When it comes to game genres, Survival Horror is a bit of a black mark for me. I was never allowed to play such titles while growing up. Most featured shooting, gore, and an ESRB rating denoting the games were intended for an audience of young adults. My parents were okay with family friendly Nintendo games, but something like Resident Evil 4 would have been a no-go.
As a result of this restriction, my experience with Survival Horror is somewhat limited. I’ve played a handful of titles in the genre over the past decade, but I’m still not entirely sure that I “get” it. I say this because I haven’t really enjoyed the majority of the Survival Horror titles that I’ve played.
That isn’t to say that I’ve hated the Survival Horror games that I’ve played, but I usually find them quite tedious. Repeatedly exploring a familiar setting? Love it. The constant oscillating build, and release of tension? Fantastic. But these games start to lose me when they randomly swap to a bombastic action set piece, or when I spend more time managing my inventory than I do actually engaging with the rest of the game. Is rearranging my backpack really supposed to be the best part of the game? If not, why are we spending so much time on it?
Regardless, it was fairly easy to arrive at the conclusion that I simply don’t understand, or enjoy Survival Horror titles thanks to my experience with about a dozen different titles. There are obviously pieces of them that jive with me. However, there seems to be too many common genre tropes that impede my ability to really sink into the majority of Survival Horror titles.
I thought it was important to lead with all of that context about my experience with Survival Horror titles because it will completely change the following statement: I really, REALLY enjoyed Crow Country. And I’m not sure what to make of that. Is this one of those rare titles that transcends its genre? Or is Crow Country simply a game made by people who enjoy the same aspects of Survival Horror that I do? I hope to explore that question here today.
Focus on Exploration
One of the things I appreciate about Metroid, and Zelda games is how they use space. Most games usually put a puzzle in front of the player with all of its pieces, and ask for the puzzle to be solved before the player can progress. However, in the aforementioned titles, it is commonplace for puzzle pieces to be scattered across the entire playspace. This challenges the player to internalize areas, and return to them when they think they’ve found all of the required components of the puzzle. The challenge here isn’t necessarily the puzzle: it’s the player’s spatial awareness. You’re being tested on your ability to remember where things are, instead of your ability to logically figure out how different pieces of the puzzle fit together.
Many Survival Horror titles also dabble with these sort of spatial awareness based puzzles, but Crow Country fully commits to the idea. The player finds themselves in the eponymous theme park for the entire duration of the game, and will spend a lot of time scouring it from corner to corner. Players will often need to return to previously explored areas with new equipment to solve some of the puzzles in said area, which leads to similar spatial challenges to those found in Metroid, or Zelda. There are even several shortcuts that allow for faster travel from one area to another. I found all of this to be an absolute joy. Very few games actually challenge players on this sort of spatial awareness, so finding a new game that does always gets me going.
However, what really allows this repeated exploration to shine is how Crow Country evolves over time. New enemies appear in previously cleared areas, which can add an additional wrinkle to your favourite shortcut through the park. This helps to accentuate the spooky vibes of Crow Country in a way that I found very affecting. It also helps to keep things from ever becoming stale. Never knowing if a route is safe, or not allows tension to naturally build, and release as you continually explore the park, which really worked for me throughout my playtime.
Deemphasized Combat
Regularly having to fight enemies is a big part of why so many other Survival Horror games lose me. There’s a couple of reasons for that, but the primary one is that my flight, or fight response is to fight. If I have the ability to fight back against something, I will. As a direct result, I tend to find it far more unnerving when I can’t actually fight back.
Many Survival Horror games try to counteract this tendency toward violence by limiting the amount of resources players have access to. However, in my experience this rarely has the intended effect. I spent a lot of time indiscriminately gunning down baddies in both Resident Evil 2, and Signalis without ever feeling like my resources were strained. This didn’t exactly help either game to achieve their intended vibe. Unless I was meant to feel like the Terminator, in which case the dev teams were spot on.
