Crow Country is a very decent horror game. I enjoyed it, but there were some aspects that I felt weren't executed perfectly.
The game's presentation is what first caught my attention, and it's really nice. The excellent choice to set the game in a theme park creates a great opportunity to have a lot of fun locales, and the game does a great job at contrasting the jovial amusement park with the decay and horrible creatures that currently inhabit it.
One of my favorite things about Crow Country is how its combat works. To shoot enemies you have to stop your movement and aim in 3D, which is made harder because your character's hand isn't entirely stable and you have to account for that movement, but also many of the enemies have very jittery movement. The bipedal monsters have extremely twitchy torsos so they might end up dodging a bullet if you aren't careful. I can imagine an alternate universe version of this game where the enemies walk like zombies from Resident Evil 1 where they walk straight towards the player without altering their course, and in that version of the game the enemy movement would be too predictable. Having your swaying aim and twitchy enemies gives the combat a sense of unpredictability that really works for a horror game. Your bullets also will deal more damage the closer an enemy is to you, which creates a tense risk reward where you want to wait for enemies to be close so you can save as many bullets as possible, but also that puts you in a risky spot, especially if you happen to miss (which the previously mentioned systems make more likely). The result is combat with some meaty tension. That being said, it's also easy in a lot of situations to just avoid the enemies which maybe isn't ideal.
Unfortunately, the puzzles are my strongest criticism. I don't think all of the puzzles are terrible or anything, but so many of them fall into the camp of "find the note that gives you the code" puzzle design. If you just read the notes littered around the game, you can often just find the answers to a puzzle, which undercuts a lot of the thinking you might have to do. As an example, there is one room where you can shoot fish for points, and you have to get 21 points. That's a puzzle someone could math out, but also there's just a note somewhere else that tells you the literal order you need to shoot the fish to score 21 points, and at that point the puzzle is just a literal shooting gallery test. Not all of the puzzles were terrible, and even at their worst the puzzles were just not all that deep. I was just a bit underwhelmed by the puzzles in this game and would have liked to see some more challenging logical quandaries.
All that being said, I like the story. The story of the amusement park is fun to learn about and the character writing is pretty competent. I'll avoid saying too much about it for people that want to play the game themselves, but the strongest part of the narrative for me was at the very end when the mysterious Mr. Crow explains where the monsters come from. It's an incredible reveal, one that raises a ton of questions and dark implications that I was not expecting, while also tying together some really interesting themes about short sightedness and greed. Like I said, I won't fully explain it in case you want to play the game yourself, but the ending is worth experiencing.
Overall, Crow Country is a really solid game. It has really good combat, a beautiful aesthetic, and a story that perhaps starts with a lot of what you would expect that takes some great swerves into truly horrific implications. I definitely recommend giving it a playthrough, even if the puzzles are a bit weak.
The game's presentation is what first caught my attention, and it's really nice. The excellent choice to set the game in a theme park creates a great opportunity to have a lot of fun locales, and the game does a great job at contrasting the jovial amusement park with the decay and horrible creatures that currently inhabit it.
One of my favorite things about Crow Country is how its combat works. To shoot enemies you have to stop your movement and aim in 3D, which is made harder because your character's hand isn't entirely stable and you have to account for that movement, but also many of the enemies have very jittery movement. The bipedal monsters have extremely twitchy torsos so they might end up dodging a bullet if you aren't careful. I can imagine an alternate universe version of this game where the enemies walk like zombies from Resident Evil 1 where they walk straight towards the player without altering their course, and in that version of the game the enemy movement would be too predictable. Having your swaying aim and twitchy enemies gives the combat a sense of unpredictability that really works for a horror game. Your bullets also will deal more damage the closer an enemy is to you, which creates a tense risk reward where you want to wait for enemies to be close so you can save as many bullets as possible, but also that puts you in a risky spot, especially if you happen to miss (which the previously mentioned systems make more likely). The result is combat with some meaty tension. That being said, it's also easy in a lot of situations to just avoid the enemies which maybe isn't ideal.
Unfortunately, the puzzles are my strongest criticism. I don't think all of the puzzles are terrible or anything, but so many of them fall into the camp of "find the note that gives you the code" puzzle design. If you just read the notes littered around the game, you can often just find the answers to a puzzle, which undercuts a lot of the thinking you might have to do. As an example, there is one room where you can shoot fish for points, and you have to get 21 points. That's a puzzle someone could math out, but also there's just a note somewhere else that tells you the literal order you need to shoot the fish to score 21 points, and at that point the puzzle is just a literal shooting gallery test. Not all of the puzzles were terrible, and even at their worst the puzzles were just not all that deep. I was just a bit underwhelmed by the puzzles in this game and would have liked to see some more challenging logical quandaries.
All that being said, I like the story. The story of the amusement park is fun to learn about and the character writing is pretty competent. I'll avoid saying too much about it for people that want to play the game themselves, but the strongest part of the narrative for me was at the very end when the mysterious Mr. Crow explains where the monsters come from. It's an incredible reveal, one that raises a ton of questions and dark implications that I was not expecting, while also tying together some really interesting themes about short sightedness and greed. Like I said, I won't fully explain it in case you want to play the game yourself, but the ending is worth experiencing.
Overall, Crow Country is a really solid game. It has really good combat, a beautiful aesthetic, and a story that perhaps starts with a lot of what you would expect that takes some great swerves into truly horrific implications. I definitely recommend giving it a playthrough, even if the puzzles are a bit weak.