Crow Country Review: My First Resident Evil Game (Praise)

Tangle Tower is a weird and sweet crime point and click game set in a massive, weird tower full of colorful characters, so what better way for the creators to kill time before the sequel’s release than by making a terrifying retro survival horror set in a local amusement park? Crow Country is like Resident Evil made of Duplo: stockier, less menacing, and easier than playing on a fully motorized K’Nex Ferris wheel, but damn, it’s still fun.

A massive part of Crow Country’s charm is its setting. It’s 1990, and you play as Mara Forest, exploring the titular amusement park that abruptly closed just two years ago. Mara is there to figure out what’s what, exploring the park’s largely abandoned and generally sinister themed areas for clues. It’s the kind of weird indie amusement park you’d find in miniature towns or areas where nothing much else happens, with an underwater zone, a fairy forest, and a sort of Halloween town with a haunted mansion. Crow Country’s clunky animatronics and inconsiderate raven theme are really well observed; the setting is fantastic and sinister, even before the weirdly amalgamated stick monsters and piles of animated goo with tombstone teeth start appearing. Hence the Resident Evil comparison.

It’s also blurry, as if you’re playing the game on a VHS, and has slightly clunky but charming third-person shooting controls – exploring and paying attention are suggested, as that’s how you can find a scope and shotgun, for better aim and more destruction respectively. Enemies can be bullet-squishy and do a ton of damage, but they’re also uncomplicated to avoid – although if you don’t cut the area a bit when you get the chance, or ignore the spike mini-boss you spot lurking nearby, you’ll have a harder time later on, as the monsters tend to multiply.

Luckily, surviving in Crow Country is pretty uncomplicated. You need bandages and medkits for health (Mara can only take a few hits, and starts limping passive-aggressively when she’s really hurt), pistol bullets and shotgun shells, and antidotes for when the environment starts spawning poison traps. Grenades are also very useful. But honestly, there are a ton of them if you just pay attention. You can only save in certain places, but each unthreatening room has a stash of stuff you can operate, and you usually get something by searching trash cans or kicking a soda machine. When you add in jars and boxes, a few handy explosive barrels, and the fact that some NRA-affiliated Santa seems to just leave boxes of bullets around the amusement park, you don’t really end up on the slim end of the resource wedge at any point.

That said, there’s not much of a threat here in the same way as when, say, a bunch of zombie dogs suddenly jump out of a one-way mirror or whatever the nerds like, so it might disappoint you if you’re looking for a real survival horror challenge. Still, Crow Country has a powerfully creepy atmosphere. The park’s story unfolds out of chronological order, as you find employee notes, newspaper clippings, and occasionally run into a sloppy NPC who tells you a bit more. It involves secret dig sites, experiments, and strange powers we don’t know about—it would be a three-part Doctor Who episode in the Sylvester McCoy era, when he was fighting sea vampires alongside the Soviets.

The park itself also unfolds in a disjointed manner, with a labyrinthine map connected to underground tunnels and employee doors that you open by solving multi-part puzzles. These themselves are also jumbled. You often find the answer to a puzzle before you find the puzzle itself, such as a worker’s note that tells you which aquatic animals you need to shoot to access a shotgun, or one that complains about the dinner show at the underwater-themed restaurant being ruined because someone stole a trident. The map helpfully circles rooms with puzzles you haven’t solved yet, which is a nice touch.

The answers to the puzzles are similarly elementary, but require enough thought and observation to make you feel triumphant when you figure them out: “Oh, the ruby ​​I can use to fix the swan game is hidden behind the portrait in the haunted house, and then I can trigger the chainsaw to activate the crane at the excavation site!” And as you backtrack and open shortcuts, the danger around the park increases, with unexpected bug attacks coming out of the walls, spike traps hanging from the ceiling, and more memorable set pieces to contend with. The scene in the gloomy maze was a particular favorite, as were the phone calls I kept getting from park owner Edward Crow.

While it’s a less arduous version of the Resident Evil-style formula, I don’t think it’s any less Good. The emphasis is more on puzzles than survival, but the attention to detail in sound design, excellent map planning, and the creepy story and environments are peppered with the occasional wink to the camera that really brightens Crow Country. It’s both a well-known game and a very good one, and I had a great time playing Crow Country (though I wouldn’t recommend it on Trip Advisor if you’re looking for a family vacation).

This review is based on a copy of the game provided by the developer.