Last month, I had 2 choices for retro indie survival horror games to play. I could play Tormented Souls or Crow Country. I chose to play Tormented Souls first, since it has a sequel coming out soon, and I wanted to play the first in order to determine how interested I will be in the sequel. I was a bit underwhelmed with Tormented Souls, and was still on the fence about whether to check out its sequel. Thankfully, the developers of the game might have made that choice easier by offering a free playable demo. So I guess I'll play that and see how it goes.

In any case, I came out of Tormented Souls still itching for some retro survival horror, and I was still waiting for a used copy of Silent Hill f (because Konami isn't getting a penny of my money after fucking up Silent Hill so thoroughly for 2 decades). I wasted no time and jumped right into Crow Country.

Crow Country is a different, but familiar take on retro survival horror.

Retro style; not-so-retro gameplay

Crow Country takes a very different approach to its retro stylings than Tormented Souls. For one thing, it comes up with an original story, instead of ripping off the story of one of the survival horror classics. It also eschews classic survival horror gameplay staples, such as the fixed camera angles, in favor of rotatable camera. Even though the camera can rotate around the character, it cannot pan up or down, so it does maintain the sense of claustrophobia and limited visibility of the old fixed-camera games. Threats can always be just off-screen, waiting for you, and enemies frequently respawn, which makes sprinting across the map very risky.

It has tank controls on the left analog stick, but I found that they were never really useful. Since the camera can rotate, and there aren't cuts to different angles as you walk around a room or down a hallway, it was easy enough to navigate with the analog stick. The analog stick is also more reactive, which made it easier to duck and dodge around enemies slinking around in the darkness just off-screen.

Instead of fixed cameras and tank controls, the retro aesthetic of Crow Country comes almost entirely from its art style, map design, and emphasis on resource-management. The graphics are very low-def. Characters look like they were pulled straight out of NPC crowds in the original PS1 Final Fantasy VII. Crow Country expertly evokes the visuals of a PS1 classic, but it also takes advantage of technical upgrades that were impossible for the PS1. For one thing, you can aim your gun freely, and targeting different body parts of enemies will have different results.

The free aim is integral to resource management.

The free aim is also an essential part of the game's novel resource-management. The maps are littered with crates and plastic bottles that may or may not contain resources. But you aren't given a melee weapon at all, and so if you want to smash these containers, you have to shoot them with a gun (and hope that you don't miss due to poor aim). You can see what resource is contained within a breakable plastic bottle, but you have no idea what (if anything) might be inside a wooden crate. There's always a cost-benefit analysis going on. Will you get something that is more valuable than the bullet you will spend to have to acquire it?

I was on the fence for a long time about Tormented Souls. I kept seeing it come up in videos about modern, classic survival horror games. People kept insisting that it was good. But I had played the demo back near its release in 2021, and I wasn't really impressed. So it sat on my wishlist for years, waiting for a steep discount. That discount finally came, I bought the game, installed it, and it still sat on my PS5, un-played, for months.

But when College Football 26 turned out to be a borderline un-playable dumpster fire, and without having enough free space on my hard disk to install Indiana Jones and the Great Circle's 130-gig install, I found myself with extra free gaming time on my hands, and decided to look for some relatively quick games to play in my back catalog. It was either this or Crow Country, and I decided to give Tormented Souls the nod. Besides, Tormented Souls is supposed to be getting a sequel soon, so I wanted to play the first one, in case the sequel gets really good reviews, and I want to play that sooner rather than later.

Part of the reason that I was on the fence about the game was that I had concerns about the maturity level of the game and it's developers. The design of the player character is kind of ridiculous. Is she supposed to look like an anime character? Her default outfit looks like something you'd see an anime maid wearing, and they go out of their way to pull her tits out in the opening cutscenes. It all seems like it's designed to titillate a particular demographic that doesn't exactly have a reputation for having a mature or healthy view of women.

I could not take the main character's default outfit seriously.

