Crow Country doesn’t just recapture the nostalgia of 90s horror games, it improves on it in every way
I was having issues figuring out ways to describe Crow Country. There’s this article I read a while back that put it in the sense of, whenever I think about an amazing game that I played when I was younger, and and eventually go back and play it, I realize that this isn’t as good as I thought it was. But this game isn’t that. THIS game is like going back to play that game and it’s somehow even better than we remember.
SFB Games were able to capture the perfect essence of this 90s PS1/N64 time period and how these games feel, but not be beholden to any of the technical limitations of that time. So it feels modern. There are a lot of really cool modern choices, like being able to move the camera in 3D around the area. It makes it feel like a new thing, even though it’s not.
But the other thing I think is actually really a big plus is that it’s not necessarily too difficult. It has really fun puzzles in it that are hard, but it doesn’t ever feel unnecessarily hard, like older games in this kind of genre can feel. It knows what it is, and it makes us realize that if we know what these games are, we’re going to have a good time. And if we’re new to this genre, we can come into it and have just as good of a time because it’s not necessarily going to force how “it used to be” with this genre.
The combat takes place with the gun, where we’re aiming for limbs, and we can unlock a bunch of different weapons as we progress or if we do secret puzzles. If we don’t do secret puzzles we just have the pistol, which is fine. We’re not going to be screwed over because we don’t have a certain gun. It’s really well designed around the player kind of pushing what experience that they want to have.
I beat the game in one night, one sitting. It’s around six hours, but I felt like if I put the game down or went to sleep I’m going to forget the specifics of puzzles — we’re juggling a lot of puzzles at once in these types of games, and the game compels us to keep going forward to see where the solutions will lead us next.
Crow Country pulls everything together and sticks it. It’s great.
This review was based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It first appeared on The SideQuest LIVE on May 14, 2024. Images and video courtesy SFB Games.
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