The Haunted Hoard: Crow Country (PS5)
Horror has often been found in the compromises caused by limitations. The robot shark in Jaws didn’t work the best, so its limited use meant less screen time for it and a more ominous build-up to the reveal as a result. Silent Hill on the PlayStation couldn’t display its eerie city in total without straining the system, so dense fog was implemented that looked like an intentional means of obscuring the monsters and sights that lurk within. Crow Country, a game released in 2024 on powerful hardware like the PlayStation 5, didn’t really need to have a grainy look, blocky characters, and its own bit of fogginess, but this survival horror throwback recognized the efficacy of its genre ancestors and fully embraced those “outdated” elements. Crow Country didn’t necessarily need to use such an art style, but it certainly gives this adventure a special identity that can lend itself well to the uncanny discoveries you’ll make along the way.
This survival horror game sees you playing as Mara Forest in the year 1990 as she pulls up at the abandoned Crow Country theme park. Aiming to find its missing owner Edward Crow, she begins to explore the mostly vacant grounds, but they aren’t empty for long. Mysterious gnarly creatures of different shapes and sizes begin wandering the park, notes you find giving these beings the ironic nickname Guests. While fighting and fleeing from the Guests ends up an important part of your exploration, you’re also there to unravel the deeper mysteries behind Crow Country alongside a few other named characters you meet along the way. The game doesn’t wait long to sow the seeds of there being something more than a rundown amusement park at play, a big crate of gold positioned right outside the first save point you encounter even, but the mystery goes much deeper than what that gold might first imply and the game manages to compose a pretty tight web of connections between the clues you gradually unravel. The notes you find are often either hints towards a range of puzzles that make up the second half of the game’s activities or directly tie to the fuller narrative, the rollout great at pulling you in and making you ponder its elements before it culminates in a way that provides an intriguing allegory to ponder. Mara is also a bit of a fun protagonist, our view into her thoughts as you observe objects or attempt interactions around the park having an amusing sarcastic personality to them.
The amusement park setting proves to be an inspired choice for the adventure. Already run-down theme parks have proven to be a good source of eerie imagery in real life, making them popular with urban explorers searching for some atmosphere. Things once meant to be cute and inviting now in disrepair and damaged works even before you factor in the extra uncanny nature that this game’s visual style inherently provides. Despite the deliberate limits on how detailed a specific object can be, environments can have a fair bit of decoration and have their interactive elements be mostly clear, especially thanks to a camera you can freely rotate since Crow Country isn’t sticking to its survival horror game inspirations when it comes to the more inconvenient elements. This being a theme park also opens up the explorable space to a range of visual variety, the park having sections with themes like an underwater adventure or a spooky space. The range of themes and backroom areas helps this relatively small location pack in a range of eye-catching and diverse elements. The puzzles often play into the area theming as well, the undersea area for example roping in sea serpent animatronics and an aquatic life shooting gallery as components of its trials. Many individual rooms get to be a bit more imaginative as they can integrate something technically unrealistic or fanciful without it breaking the horror atmosphere due to the decrepit state of the park.
Curiously, the puzzles in Crow Country can be clever but also willing to undermine themselves a bit. You might have something that involves a good bit of logic and observation to learn a code for a nearby keypad… but that code is also written on the back of a wall if you find the nearby secret. It is interesting in some ways to offer more than one solution, an easier route for people who aren’t picking up on the other clues, but considering the game offers an Exploration difficulty where there are no guests and it is all puzzles, it’s strange there would be much simpler outs that could undermine that mode. Playing in Survival does feel the way to go almost because of this, but that doesn’t mean the puzzles are lacking in creativity. Some optional puzzles will provide you upgrades to your weapons and healing or rare resources if you engage with them and the game doesn’t give an easy out for those, meaning while you may sometimes find the easy road that avoids the interesting intersection of an area’s trapping and theme with overcoming some obstacle to progress, you can at least be assured there are tougher trials with rewards that help against the Guests.