It would be one thing if the game were going for some kind of dis-empowerment gimmick, and actually gave the player control of the character while she's naked and vulnerable. But they don't. She gets dressed during the fade-to-black between the end of the opening cutscene and the player taking control for the first time. So the outfit and nudity all seem rather pointless.

It seems like even the developers understood the ridiculousness of their design, since they include an optional alternate outfit for her in a locker in the starting room. This alternate outfit includes a more practical (and less revealing) pair of jeans with a leather jacket. I actually didn't notice this outfit until after I died and had to restart the game, but once I found it after the restart, I couldn't switch to it fast enough. At least now, I could take the character and game more seriously -- pending finding out if the game's story and scenario are equally silly and immature.

Nostalgic call-backs

Was the story as bad as I was afraid?

Well, no. Not really.

It's mostly fine.

If anything, Tormented Souls isn't so much "immature", as it is derivative. From the start, many audio cues and music sound like they are pulled straight out of a PS1 Resident Evil game. The improvised weapons give slight Dead Space vibes. And as the game goes on, it's story should feel more and more familiar to anyone who played through the original Silent Hill, except without all the clever symbolism and references to real-world alchemical and occult beliefs that help gave Silent Hill its uncanny tangibility.

If the bar is set at "less smart version of Silent Hill", then I guess things could be a lot worse.

Gameplay-wise, Tormented Souls feels more like the original Resident Evil with its static cameras, tight hallways with monsters hiding around blind corners, and a save system that requires a consumable resource to save your game. There's no magic item box though, as you carry all your supplies and puzzle items on your person at all times, including multiple weapons, a crowbar, a hammer, a car battery, and other large, bulky items that definitely don't fit into those pouches slung around Caroline's waist.

You will be blindly pointing weapons at enemies off-screen.

It definitely does have the classic survival horror feel, with some modern bells and whistles. For one thing, it borrows the REmake design of mapping the character-based tank movement to the direction pad, while keeping directional camera-based analog control on the left joystick. The tight halls and frequent camera cuts make it difficult to use the analog stick when navigating the mansion halls, and there were multiple places where trying to do so resulted in me turning around in circles multiple times. There were even a couple places later in the game where the camera glitched out and got stuck rapidly flickering between 2 angles. For situations like these, it's great to have the tank controls.

I've been trying to go through some of my backlog of games on both the PC and PS5, and recently played through a retro, lo-fi indie horror game called No One Lives Under the Lighthouse. I'm not quire sure what to make of it, and have very mixed feelings. In essence, the first half of the game is excellent. It perfectly evokes the loneliness and sense of isolation of being a lighthouse keeper, and both the lighthouse and the island it sits on are incredibly atmospheric. The back half of the game, however, kind of went off the rails for me. It jumps around a lot, the imagery becomes exceedingly abstract and difficult to parse, and it was just overall confusing. Honestly, I kind of wasn't even sure if I was playing as the new lighthouse keeper, or if the game had flashed me back to the past to play as the previous lighthouse keeper who had gone missing. That's right, the game was so confusing that I wasn't even sure which character I was playing as!

It doesn't help that the dialogue and narration is completely text-based, and that text is too small, and the font is too elaborately-decorated in an Old English style. So I may have mis-read some of the text that might have explained what is going on. There's no options to change the size of the text or use a more plain type-face either.

The premise is to maintain a lighthouse after the former keeper disappeared.

The basic premise is that a lighthouse keeper goes missing under mysterious circumstances, with no body being found. A new keeper comes to the island to take over that missing keeper's duties, and the nature of the previous keeper's disappearance is gradually revealed. Or at least, it's supposed to be revealed, but I honestly couldn't follow along with what was happening.

After the prologue, it is assumed that I'm playing as the replacement keeper. But later in the game, it starts to be implied that either I've switched to playing as the previous keeper in the past, or that I was playing as the previous keeper all along. There might also be a third lighthouse keeper, who was the original keeper before the one who disappears in the prologue? I don't know.