I didn’t realise how much 90s horror lives on in my muscle memory until I sat down with Crow Country. My head is still full of things I forgot to forget as games grew and evolved and expanded beyond the blocky figures and pixelated gore I grew up with. Stuff like the sound of the cursor flicking over the items in the inventory, or knowing I can reload from the menu, or knowing, with cast iron certainty, that I’ll find more handgun ammo than shotgun shells around here, which in turn will be more plentiful than the magnum ammo. Perhaps that’s why Crow Country feels so much like coming home.
Crow Country reviewDeveloper: SFB GamesPublisher: SFB GamesPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC (Steam), PS5, Xbox Series X/S
Well. You know. If I stomped around home melting deformed denizens with my flamethrower, anyway.
I’ll be honest, though; these kinds of retro homages? I’m kinda done. And by kinda, I mean totally, and by done, I mean I’ve absolutely had my fill of them. Maybe they’re a little more impactful to those who missed these kinds of experiences the first time around, but I’m old enough that I didn’t, which is possibly why I’m more surprised than anyone that after reluctantly picking up Crow Country, I found it astonishingly difficult to put it down again.
You play as Special Agent Mara Forest, a firearms expert – lol; I’ll circle back to that one, my friends – sent to locate the missing Edward Crow, the erstwhile founder and operator of the stunningly grim theme park, Crow Country. Yes, it’s now abandoned – although the spilt sodas and empty popcorn tubs littering the ground suggest that the exodus wasn’t all that long along – but it’s hard to imagine this place as anything other than deeply unsettling even at its prime.
Like the 90s horror games it imitates, this story unfolds through the notes, journals, and newspaper clippings you find stashed around the place, although it remains delightfully opaque right up until the end. Occasionally, you’ll stumble upon other people who’ve strayed too far into the park – a young lad ill-advisedly trying to catch a snap of something strange on his Polaroid camera; a gleefully unhelpful hi-vised park attendant; a lawyer who doesn’t know when to quit – although more often than not, the things you’ll stumble upon won’t be people. Even though they look human-like from a distance.