Crow Country is such a meticulously put together game, such a thought-through piece of survival horror, that I think it has become one of my go-tos to recommend for people new to the genre. There are precious few games that leap straight to the top like that, but Crow Country is one of them.

You play as Mara Forest, a special agent with a good sense of humor, sent to investigate a now-defunct amusement park called Crow Country. From there, the story never misses a beat. The game’s pacing is incredibly tight, with each puzzle leading almost seamlessly on to the next. What I respect most about Crow Country is that there is never any downtime. Or, rather, that the quiet moments aren’t meaningless, and the game never feels the need to pad the runtime with needless walking. Enemy encounters never feel too confronting, and the way resources are handed out (at least on the regular difficulty) makes you feel just in control of the situation, provided you land your shots correctly. 

The amusement park that lends the game its name has a few different themed sections – underwater, fairy, futuristic, and halloween – and none of them have needless rooms or any sections that feel like busywork. Puzzles are intuitive and easy to solve; some include mechanics or minigames that are never seen again in the game, but are so easy to control that it feels like the same level of polish went into them as everything else. And the level of polish… it is rare to see a game come out of the gate feeling this good to play, with no bugs or visual blemishes in sight.

The game looks and feels like a relic from the 1990s. Backgrounds that at first look like pre rendered backgrounds (such as you might see in Final Fantasy VII or Resident Evil) can be rotated with the camera, revealing a wealth of little details. Grimy signs, blood smeared on the walls or left to seep into the carpet, traps lying on the floor or dangling from the ceiling – all of this and more is revealed by each room. Each room is so lovingly rendered that I can’t help but linger in them, reveling in the detail – and the useful items I find by looking around. Some of them are so well hidden you can’t help but smile at yourself for finding them, or imagine the developers giving a knowing wink.

Environments are full of realistic clutter and contain freaky sights to see, along with cutesy mascots and kids’ entertainment.

The game is the perfect mix of linear and nonlinear, with some puzzles able to be solved in multiple ways, and other puzzles requiring objects to resolve. So the game is a fabulous combination of linear and open, where the park is open to explore and each room offers a new object that will cause a light to go off in your head. You get a ruby, so you go, “oh, now I know what to do!” and you run all the way back to a room that required a ruby-shaped object. You solve that puzzle, and get something else, and the cycle continues. The game has a wonderful way of prodding the puzzle-solving side of your brain, making you want to keep playing. It is one long string of puzzles.

If there was one (admittedly tiny) complaint to be had, it would be that the combat is not quite as challenging as it could be. Enemies tend to be easy to avoid and you can run around about 60% of encounters – which is good horror design on the one hand, but it does tend to deflate the tension a bit when you’re just sprinting around the place. But that’s probably on me, and the large number of horror games I’ve played. Crow Country, to its credit, does try to mitigate that with a variety of traps that force you to slow down and look carefully at the environment. And it is a small complaint – aiming your gun can be a tense affair, particularly in the smaller rooms, and frantic bursts of missing your shots can mean trouble later down the track. It is a game that deserves to be slowly savoured.

Yet Crow Country is also a short game that never overstays its welcome. And it is a game that truly does need to be played – it is a love letter to a genre that deserves to live on. The ways in which it modernizes the survival horror formula, and streamline the puzzles, makes Crow Country feel like the worthy successor to countless other titles that came before it.

I’ve seen people critique the game’s story, and I agree – it’s no Silent Hill or anything, where the game is an elaborate metaphor for a person’s own feelings on the world. Yet not every game has to be some kind of psychological thriller or insight into the human mind. Crow Country does have heaps of great characters, and tight writing that spells out what it needs to in a short amount of time. It is a deceptively clever game, where plot twists are actually trying to block your perception of other plot twists. Some twists are revealed in the smallest, most innocuous use of the user interface. Some things aren’t entirely spelled out to you, even by the end, but stuff can be inferred.

It is a game that uses its theme park motif to the fullest, but its other themes that run beneath the surface are also meaningful. The overarching mystery about the recurring number you see around the park, that can’t be entered into any of the keypads is just one more thing that will prod you to think about the game and its story – when you’re not luxuriating in the sublime atmosphere of a dilapidated toilet stall. The game’s soundtrack is tremendous – the main theme evokes Yamaoka’s work (as many modern horror game composers do); but not to mention pieces for the theme park that sound authentic, as well as haunting. It’s super cool how all the pieces of the game come together under this one sublime atmosphere, generated by graphics that have no right to look as awesome as they do. But they do look awesome. They create an almost unrivalled sense of place and time.

Secrets are a big allure of exploration. It’s so cool to find something that is off the beaten path, but still has a practical use (and can even change the way you play the game!)

I wish I could write more on it – I might do a review on the channel later – but I think for now, I just want to sing the game’s praises plainly. You know how I hardly have any time for anything at the moment? Let this be a testament to Crow Country‘s design: immediately after I beat it I started a new save to try and beat it faster. And I did. The game is so well-designed. It is the kind of survival horror that game design classes should take apart and examine. It never overstays its welcome, never demands too much from you. If you want to play it as a haunting puzzle game, you can! It has a mode to disable enemies, and a hard mode which makes things much more difficult, purportedly. That’s what I’m going to try next.

Crow Country is a marvel of a survival horror game, and if you are a fan of classics in the genre, you owe it to yourself to play this tremendous game. Highly recommended.