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?
Resourcefulness
The game is also simultaneously stingy with resources, but also forgiving. Early in the game, I had a ton of bullets, and very few healing items, so I felt encouraged to shoot and kill every enemy I encountered from a distance (the closer you let them get, the more damage your guns supposedly do). But as the game went on, my bullet supply started dwindling, while I was finding health packs that I didn't have the inventory space to carry.
If you're low on ammo, you can
always return to your car for more.
But I don't think it's ever possible to get completely stuck because you are out of ammo. You can always back-track to the character's car and get more ammo from the trunk. Vending machines and garbage cans can also provide additional resources, but you can only get these "free" resources if you are critically low or empty. This ensures that even if you are playing poorly, you will always have just enough resources to continue with the game. Maybe on the hardest difficulty, it might be possible to soft-lock yourself, but I do not think it's possible on the easy or default difficulty.
Aiming is also slow and cumbersome (in keeping with the classic PS1 survival horror games). I always felt vulnerable while I was trying to line up a shot. However, the guns all have a fast rate-of-fire and no recoil. Once a shot was lined up, it was a simple enough matter to just pop off multiple shots until the monster drops dead. As such, the combat never felt particularly challenging, and most of the damage I suffered was from accidentally running into traps that had spawned in places I already explored and thought was safe.
However, if you're fighting all the monsters like this, then you will run low on ammo and have to backtrack to your car to pick up more. Ideally, you should be strategic and thoughtful with your shots, and try to lure enemies next to exploding barrels or other traps in order to take an enemy (or 2 or 3!) out with a single shot. Admittedly though, knowing that I could always go back for more ammo meant that I never felt particularly pressured to use ammo efficiently. I was always more concerned with conserving my health, and would just unload into any enemy that I came across, if I had the bullets for it (which I usually did).
A puzzling park
The map is also reminiscent of classic survival horror maps. There's a central hub that connects to each area, and each area will connect to an adjacent area and loop back around to the hub. The main path through the game is pretty linear, but there are a bunch of optional puzzles that will encourage re-visiting old locations to unlock new rooms or collect additional ammunition and story memos. These puzzles and secret areas also hide much-needed supplies that will help with the push through the end game.
The map screen has limitations.
Saving is limited to specific rooms, but does not require a consumable item. Backtracking to a save room or secret area doesn't take long, as the map isn't very large, and load times are short. I can run from one corner of the map to another in a minute or 2. But enemies will frequently respawn after certain milestones or after solving puzzles, and traps will also spawn, which makes back-tracking risky. Don't ever let your guard down, even if you're going back to a place you've been half a dozen times before!
Those puzzles are usually on the easy side, with very few puzzles that I considered too mentally taxing. Though the map is densely-littered with optional puzzles, which means there's a lot of things that you have to come back to later. This can create some red herrings, where you might think that a puzzle is solvable now, but it isn't. But sometimes, a puzzle is solvable, but you might not realize that you have all the clues you need, so you may put it off till later. This creates a nice, player-driven flow to the game, such that I never felt like the game was holding my hand or dragging me along. I solved the puzzles myself, and largely felt satisfied with coming up with the solution myself.
there is an optional hint system.
Any perceived weaknesses in individual puzzles is also largely offset by the scope and breadth of puzzles. individual puzzles are highly varied, and you're never doing the same thing twice. Many of these puzzles are linked together in surprising ways. A solution to a puzzle in one area will grant immediate progression or rewards, but will also often give a clue or key item for a puzzle somewhere else. This makes the entire map feel almost like it is one large, interconnected puzzle, especially once you start piecing together the optional puzzles.
And if you ever get stuck, the game also includes a handy hint system. There are fortune-telling machines scattered around, which you can use to get hints as to how to progress. There are a limited number of hints available, however, so you have to be strategic about how and when you use them. It's there if you get stuck, but nothing in the game feels so obscure or esoteric that I needed this help.
No self-respecting, wanna-be, retro survival horror
would be complete without a crank handle.
A quick and novel bit of nostalgia
Crow Country's short, 6-ish hour playtime means that it never wears out its welcome or becomes completely predictable. It is short, but it is jam-packed with action, puzzles, and a few good jump scares. The story of the game does a good job of building intrigue. It gets a little silly at the end, but that silliness also helps to create a sense of lingering dread about the future for Mara, and for humanity as a whole. As Mara says at each save point, "Maybe things will be alright. But maybe they won't."