Five Nights at Umbrella Corps

Crow Country is a really neat Resident-Evil styled survival horror that takes place in a theme park somewhere in the Atlanta metro. Being that I'm a huge fan of RE and the survival horror genre at large, when I saw this near the top of the highest rated Backloggd games for 2024 my interest jumped. This was everything I was looking for in a game while I await Shadow of the Erdtree. It's remarkably short (less than five hours, however I was afk for some of this,) fairly easy, has an awesome CRT aesthetic, an RE1 camera, and the lore was interesting enough and told well to keep me interested in its short run time. Plotwise it’s nothing extraordinary: You play as Mara, a girl investigating this dilapidated land of attraction. The more time you spend investigating the nooks and crannies of Crow Country, you meet more people and become further enveloped in the spooky mystery behind disappearances and fatalities alike. Zombies known as "guests" inhabit the park in various shapes and sizes. Some of these guests are large and tower over the area you're in, some nimble and move quick, others literal blobs on the map... they're remedied all the same by a few shots from whatever weapon you're using. I used the basic pistol, in RE style, for the majority of the game until the final boss and got along just well. There are several optional bosses as well, all of which went down with a few grenade tosses and a shot or two. I liked this a lot about Crow Country, its short and doesn't control all too well (I mean really, what tank control game ever did) and making combat as simple as it is just making the runtime feel better.

Now I am generally pretty positive in regard to this game, especially because it respects the players runtime, but I felt like a lot of the puzzling and item usage felt a little... random to me. This made the game for much of its latter runtime feel more like a metroidvania than an RE style survival horror than I believe was intended. Items required you to run from one end of the map to the other and sometimes puzzles felt a little obscure in their solutions. Overall I think it could take a hint from the RE2/3/4makes and be more intuitive than it was.

In all if you're a fan of survival horror, especially from indie studios, Crow Country is a must play for 2024. It's short, sweet, and wears its inspiration on its sleeves in the right way.

1000xResist is one of those sleeper indie games I picked up because of the seemingly out of nowhere cult favoritism and fanfare they've gotten, thinking I may be in the running for a hidden gem and possible memorable sleeper hit. What I quickly found out as I made my way through this visual-novel esque piece of abstract was that you are intended to revel and take in the confusion as a piece of endearment towards this media and not as a detraction. The scope of the narrative is entirely obscure and reminiscent of an amalgamation of futuristic and philosophical pieces of work that I've experienced in the past like Nier: Automata, Land of the Lustrous, and strangely enough Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I'm all for the out-there when it comes to penning a story, but there has to be a level of grounding for me to have a buy-in. Nier: Automata's abstractism and grandiose questioning of Philip K Dickian ponderings works because it has an immediate pressing storyline to help carry on the deeper and more intrinsic philosophies. Where 1000xResist separates for me is that you as the player are immediately thrust into a cavernously deep thought-focused plot with no real endeavor made to either coat it under an easier to parse coat of paint or giving it a guiding light. I'm not saying that it needed to be spoken to the player like they were out of Idiocracy or something, but Moreso that levelling out a ten or so hour experience in abstract and only making it more confusing and... abstract leads to a story that never really sticks for me.

I was able to understand the loose goings-ons of things as they happened and the messages placed throughout the game, but it never really struck with me as a critically important or thought provoking piece of media. This is the same gripe I had with the last six episodes of Neon Genesis: Evangelion that gets me in hot water with friends of mine as we discuss the hallmark and legendary anime. As the creator delved further into the conceptional of Shinji's mind and enemies at large and further and further into psychological mysticism, I fell out of favor with the show. It felt like it was trying to "think too much" and not "say enough." That is ultimately my qualm with 1000xResist, there is a lot being done in weird ways that are meant to be symbolic and interesting but ultimately fell flat because of the persistence to non-linear and ambiguous storytelling.

On top of qualms with the way the story was told, there are some slight issues I had with this game that don't really chalk up to much of a real con-list: voice acting I felt could have been greatly improved to create a more passionate tale, and the hub world that you revisit quite a bit is maze-like and annoying to traverse.

Pick this up if you want a mildly interesting (basically) visual novel that jumps heavily into science fiction themes, but if you want a game that will stick with you and make you think, this was not it.