Crow Country, an atmospheric survival horror set in 1990, is a haunting love letter to PS1-era games

2024-01-11

GamesAdventureCrow CountryCrow Country, an atmospheric survival horror set in 1990, is a haunting love letter to PS1-era gamesWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: SFB Games)

Crow Country

What the hell happened here? We were thrilled to learn the new game from the developer of the excellent Tangle Tower was set in a theme park. True, Tangle Tower is about solving a murder, but it has a great sense of humor and colorful characters full of life. Crow Country is full of the opposite; it’s a run-down abandoned theme park where the theme seems to be ‘nauseating dread’. What inspired such a horrific new direction?

“It’s not as much of a departure as you might think,” claims Adam Vian, creative director at SFB Games. “Crow Country is a narrative-focused atmospheric game about exploring a single location, solving puzzles, and unlocking secret rooms. So is Tangle Tower.” For its new game, SFB is adding frights to that mix because survival horror is Vian’s favorite genre. “It’s just such a perfect, satisfying balance of ingredients. You have to engage your brain, you have to think ahead, you have to make decisions, you can make mistakes. It’s all about getting just the right amount of player agency within defined parameters.”

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(Image credit: SFB Games)

Crow Country

Subscribe(Image credit: Future, Warner Bros)This feature first appeared in Play Magazine.Subscribe to PLAY Magazine here to save on the cover price, get exclusive covers, and have it delivered to your door or device every month.

(Image credit: Future, Warner Bros)This feature first appeared in Play Magazine.Subscribe to PLAY Magazine here to save on the cover price, get exclusive covers, and have it delivered to your door or device every month.

(Image credit: Future, Warner Bros)

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This feature first appeared in Play Magazine.Subscribe to PLAY Magazine here to save on the cover price, get exclusive covers, and have it delivered to your door or device every month.

Considering those detailed environments, it’s striking how pared-back the character design is. Mara looks like she’d be more at home in a doll’s house. “Compared to the environments, the human characters are even simpler, rounder, and they tend to not use textures – just flat colors,” says Vian. “This helps with visual clarity, but also I find that they’re just more appealing and endearing when behind that extra layer of abstraction. Mara doesn’t even have a mouth, because half the time it would look ‘wrong’ for the emotion she is supposed to be feeling, so I just got rid of it.”

Our first cautious steps inside the park do little to calm our nerves. The eerie music sounds like something they’d play at James Sunderland’s funeral. Several crows are picking at a bloody patch on the floor (“Some kind of dead animal?” wonders Mara). The edge of the screen is just a blur of pixels until we take a step forward, functioning like fog in Silent Hill. In fact, Crow Country is giving us flashbacks to the theme park Heather endured in Silent Hill 3, one of Vian’s personal favorites.

(Image credit: SFB Games)

Crow Country

“I like games with a strong, tangible sense of place,” he says. “The RPD building in [the original] Resident Evil 2, for instance, is so well realized I feel like I can smell the paint on the walls. I’m also a big fan of watching urban exploring videos onYouTube. There’s nothing better than a partially decayed abandoned building.” Er, agree to disagree?

If you share Vian’s passion for decaying buildings then you’re going to love wandering around Crow Country. We thought we looked bad after a couple of years of Covid lockdown, but we’re an oil painting compared to the state of this place. We find a body of gross green water, with a mechanical contraption in the center making several wooden ducks rotate in a circle. A nice idea for an attraction, except the ducks have a horrible, jerky motion. At least Mara moves more smoothly – or not, depending on what era of gaming you prefer.

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“You can use the D-pad for tank controls, or the analogue stick for modern controls,” says Vian. “I was a stubborn old-school supporter of the tank controls in Crow Country until the day I – grudgingly – added modern controls. I quickly realized it was better, and never looked back. I’ve really let myself down there.” Don’t be hard on yourself Adam! We think it’s an ingenious compromise, likewise with the ability to move the camera somewhat freely. Was locking it in place ever considered?

“Doing fixed camera angles well is actually incredibly difficult,” explains Vian. “You’re basically committing to showing each area of your game as maybe two or three considered compositions, like paintings. Each one has to be both functionally useful and an artful composition. That’s hard! It’s much easier to just always keep the camera at the same height, and at the same angle. Even though the Crow Country camera ‘moves’ to follow the character, in many ways it’s more rigid and uniform than the fixed cameras in Resident Evil. For example, I never have to show the sky. Or the ceiling.” Well, we’re sure the full game will never be so mean as to take nasty advantage of that…

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(Image credit: SFB Games)

Crow Country

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CATEGORIESHorrorPC GamingPS5Xbox Series XPuzzlePlatformsPlayStationXbox

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GAME REVIEWSMOVIE REVIEWSTV REVIEWS

1Nemesis review: “A magical sense of tension”

Nemesis board game models and tokens laid out on a board

1Nemesis review: “A magical sense of tension”

Nemesis review: “A magical sense of tension”

2Arcs review: “A whole lot of game in a small package”

Arcs review: “A whole lot of game in a small package”

3Path of Exile 2 review: “A stellar start to a thrilling and brutal dark adventure”

Path of Exile 2 review: “A stellar start to a thrilling and brutal dark adventure”

4Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review: “The best adventure Indy has embarked on in over 30 years”

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review: “The best adventure Indy has embarked on in over 30 years”

5Marvel Rivals review: “So preoccupied with trying to be like Overwatch that it forgets to play to its own strengths”

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1Sonic the Hedgehog 3 review: “Keanu Reeves as Shadow is wasted whilst Jim Carrey steals the show”

Shadow brandishes a gun in Sonic The Hedgehog 3

1Sonic the Hedgehog 3 review: “Keanu Reeves as Shadow is wasted whilst Jim Carrey steals the show”

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 review: “Keanu Reeves as Shadow is wasted whilst Jim Carrey steals the show”

2Mufasa: The Lion King review – “It’s no Hakuna Matata but this Disney origin story is a class above the 2019 movie”

Mufasa: The Lion King review – “It’s no Hakuna Matata but this Disney origin story is a class above the 2019 movie”

3Kraven the Hunter review: “The insistence on an R-rating helps save this, with a decent helping of bloodthirsty action”

Kraven the Hunter review: “The insistence on an R-rating helps save this, with a decent helping of bloodthirsty action”

4The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim review – “An uninspired expansion of the most iconic screen take on Tolkien”

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Squid Game season 2

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Caw blimey

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