Crow Country

I thought I'd keep the horror ball rolling by playing some new releases, so what better game to start with than the Silent Hill and Resident Evil inspired Crow Country?

I played this on my PC, through Steam.

For the uninitiated, this is a new survival horror game that set out to make something in the vein of the classics.The result is a game that looks striking despite its relatively modest graphics and one that plays quite like those early survival horrors. Its gameplay evokes the puzzles of those games while its visuals are reminiscent of something like Final Fantasy VII's overworld. It's a delightfully "retro" feeling game for something from only a few months ago.

The gameplay is, like I mentioned, going for something akin to those early PS1 games. It's got strange puzzles where you use the various items and keys you've found to open locked doors and operate nonsensical mechanical systems, and the writing is self-aware enough to poke fun at the absurdity of survival horror gameplay without being overly critical of it to the point where it'd detract from the experience. It strikes a good balance.

Mara Forest is also a pretty fun protagonist.

The story is solid, and while it may take a while for things to pick up it all wraps up incredibly well. The final few minutes of the game tie everything together in a satisfying way. Before that though, it's also paced pretty well. This isn't a long game, I think it took me around five hours on the normal difficulty (I'll talk about that in a bit) and I found I was reaching new areas or encountering new enemy types at a pretty regular pace. There are some upsetting designs in this game that probably stand out even more so when compared to the simple aesthetic that most normal characters have. When this game wants to be scary, it gets scary.

As far as the difficulty, it's a mixed bag. I initially started the game on "Murder of Crows", the "Hard Mode", before restarting on the normal mode because the hard mode just wasn't very fun. On that hard mode, ammo and healing items are more scarce, and enemies are also more aggressive and (seem to) deal more damage. Some of the handicaps available on the normal difficulty have been removed and the end result is a game that is, in my opinion, too hard. I think the normal difficulty is a bit too easy, ammo and healing were never an issue for me, but the way they've overtuned the harder mode and it just wasn't fun to play. Maybe on a subsequent replay it'd be fine, but for a first run-through I'd say stick to the normal mode.

I've included my results screen below.

Crow Country is not without its faults but it's a solid survival horror game clearly inspired by the greats without feeling like a pastiche of either of them. It's its own, original thing and I think that originality should be commended. I had a great time with this.