While that same mass genocide is absolutely possible in Crow Country, the shooting feels so fiddly that I regularly found myself fleeing from combat. This allowed many of the game’s baddies to maintain a facade of being threatening, which normally isn’t the case beyond the first hour or two in other Survival Horror titles. It turns out that all it takes for me to abandon my murderous urges is being mildly inconvenienced by imprecise controls.
In addition to Crow Country’s fiddly controls, several boss fights can be completed without firing a bullet, which further deemphasizes combat. I’m not entirely sure that most people will choose to go that route as solving a puzzle while under duress is fairly challenging, but the option is present.
The Crusty Artstyle
Is crusty the right word? I mean, just look at it:
Maybe nostalgic is better? I don’t have any nostalgia for games that look like this though, and I still thought the aesthetic of Crow Country was the bee’s knees.
Similar to games like Signalis, Crow Country makes use of an intentionally low poly aesthetic. I like this a lot because the lack of detail constantly obscures what exactly the player is looking at. This allows their imagination to run wild, which has the benefit of making Crow Country’s menagerie of shambling enemies a lot more frightening.
On the whole, I don’t know that I’d call the artstyle pleasing, but I think developer SFB Games absolutely nailed the visuals with Crow Country. They have the intended effect of maintaining the spooky vibes.
Modern Conveniences
I hate inventory management with a burning passion. I know it’s a large component of basically every game with any kind of Survival mechanics in it, but I’ve never liked it. That probably stems from my deep seeded hatred of Free-to-Play titles, which often give players limited inventory space with the ability to buy more for a premium. That’s such nonsense, and my negative association carries over into other games where determining what supplies you do, and do not need is an integral part of the core gameplay loop.
That said, I’m glad that Crow Country completely did away with inventory management even if it is a standard genre convention of Survival Horror. It allowed me to spend far more time actually engaging with the game’s world, puzzles, and combat (or rather dancing around enemies), instead of becoming overly fixated on making sure I had all of the supplies I needed. This was especially helpful for Crow Country’s puzzles, since I didn’t need to constantly stop at a safe room to gather the required items. This had the added benefit of meaning that I was saving far less frequently, which also heightened the tension of each trek across the park since I had way more to lose.
The removal of inventory management isn’t the only modern convenience: Crow Country also features both modern, and tank controls. As someone who never played with tank controls, I liked having the ability to play with a control scheme I was more familiar with. I imagine folks who are familiar with ye olde PS1 games will appreciate the inclusion of tank controls, but I can’t speak on their behalf. Regardless, this was a nice additional touch for folks like myself who don’t have nostalgia for those older controls.
Well there you have it. Those are all the core reasons why I enjoyed Crow Country.
Overall, I’m still not sure if I’d give Crow Country a blanket recommendation. My general lack of experience with Survival Horror titles is a big part of why. I’m not confident other folks who really enjoy games in this genre will have the same kind of experience I did.
That said, if you, like myself, find that you haven’t really gelled with Survival Horror titles in the past, and anything I’ve outlined sounds appealing then you might want to give Crow Country a look. I think it’s an absolute gem, and I’m glad some developers finally made a Survival Horror game that appeals to my very specific tastes.
Crow Country is currently available on all platforms sans the Nintendo Switch.
Frostilyte Writes 
I find it interesting that you didn’t seem to have an issue with resources in RE2 or Signalis. I often found myself running out of ammo and having to choose to avoid enemies more often than I’d like. I’m not a big fan of that either. It’s why RE4 remake was a more enjoyable gameplay experience, because that was one of the few survival horrors that seemed to always give me a sufficient amount of ammo. The other issue with low resources in some of these games is that their other mechanics do not make up for it. They usually make you move around too slow and have piss poor melee that feels like an afterthought.
I don’t know if The Last Of Us counts as a survival horror, but they have a good movement system and decent melee mechanics that makes combat and avoiding enemies a much more enjoyable experience. It’s a shame more games don’t attempt to follow in its footsteps.
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I was absolutely drowning in ammo by the end of Signalis, but I think part of that came from how I’d deliberately lure enemies away from the critical pathways in most rooms. Corpses only ever pop back up again based on the player’s proximity, so if you never have to walk near a corpse then you never have to potentially spend another round of ammo on it. I dunno if you did something similar, but that helped me to conserve waaaaaay more ammo than I needed for the whole game.
