettling but simultaneously charming and...almost cute! It's a weird combo but it works remarkably. Even the camera choices are a really elegant balance between old-school and innovative - while its y-axis is fixed at an isometric perspective, you can always spin it horizontally at any angle, which maintains the feeling of walking around little dioramas of level design, while giving you the freedom to fully explore their nooks and crannies.
Admittedly, in the first hour or two (which, for a fairly short game, was maybe even up to a full third of it) I was not entirely sold on the gameplay. The pacing and design decisions do make for a somewhat slow start. Take for example Resident Evil 2, which starts you off in some smaller environments to explore, and only lets you realize the true grand scope of the police station in retrospect after seeing individual chunks of it. Since Crow Country has you exploring a decidedly smaller environment than that (an endearingly dinky little amusement park presumably located in some midwest backwater), it makes the decision to frontload a lot of the environments and puzzles that pretty much the entire game will be focused on unraveling, right at the start. You'll be discovering dozens of notes that don't feel immediately relevant until you find the location or item that they're referencing, and walking through room after room where it doesn't feel like you can do much besides collect a couple items and try to make a mental note among a growing list of them of the puzzle the area obviously contains that does not feel immediately solvable.
Obviously, the loop of exploration, discovery, and backtracking with newfound information and/or inventory is a core part of adventure/survival-horror game design, but the balance in the early parts of this game feel unsatisfyingly off. It's made even more tedious by the fact that initially, enemies are not particularly intimidating. There are a few narrow hallways here and there where you're forced to make the classic RE calculation of using precious ammo on a monster in your way or attempting to skirt around it to the potential sacrifice of some health if you're unsuccessful in doing so. For the most part, though, environments are pretty wide open, allowing you to easily run past enemies without much thought about them at all.
Thankfully, the deeper you get into the game, the more these problems naturally resolve, and the more satisfying the gameplay loop becomes. Once I had the park mapped out and knew which areas were important to focus on, it became massively exciting to add a new piece to my limited inventory, knowing exactly where to utilize it. There were even a few great moments where, while in the middle of doing something somewhere else, the background cogitations of my brain suddenly came to a solution for a completely different area, and the frontloading of information that this game emphasizes feels intentionally designed to encourage those moments of inspiration, even if that made the initial impression a little underwhelming. Simultaneously, the danger of the environments gets amplified the deeper you get, with not only more numerous and powerful enemies appearing in previously tread areas, but also random traps like falling chandeliers and poison-gas filled landmines. The game still never felt genuinely hard (nor do I think I really would have wanted it to) but it did make backtracking increasingly engaging as I realized more and more how I needed to watch each step I made.
Maybe the area of the game that I found myself most surprised to be enjoying was the story. It has an interesting cast of characters, and I got pretty invested in seeing how it all turned out for them as the picture of what was going on here got clearer. The distribution of backstory throughout the game through newspaper articles and diary entries lying around is maybe not the most elegant of solutions, but it’s a genre staple, and it works. Similarly true to the genre, you spend so much time wandering the corridors, running away from fucked up creatures that it’s always a pleasant surprise whenever you find yourself in a room with another human character. The dialogue isn’t exactly brilliantly written, but it serves the characters well enough, occasional flat attempts at internet humor aside. Most importantly, it stuck the landing at the end, providing a satisfying conclusion along with a couple surprising twists, and also left some of the bigger questions about the implications of what’s hidden beneath Crow Country wisely open to speculation.
So yeah, not a perfect game I suppose, but a supremely charming one that I expect will stick with me.