If Fear the Spotlight is something I'd recommend as baby's first horror game for the "interested in Silent Hill" crowd, this is the same for the Resident Evil crowd. Crow Country is a survival horror through and through, and while it is heavy on the puzzles (there's a reason for this) and light on the inventory management and difficulty, it is exquisitely crafted, and with a lot of personality to boot. It's an excellent entry point into the genre, and a great game all-around.
Special agent Mara Forest is headed to the abandoned amusement park named Crow Country after its owner, one very wealthy Edward Crow. Her motive, for the majority of the game, is vague and unclear. The park is not quite deserted, as some people connected to it and its history are still rummaging about, but there are also weird, twisted creatures stalking the grounds. The story of Crow Country is immediately intriguing. It's told primarily through letters, newspapers and the like, but also by talking to the few NPCs. It's a very early RE type of storytelling. There is a unique strangeness to the setting and what could be happening that subtly sets Crow Country apart from its peers. The ending of the game is quite surprising, and it put the nicest bow on top of the neat package for me.
As far as gameplay goes, Crow Country is maybe 70/30 on the puzzles-to-combat ratio. Perhaps even 80/20. This is because the game is made by SFB Games, primarily known for the Detective Grimoire adventure games. So it makes sense that puzzles are so abundant, but in general I'm amazed at how much the team succeeded at creating a (light) survival horror despite dabbling primarily in a vastly different genre. Puzzles are never terribly difficult or obtuse, and there are tons of hints scattered about in notes, but the hard part is keeping track of them all. Being stuck will 99% be due to forgetting a specific clue,but there are a couple of rare instances where the game has a nebulous logic. Combat sees you stop and shoot in classic RE fashion, but with more control in the aiming, allowing for headshots and interacting with the environment, something that Crow Country is quite insistent on. The park is littered with traps to avoid, making navigation more challenging and backtracking less monotonous (as new traps and spawns will repopulate areas after making enough progress), or to use to your advantage in combat. All these systems are not terribly challenging or deep, but they make for a compelling enough gameplay loop. The controls aren't as slick as they should be. Which button does what often goes against the common sense ingrained in me by years of gaming, and most of the damage I took was due to me reloading when I wanted to shoot and vice versa. Even at the very end of the game I would be making that same mistake, something in the control scheme was just disagreeable to my brain.
The aesthetics and atmosphere of Crow Country are immaculate. A total home run, and once again, there is some notable uniqueness here. The atmosphere reminds me a bit of Silent Hill 3 (come on, it's a haunted theme park, of course it would remind me of SH3), and it never goes full horror. It's omnipresently creepy, though. It's a desolate and eerie world, but it never really inspires terror. Even the enemies are certainly unsettling, but they have a little something that dulls the sense of danger (this is intentional and explained in the story, but even before you get to that plot beat you kinda feel it in your bones). There is a certain humour and levity to the game that feels otherworldly and strange, like a dark fairytale. It has also lots to do with the art style, with fantastic PS1 and Playmobil-esque character models that bring to mind Digimon World of all games. Again, bold choice, strange even, for an horror, but it pays dividends. The music is not very memorable but it works, the sound design however is fantastic, with some sounds that are still in my mind.
Crow Country was definitely a surprise. Not only a good game, but an insidious one: I liked my time with it, but my appreciation of it grows the more time passes and the more I think about it. I think these lads have some real talent, and at this point I'm interested in checking out their adventures as well.