For RE2R, I didn’t mention it because it would break the flow of the article, but I didn’t actually finish the game. I only made it slightly beyond the police station because that’s when I thought the game stopped being fun to play. I don’t know how far, or not far that is from the end, but perhaps things get a little more hectic later? When it was just a couple Lickers, the trench coat guy, and the regular shamblers I didn’t really have an issue keeping on top of them. I might have also been playing the game on a lower difficulty, but I can’t actually remember if that’s true, and I was playing RE2R on gamepass, so I can’t readily check that either.
I mean maybe? Genres feel like more of a “vibe” thing most of the times, so what genre a game slots into is can be a fairly murky debate.
Couldn’t say why more games didn’t follow The Last of Us’ example, but the narrative elements of the game might have overshadowed the gameplay elements a bit. The story, and cutscenes are what I usually hear people talking about in regard to those games. Could just be that not enough people who really appreciated those elements of the game have had the opportunity to integrate them into their own games yet.
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I definitely didn’t have that amount of strategy in Signalis. I either just avoided enemies I knew I could avoid or shot the ones I had to shoot and hoped they wouldn’t become problems again, or burnt them if I thought it was necessary.
I just remember RE2 not quite giving me as much ammo as I’d like, and RE3 and RE4 giving me a lot more.
When I was playing The Callisto Protocol I remember thinking “man this is super tanky, I wish they had just went for a more sci-fi TLOU with its combat. It’s certainly got a bigger focus on utilizing melee than a game like Dead Space. But unfortunately they thought it was a good idea to make your character much slower in every way than Dead Space.
Anyways im kinda rambling now.
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If there is one thing I’m known for doing while playing games, it is chronically overthinking everything. Doesn’t matter how simple the game is lol
Gotcha. I suppose you weren’t the only person who felt somewhat similar because I remember a lot of folks being pretty upset with how The Callisto Protocol launched initially. It’s one of those things where I feel like a lot of developers might find themselves trapped using genre conventions just because they are conventions instead of asking if they make sense in the wider context of their game. Though I haven’t played Callisto Protocol, so I really can’t say.
No worries. It’s always nice to have a bit of a chat with you in the comments. Besides, this is all tangentially related to what I wrote about.
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I just finished writing up my thoughts on this game too, and it’s interesting to hear what you liked about it. I play tons of horror games, so I don’t always notice which elements are popular or not. The lack of inventory management definitely stood out to me, as it’s such a common part of most survival horror games yet didn’t hurt this game at all. I’m glad to hear you enjoyed it!
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Kind of related: where can I go to read your thoughts on the game? Not sure if wordpress is glitching out, but your blog link in the comment doesn’t seem to link back to a blog. I’m assuming you migrated your stuff elsewhere, ya?
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I’m not sure why the link goes to the wrong url lol. It’s actually https://kaytalksgames.wordpress.com/
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Perfect! Thank you.
In hindsight, I feel like I should have just tried copying that into my browser…ah well. Some days my brain is just out to lunch, ya know?
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Welp, looks like I have a game to check out at some point…
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If I remember correctly, this is the second time I’ve done this to you, isn’t it? The first time being Signalis? Either way, I hope you enjoy Crow Country. I’ve gotten the sense from your writing that you’re more into these titles than I am, and I’m still not entirely sure if my enjoyment of Crow Country is entirely dependent on my lack of exposure/enjoyment of other titles in the Survival Horror genre. Here’s hoping it’s a title that even genre vets enjoy too.
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As someone who struggles a bit with not loving a lot of elements of survival horror, I’ve been hesitant to try this one? But you’ve kinda convinced me to give it a shot at some point. And “crusty” is a completely valid and descriptive word.
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Well, I hope that you enjoy it whenever you get around to it. I’d like to know how you find it once that occurs, so let me know here, or any of the other places we run into one another.
Mir had a bit of a laugh at the use of the word crusty. She said it was a very me way of describing something hahaha.
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