Crow Country | Switch Review

The nostalgic cycle has reached the PS1 fiercely in the past couple years, producing many games that harken back to the classics of that era. Crow Country from SFB Games yearns to remind you of the survival horror games of the time, the ones that established the genre as we know it today. For what it’s worth, it absolutely captures everything from that time.

Caw Caw

You play as Special Agent Mara Forest in the year 1990, as she investigates a theme park named Crow Country. The park was shut down two years prior due to an unfortunate patron being injured at the park. Mara is sent in to locate the founder of the park, Edward Crow, who has become unresponsive to his legal matters. As one would expect of any abandoned theme park in America, it’s crawling with inhuman monstrosities the mind can barely comprehend.

What unfurls is a surprisingly engaging story by the end. While there will certainly be a few twists that are easy to see coming, a lot of the later plot is surprising and genuinely compelling. I did not come to Crow Country expecting to remember much of its plot at all, let alone caring a lot by the end. In many ways, it swings for the fences and nails it.

The Mind’s Eye

As for the gameplay itself, it’s exactly what you’d expect out of a PS1-style survival horror game. You’ll spend the whole game in a single location, in this case Crow Country, and find your way around by solving outlandish puzzles. An item or key you may need to unlock a door in Area A may be hidden in a room in Area B, but the clue to enter that room in Area B may be tucked away in Area C.

Crow Country really expects you to pay constant attention to your surroundings and investigate anything that looks even a little out of the ordinary. A lot of background elements that seem innocuous could end up being vital items. My only problem with this is that, for many puzzles, you need to read a memo to get key information. That was occasionally the case for games on PS1, but it’s constantly being done here in Mara’s journey. Sometimes it felt like I was doing more reading than investigating, which was a bummer.

They’re Coming to Get You, Mara

Enemies litter the many areas of the theme park, ranging in type. For the relatively short length of the game (I finished in around 5 hours or so), I was impressed by the enemy variety. From what I could tell, these myriad malformed monstrosities appear more and more as you progress. So if you leave a hallway full of enemies early on, it will only be all the more dangerous later as some fiendish friends of theirs show up.

These foes are fought with your standard stable of weapons: handgun, shotgun, flamethrower, etc. Aiming is done in a free-aim manner, but from a more isometric viewpoint. This makes firing weapons cumbersome and a bit odd, which is actually a major benefit in this genre. It’s hard to ever feel entirely comfortable shooting at monsters, which is a feat when you can technically aim wherever you’d like, and that’s a major compliment. It would be a boring horror game if the enemies stopped feeling like threats.

Far less successful, and far more annoying, are the traps scattering the areas. These spawn and respawn at random by my estimation, and it is quite frustrating. Most can be easily dispatched with a single bullet, but they’re far more frustrating to avoid than fun. I’m sure that was the point, but it didn’t stop me from getting annoyed. My mind would be laser focused on keeping numbers straight in my head, and all of a sudden a chandelier drops on my head. It doesn’t produce scare or panic the way an enemy might, so its only function is to annoy, and annoy it does.

Backtracking is a survival horror staple, as it is here in Crow Country. You’ll be running back and forth from areas often, and it is definitely rewarding to memorize the theme park by the end. On Switch, unfortunately, the load times can make running around a chore. These typically run for 10 or 15 seconds while you’re staring at a completely blank screen. It may not sound that bad, but you can run across a room in the same amount of time. It makes backtracking to investigate a hunch take as much time loading as it does playing, and that just flat out sucks.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Obviously, Crow Country is going for a low-poly look, and it looks wonderful. The characters almost come across as dolls in nightmare theme park dioramas. The game’s art direction does something I would’ve assumed impossible: It conveys the feeling of pre-rendered art, but is presented in real time. There are no fixed cameras here, allowing you to rotate your viewpoint as you’d like, and yet the backgrounds have that telltale sheen we all remember from the pre-rendered backgrounds of many PS1 games. It’s a startling achievement.

I enjoyed my time with Crow Country. I don’t think it would be remembered as a classic if it released contemporary to its inspirations, but I don’t think it wanted to be. It’s a love letter to a bygone era, and feels very much like the kind of game you would rent for a weekend from your local video store. You might even rent it twice just to see all the many secrets scattered around the park and the perks you get for replaying and striving for better completion rating scores. It’s the kind of game you’d see on an internet list later in life and think “Oh yeah! I remember that!” If you crave that particular nostalgia, as I do, Crow Country is worth a few of your hours.

To hear me talk more about Crow Country, be sure to listen to the October 24, 2024 episode of The Gaming Outsider podcast around the 50:56 time stamp.

This review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy of Crow Country provided by Neon Hive for coverage purposes. It is also available on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC via Steam.