After playing through Crow Country’s brief demo a couple of months ago, I was eagerly looking forward to playing the full version. Classically-styled survival-horror is some thing of a rarity these days, so I’ll pursue it anywhere I can find it. So far, Resident Evil 7, Tormented Souls and Signalis have all provided great experiences on that model, and I was really hoping Crow Country would do the same. To put it briefly, though, it almost manages it.

Crow Crountry has all the makings of a solid classic survival horror experience. It has the old-style graphics complete with film grain effect. It has a zoomed-out, over-the-shoulder camera-angle that does a great job of evoking the old, fixed-camera angles of the past, and even the environment has a pre-rendered diorama look to it even though it’s clear that everything is fully modeled. In other words, this game is what I’d expect a modern throwback to the old visual styles to look like.

Crow Country also does a good job with its music and walking the line of awkward (but not awful) combat. The musical tracks all do a good job of making each are seem other-worldly in distinct ways, and the combat is the sort that is just slow enough to make you nervous while dealing with enemies. 

Lastly, Crow Country itself is fun to look at. It’s clear that a lot of care and attention went into the game, and its maker clearly knew what they wanted when developing it.

There are, however, two issues that hold the game back; one is difficulty. Now, I’m not necessarily looking for a “hard” experience when I play a horror game, but I maintain that the situation needs to feel threatening in order for it to work. Now, I have died a couple of times during my playthrough, but those were just instances of carelessness on my part. For the most part, the enemies in Crow Country aren’t threatening.

Certainly you want to avoid them because contacting them hurts, but avoiding them isn’t difficult. You can just run past them most of the time without issue.

Otherwise, youcan use the game’s very generous supply of ammo to just kill them. If you do get hit, don’t worry; there are plenty of health items at your disposal and you can carry everything you find. In other words, enemies are pretty trivial in Crow Country. They’re easily dealt with and mistakes are easily recovered from. 

The other issue has to with Crow Country’s puzzles. These could all be great! However, very rarely does the game let you put the pieces together yourself. Most of the time, the solutions are all but spelled out on literal signs found all over the park, sometimes

even in the same room as its associated puzzle! Seriously, all the fun of a puzzle is thinking your way through it, yet the developer felt the need to all but remove that part! What the heck?? Why even go through the trouble of designing the puzzles at all if you’re just going to nail the solutions to the wall on bright white, impossible to miss posters?? It makes no sense!

The worst part of this problem is that there are a small handful of occasions where this isn’t the case, and those puzzles are actually pretty fun to work out. This kind of  thing could have been the whole game, but instead it’s just a taste of what could have been. I mean, even the secrets are straight-up pointed out on the map after you solve a certain puzzle. It’s just so…disappointing.

I’d talk about the story, but it honestly didn’t make much of an impression on me. There’s enough mystery there to pull you onward to the end, but I wouldn’t call it anything terribly special. All in all, Crow Country is a decent game that almost manages to re-capture the kind of classic survival-horror experience it’s going for. If the enemies were more threatening and players actually trusted to solve the puzzles, it could have been great! Instead, it’s just alright. Grab it on sale if you’re still interested.

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Haveyou played Crow Country yet? What was your take on it?

Image from the Crow Country Steam page