In short: Crow Country is a great, yet flawed survival horror experience. Highly recommended 9/10
Recently I played through the entire 30 or so Resident Evil titles from beginning to end and it took me nearly six months. Those games are a rollercoaster to say the least but ever since I've been looking for a game to scratch the same itch that the "original" Resident Evil (2002) scratched.
Crow Country is not Resident Evil, despite it's clear inspiration. It's a much shorter, much more straight forward experience. The puzzles are a series of dominos, once you solve the first puzzle, it gives you the item you needed to solve the next, and that one gives you what you need for the next, and so on and so forth. You can't solve them out of order because you simply don't have what you need to solve them until you solve the previous puzzle. In that way, Crow Country is much more linear than it let's on.
The horror in the game is effective I think. The guests are creepy and gross, albeit unthreatening; but perhaps for this reason the jumpscares (of which there are a number of) are often unexpected and effective, well, that and the humor, which I felt was used often enough to be unexpectedly funny yet rare enough as to not break the horror. Though with any horror, the longer you play the game the less shocking and horrific it becomes and in its place, frustration.
In the original Resident Evil you were faced with a dilemma. You only had X amount of bullets and Y amount of enemies. At any point you can spend resources to wipe out a room for safe passage, but then you have fewer resources and killing enemies can spawn Crimson Heads, a much bigger problem than regular zombies.
In Crow Country, there is very little incentive to clear a room. Despite how much ammo they give you, it doesn't often feel like enough and rooms can sometimes fill with enemies even just by leaving and returning, and as the game goes on, traps get introduced as well. It's not uncommon to walk through a clean room, only to double back to it minutes later and find 2 new enemies, a gas trap and a chandelier waiting to crash on your head the moment you come back in; but what's interesting is that none of this really matters. Enemy hitboxes are small and slow while the rooms are large, unless I got stuck in a room or made a conscious choice to clear it, I never felt the need to actually fight the enemies that are present in it.
Arguably my biggest gripe about the game is the reading. Nearly every room has a note, and many rooms have multiple notes and rarely are they ever meaningful. One such example will say "I hid the crank in a safe in the utility room." No nuance, no hints, just a flat out "Here's this item. Go there to get it." That's not to mention the immersion destroying gameplay notes in nearly every room that give you unnecessary tips like "Shoot the red barrels to damage enemies" or "Headshots deal more damage than body shots!" Every time I read one of these notes my soul broke into a dozen more pieces, so I stopped reading them.
Final Notes:
Despite these grievances the story of the game intrigued me and kept me on the hook long enough that I finished the game in a single sitting and even got most of the achievements along the way. I liked the characters, the setting, the controls, and most importantly the soundtrack; composed by Ockeroid. The game was by no means bad, but if there were any one thing keeping me going it is the soundtrack, it never lets up and there is always something playing, which can sometimes be a bad thing for games but here the soundtrack is very fitting while also serving as the ambience for the world.
A few small tweaks and this game would be a perfect 10/10.
