“If Anyone Asks…”
Crow Country, developed by British studio SFB Games, is simultaneously very unique and directly inspired by some classics of my childhood. I decided to grab it for my Steam Deck on general recommendations from the Resident Evil-loving corner of the internet, and if you take anything from this review, let it be that this was a smart move. For a quick overview of the basics, Crow Country has you playing as an impressively young agent investigating the titular Crow Country theme park, closed for some time, under rather nasty circumstances. You’ll engage in combat and puzzles that are very reminiscent of the PlayStation 1 Resident Evil or Silent Hill games of the mid-to-late 1990s – the game itself set in the ‘90s for that extra flavour hit – but with levels of offbeat innovation from those classic titles that I’ll tackle down below.
Crow Country’s Unique Approach To Visuals
I know I’m harping on with the Resident Evil comparisons, but any discussion of Crow Country’s retro-visual style needs to start with RE – after all, that’s clearly what the developers did. Back in the ‘90s, when the PS1 arrived with a combo of very early 3D capabilities and CD-ROM-based games with a surfeit of space (700 megabytes was a great deal back then, with the Nintendo 64’s cartridges offering incredible storage bandwidth but a fraction of the space, not to mention higher prices and a larger physical size), multiple franchises used pre-rendered backgrounds that let the machine focus its processing power into only the interactive elements, like characters and enemies. This made for some memorably stunning visuals and cinematography that continue to stay with me after decades (despite the admittedly low resolutions), but interactivity was more limited due to the environments being, in the end, 2D images. I’m sure a lot of us imagined what it might have been like for us to turn the camera around in games like Resident Evil 2 or Final Fantasy VII, but on the PS1, devs had to be smart and make their sacrifices.
Crow Country’s creators, however, obviously wanted to make a game that tapped into that feeling, and it starts by generating a real PS1 survival horror feel. First, it goes for the low-poly aesthetic for the character models – I found them a touch cartoony, feeling almost like advancements on the characters of 1992’s Alone in the Dark than Resident Evil, but they help ground you in the vibe the devs are aiming for. Then, it combines these characters with an environment design that uses higher-poly, modern (though light enough for the Steam Deck) graphics rendering to reproduce the feel of those older pre-rendered backgrounds in 3D. The old backgrounds always had a particular look to them, distinct from the eventual game graphics that managed to match their raw fidelity, and Crow Country does an admirable job of replicating that – this makes it all the more cool when you turn the camera and spin around. For someone who grew up on those older titles, it’s almost like a magic trick, finally seeing something you’ve spent far too long imagining. It’s not fa ull 360-degree 3D – the game camera always looks down at an angle, presumably for gameplay and cinematography reasons – but it’s still a unique experience that I recommend. The overall visual quality is low-fi but still more than enough to communicate the creepy vibe of Crow Country – the abandoned amusement park in the dead of night is a classic setting for a reason, and this implementation reinforces it with the lighting and weather changing as you progress through the game and deeper into the night, with rainfall heralding the closing chapters. Overall, Crow Country is a triumph of very deliberate artistry and design over raw graphical power.
Resident Evil’s Gunplay, Advanced
Once again, Crow Country starts with a Resident Evil base and moves in its own direction. Where the older RE games relied upon automatic snap aiming and tank controls to cope with the non-interactive camera (though you could point your weapon up or down for some rudimentary targeting of enemy heads or legs), Crow Country exploits the 3D space to allow for more detailed aiming and full analog stick control. However, I actually found the results to be a bit disappointing – while the movement works fine with no issues, the diagonal top-down nature of the camera made the aiming quite tough. You’re supposed to rely on your laser sight and a targeting symbol that appears on the enemy as you train your gun on them, but it can be difficult to see the former, and the enemies can get quite close before you can get a good look at the latter. There’s no long-range sniping here, and I often had times where I struggled to get a bead on one of them before they aggressively rushed me down. It was never too bad, and if anything it ratcheted up the challenge and tension (also, an early hint notes that your guns do more damage at close range, so I’d likely be wanting to use this strategy anyway), but you might want to know in advance that you’ll often have to strategically retreat before lining up another shot. I also appreciated that the aiming system is woven into the loot collection, with crates and bottles you have to shoot to get at their useful innards.
