To play Crow Country is to believe in a fiction. It is a gorgeous, hazy memory of a summer spent playing Silent Hill or Parasite Eve or Galerians or whatever battered rental store game you had enough money to get your hands on in 1998. It’s a mood and a look first and foremost, but not to the detriment of the story it seeks to tell. It is not an accurate recreation of the games of the early PlayStation/N64 era; instead, it’s what most people remember in their mind’s eye. And ultimately, that’s what it should be.
Crow Country is a retro-themed survival horror game by developer SFB Games. To call the game low-fi would be underselling it, as all the characters and models exist in a fidelity squarely between pre-rendered CGI on the SNES and the chunky polygons of early PlayStation games. The entire experience has the intentionally rough patina of a lo-fi CRT haze. Set in the year 1990 somewhere in the vicinity of Atlanta, you play Mara Forest, a young woman investigating a mysterious theme park called Crow Country that abruptly shut down a few years ago. Owner and namesake Edward Crow has vanished, and mysterious shambling creatures, some resembling people and others less so, have overtaken the park.
Mara must explore the abandoned park, solve (of course) several whimsical puzzles, and uncover the horrifying truth behind what happened. When and if you decide to fight these creatures, combat plays like a stripped-down version of Resident Evil’s third person gunplay, although the whole game falls more on the adventure game end of the survival horror spectrum. There is very little real terror here, but there is a whole lot of ambient, creeping mood, which I personally rank much higher.
As a person who owns a MiSTer and thus has recent exposure to many old PlayStation games, a lot of them are full of what I will call “unfair horseshit.” Many survival horror games, particularly the really obscure ones, have not aged well in terms of organic puzzle design. There are leaps in logic, to the point I directly associate the era with being maximally frustrating. If you have not returned to that era of gaming in a long time, the experience can be sobering. There are a lot of gorgeous, one of a kind games you loved growing up that, if you haven’t built up a tolerance, straight-up suck to play now.
Crow Country is a modern game at its core, which creates an interesting design challenge. How do you faithfully capture the unrefined stress of those old games without the gut punch of realizing that this game is from an alien era? To this end Crow Country does a solid job of having it both ways (Return to Monkey Island and Tunic to some extent also pulled this trick off fantastically). From the jump you are mercifully offered the choice between playing the game in either a survival horror mode or a lower stakes exploration mode. The survival horror mode is true to the spirit of the era – you are constantly being accosted by new and increasingly comical obstacles to account for, including animatronic bird heads that spit poison gas and bear traps. If you die, you are probably going to have to reload a save, although I did not find myself doing that too often. The enemies are grotesque and terrifying, although true to the genre you quickly learn that running past them often makes more sense.
Luckily, you never want for a lack of resources. The game has a way of rubber banding ammo and health packs to you when you get low, and there are various trash cans to dig through and soda machines you can kick to get whatever crucial item you need at the time. And while many of the puzzles are indeed arbitrary, the park is littered with various fortune telling crow kiosks that give you a maximum of 10 hints per game. This is not a game that wants to actually punish or frustrate you. Hardcore survival horror fans may find this a tad too easy, but keep in mind you will be judged by your performance at the end, so there are degrees of difficulty for those that seek it.
What Crow Country is doing slides right into the current lo-fi zeitgeist, from how it conceptualizes the past to how spaces are rendered. It would be easy to make a Five Nights at Freddy's comparison, but I respect what this game is doing too much to insult it like that. Some of the creatures (“guests”) would fit nicely in a found footage horror short on YouTube, and there are literally Backrooms in this game; if you know anything about the topography of DisneyLand it could not be more apropos. In the hands of a far less competent studio, many of these impulses could be seen as shallow, but Crow Country has thorough respect, comprehension, and reverence for the games it references.
This extends into the writing, which is just sparse enough to believably fit in the time period it’s referencing, but is drier and funnier than the average (poorly localized) PlayStation game. It’s of a piece with Earthbound 64, not just aesthetically and tonally, but also because Earthbound 64/Mother 3 was cancelled and thus is largely imaginary, its constituent parts eventually being reformed as Mother 3 for the GBA. Crow Country feels like a game that an old magazine like Electronic Gaming Monthly would gush about in previews but which would never materialize, save for the grace of your one weird friend who imported it because they convinced themselves they were going to learn Japanese.
I will not spoil the central mystery of Crow Country, but I will say that like the aforementioned Mother games it is haunting, bizarre and earns its payoff. And despite outward appearances, the core of the plot fits squarely in the moment. It isn’t too complicated and doesn’t overplay its hand, and if you are not careful you could easily miss a crucial detail. But I was thoroughly touched by what the story was able to pull off in such a short time, with such a limited palette, and such terse verbiage without breaking kayfabe.
Perhaps this is part of why so many people pine for this era of gaming, why it looms so large in the current imagination. Since the leap to 3D we have seen nothing but diminishing returns every generation. What have we gotten since then has been garish and increasingly expensive, bloated and unsustainable, with very little added narrative value. I don’t begrudge people for having doubts about a pretty, hollow, expensive and ugly future, particularly the young and alienated. Given the alternative, the past can look inviting.
We can never recapture that technological leap to 3D or what it represented, and it can be foolish to try. But sometimes it’s nice to pretend a little, to cosplay the past, to get the core of what worked with those old games, quietly smooth over what didn’t, and create something new. To get a misremembered dream that does what it sets out to do efficiently and leaves you feeling more full when it’s over than modern, broken games with budgets hundreds of times larger.
Crow Country is available now on Steam, Xbox and Playstation 5.
