Crow Country (PS5) Review

We’ve been lucky enough in recent years to see a gradual revival of the survival horror genre. I’m not foolish enough that I don’t understand why the genre died (the amount of Resident Evil clones on the original Playstation alone could fill an entire shelf), but as a fan of tank controls and diorama level design, it was pretty lonely and painful between the years of 2005-2019. Now though? Hoo baby, we are living it up. We get Resident Evils every year, we got Signalis, we got Tormented Souls, we’re getting Silent Hills, that are probably going to be bad! We’re so back!

Crow Country isn’t exactly the most novel game in the world, nor is it necessarily trying to be. Instead, Crow Country succeeds by perfectly pandering to the rose-tinted lens our mind’s eye has over the survival horror greats of yore, into a cute and quaint package that manages to eschew most of the genre’s pitfalls. You might not be completely blown away, but if you love puzzles and rotating characters along an axis to point and shoot, then have I got the game for you!

Taking place entirely within the confines of an abandoned amusement park, Crow Country follows special agent Mara Forest as she attempts to find the titular park’s mysterious and elusive owner. As she makes her way through the park, she runs into all manner of grotesque creatures and mysterious characters, and a larger conspiracy is revealed and untangled. While I enjoyed the limited story of Crow Country, it definitely isn’t the focus of the game. I’m not saying the twists aren’t interesting (they’re actually genuinely cool!), but the core of Crow Country ultimately comes down to just how well it manages to present its aesthetic and ideas as a cohesive package. 

If there’s one thing you know people love these days, it’s low-poly sendups to the early 3D era of gaming, and Crow Country nails the vibes so perfectly that the only thing it’s missing is the moments from Resident Evil 2 where it genuinely looks like Leon Kennedy’s model is about to jitter out of existence. Every character and enemy model is so perfectly angular and shaped; cobbled together like they’re little action figures with the pieces glued on. The enemies specifically have this great gimmick of dying in unique and vivid ways like melting down into a puddle, or separating into a bunch of little blades that explode out at you. The “Goblin” enemy specifically sticks out to me, because its head just straight up falls off its body and rolls away. These animations are memorable mainly in part because it’s the perfect example of what you can do when working with an older design system. By existing within the trappings of the old, the moments where they actually utilize the processing power and capabilities of modern game engines become all the more alien and interesting.

It’s hard not to just endlessly praise all the little things in Crow Country’s visual design! There is plenty to the game itself but really, I was just consistently in love with everything about its playhouse diorama style. There’s a haunted house with little jpegs of ghosts floating around: a toy vampire in a bed that pops up, and a globe you can spin for no reason. There’s a jail with imprisoned mythical creatures that flashes them as little gifs in the cage with a bolt of lightning when you rattle the bars. You can find a submarine with a screen that just drops facts about sea creatures from a shooting gallery minigame! You will run into an entire arcade with multiple minigames you have to clear to progress , with a quiz-themed mini-game featuring answers that only make sense for the game’s setting of 1990! Everything is bursting at the seams with personality and charm! I was walking around the park with a smile that only grew with each puzzle I found.

When it comes to those puzzles, nothing is anywhere near as obtuse as the games Crow Country riffs on, which brings me back to that bit about the rose-tinted mental lens. Crow Country has a lot of puzzles that encroach upon the domain of funny word puzzles like a Silent Hill, but ultimately it’s more interested in gesturing towards the idea of them rather than actually making you wrack your brain. For some that might be a disappointment, but honestly I was more than happy to just do my little tasks and have the classic video game “oh this item goes here!” moments. There were some really surprisingly free flow answers to situations (finally a game where you think “can I just shoot that instead of getting a special item” and it’s actually true!)

Crow Country’s combat is (surprise!) like those older games I’ve already mentioned, but tightly designed in a way that makes things more accessible. If you’re someone who’s not a fan of the average tank controls game, you’ll be happy to know that they have a 180 degree turn that’s incredibly simple to execute, and the camera is “modern” in the sense that you have full control of it. It’s also fairly generous with ammo, so you won’t be running out even if you happen to be some sort of sicko who has to kill every enemy she runs across. There’s even a (seemingly) endless solution to running out of ammo in the form of vending machines scattered across the park, so even if the worst comes to pass, you won’t find yourself in one of those infamous Silent Hill resource famine scenarios. One of the only things that really threw me off with the game when I started it up was the lack of any melee option. What is a survival horror game without the ability to knife a box until it explodes? A question I found myself asking for all of five minutes before I realized that, okay yeah it’s actually fine because you get so many bullets and grenades that it’s just, fine. 

I mentioned the setup to the story and that’s…really all I can do without outright telling you the entire plot. I wouldn’t call the story to Crow Country minimalistic at all, but it is mostly succeeding at its incidental dialogue more than anything. Mara is an entertaining and relatable protagonist (at one point you have to break the head of a mascot character to get an item, and she sounds genuinely upset and apologizes to it), but most of the other characters just sort of exist. If anything, it sort of reaffirmed to me just how important the insane voice acting of those early Resident Evil and Silent Hill games was for making what would otherwise be fairly basic characters into memorable line machines.

Crow Country is ultimately an exercise in nostalgia, and for the first time in a good long while, I completely understand and agree with that mission statement. Isn’t it cool that people can make things echoing their feelings and ideas from a past love? I’ve always been mesmerized by the way creators take their inspirations and mold them into things entirely their own, but I’ve found myself appreciating developers who are wholly honest about the things they love more and more. Crow Country might not blow your mind, but if you ever loved those old survival horror games, or tabbing through pictures of Heather Mason on the Silent Hill wiki, you’ll feel a little tingle in your heart, and a warmth telling you that maybe everything will be okay.