Your limited resources are handled smartly – you won’t be carrying all that much in the way of ammo or healing items simultaneously, but the game provides trash cans and vending machines that will dole out whatever you’re running low on. This means you don’t have to worry about rendering your playthrough truly unwinnable, but you also need to be judicious since the theoretically infinite resources don’t really matter when a zombie is barrelling down on you with no trash can around. Especially when you haven’t used a save point in a while – do not make my mistake of assuming Crow Country has auto-save, ‘cause it don’t. There’s no limit ink ribbon-style items here, but you do need to make a point to save whenever you come across one of the points (they’re all different but are characterised by warmth and flame). The result is an overall nice balance that keeps you from ever feeling truly safe as the darkness closes around you.
Puzzling Your Way Through
The puzzles of Crow Country are well done, though I found them tough enough to require some light Googling on occasion – though there is also a series of machines that dispense hints in exchange for lowering your end-game score. What we have here is a mixture of solving parts of the in-universe theme park activities (some even requiring your bullets), technical malfunctions like power outages and a missing data disc for Crow Country’s various employee computers, and outright bizarre, classically-Resident Evil nonsense puzzles like a key hidden in resin hidden in a puppet head. The result is an eclectic mix that I’m sure will appeal to any survival horror fan, though I did sometimes find the low-fi visuals to interfere with my ability to scan the environments for what I needed. This may of course have just been due to playing on a Steam Deck instead of a TV – or my terrible attention span – but I did miss things like a circuit breaker on the wall that I expected to be in another room, and mistakenly tried to insert a red ruby into a red, similarly-shaped hole (I actually needed a mask for that one).
Narrative – When Crows Come Home To Roost
I’ll avoid going into too much detail here, as you should go into this title at least reasonably blind. You play as Agent Mara Forest, a firearms expert, called in to find Edmund Crow of the abandoned Crow Country theme park. Agent Forest is clearly a dedicated professional, as even the appearance of twisted, zombie-like “Guests” and injured victims fail to deter her. From here, there are multiple human characters to go along with the monsters, as you and Mara make your way across, throughout and beneath the park, uncovering both supernatural and harshly realistic scandals. I don’t want to go any further than this – Crow Country is very much on the shorter side, and saves its biggest gut punches for the final hour. One request – try to to Google the game’s plot or characters. I tried that after completing the game and found major spoilers right up front, which I’m glad I was able to experience as intended.
Environmental storytelling is well done – things like the blocked-off, never-completed Cosmic Futures construction area and cartoony mushroom door to the Fairy Pond show both sides of these kinds of theme parks, mentally putting you in the shoes of Crow Country’s designers, employees and guests (but not Guests). In-universe ocean and Halloween design theming clash deliberately with both the more drab and grungy business areas and the lavish offices of the park’s owners. There’s a pervasive theme in Crow Country of the wealthy and powerful getting away with plenty of nastiness, clearly demonstrated in both design and more direct fashion.
Conclusions
I strongly recommend Crow Country for the old-school survival horror fans, and somewhat recommend it for everyone else. The game isn’t perfect, and it consists of a series of very deliberate design decisions that may not appeal to everyone – that’s not even getting into the fact that not everyone’s into scary games, of course. But as long as you’re willing to be the person this game is targeting and can work around a bit of charming “indie jank”, it’s a very strong entry into this field of nostalgic horror games. There are things I’d change, of course. – but not very much, given that the game is a very deliberate labour of love. I’m hoping to see an eventual re-release with full voice acting, since I think the game’s current sole VA, Kimlinh Tran, seen playing the game in this video, would have a LOT to work with when it comes to Maya Forest’s full arc. As a Steam Deck game specifically, it’s very good – as I noted earlier, a larger screen might make scanning the environments a little easier, but being able to curl up on the couch with a handheld version matches the cozy, horror-diorama vibe of Crow Country very well. The game is fully Verified for Steam Deck, and that matches my experience with no noticeable issues. Buy it for your Deck without fear – at least until you start playing.