The Guests are not nearly so oppressive that Exploration difficulty feels necessary even for a horror novice. The park has plenty of ammunition and healing to find and enemies will stay dead if killed, although over time new Guests will start populating spaces based on how far in you are. Killing Guests is a strategic concern as you will traverse Crow Country repeatedly to take important items to where they can solve puzzles or unlock doors, smaller Guests like the little blobs easy to walk around but taller ones are more aggressive and swift. Many human sized ones require more work to weave past, but if you do want them out of the way for good, you’ll need to use your pistol or some other gun. Aiming requires you to stop in place and angle the gun in a third-person view, a marker and potentially laser sight if you find it helping land the headshots that can kill foes more quickly. Many Guests can take a few shots to fell, meaning you might have to scramble if you don’t take them out quickly enough in the often cramped spaces, and missing shots is possible because you have to do that brief bit of pointing properly before firing. You’ll come to know certain types of Guests over the adventure though, which ones will scramble towards you like a cockroach or might be so large they can easily hit you even if you’re not too close. Perhaps one element that makes Guest management more feasible without straining your resources though are traps. Be they explosive barrels, electrical transformers, or actual bear traps, luring a foe towards them and then either activating it yourself or having them do so deals heavy damage for often little investment, this also adding texture to the encounters as well as risk as you can very well activate traps unintentionally or suffer if you’re too close when one goes off.
Crow Country doesn’t feel like it wants to be too difficult on its standard difficulty. You do need to find fireplaces or the like in safe rooms to set up saves so you might lose some progress if you die, but your inventory can carry most items and while there are limits on how much ammo and healing you can carry, you still can have quite a lot to offset if there is a particularly dangerous event. The Guests don’t stop feeling dangerous despite it all though, the player having to be smart about their actions to have excess and there are a few surprises that might end up with you dipping into your reserves or relying on the rather uncommon grenades. It’s an effective balance because you can handle yourself as needed but know overinvesting or using things in a panic can take away your cushion. Crow Country is also pretty good about segmenting the puzzle elements away from the action, the player able to sometimes let them blend if they choose not to deal with nearby threats, but you’re given room to think and experiment during more involved interactions. It’s not a particularly long adventure either, and if you need it there is even an in-game hint system via a fortune telling machine since it can be easy to forget if you’ve opened every possible door with a new key or can finally interact with an object that was just a mystery in the game’s opening moments. Being a bit compact helps the game stay so cohesive though, Crow Country never feeling rushed or like it had to compromise its ideas.
THE VERDICT: Crow Country’s setting was brilliantly considered, the theme park able to provide a range of area types for unique puzzle solving and sights that look uncanny as the PS1-style limited graphics mix with the inherent eeriness of a place meant for joy now abandoned and infested. Some of the puzzles are let down a touch by the game giving easy ways out of otherwise clever interactions that can be stumbled across accidentally, but there are still enough quality ones that always work to supplement the interesting balancing act of trying to manage the violent Guests without exhausting your somewhat generous but certainly not abundant resources. Traps add texture to the regular encounters and the story does a good job of tying everything together into a tight package, Crow Country a delightful mix of new and old sensibilities when it comes to gameplay and horror.
And so, I give Crow Country for PlayStation 5…
A GOOD rating. Crow Country uses its old school look to good effect, not sacrificing clarity and designing well around its limitations. The Guests can still look unsettling and the graininess can even obscure their features just enough that makes them a bit harder to comprehend, but when looking for useful items or trying to aim your gun you won’t be rubbing up against display issues. Crow Country tries to meld the old and new in terms of a classic look with more modern conveniences, but that does make it a little easy at times. With Exploration difficulty already existing, the alternate solutions to puzzles could have been kept to there or perhaps the fortune teller machine, and while abundant resources can ease the game’s edge a bit to make it accessible to a broader audience, it also could have afforded more encounters with tougher foes to put a bit of a squeeze on you here and there. Thankfully, Crow Country doesn’t diminish itself too much with its kindness towards people who might not be survival horror genre veterans, the story still compelling and unfurling in a way that keeps you hooked, the game’s somewhat short length at between 6-8 hours suiting a story that can produce intriguing thought starters early but still have room for effective reveals that reframe things well. The Guests are still effective even if your weapons can make quick work of many of them, their movement in cramped quarters adding immediate pressure or effective ambushes but the traps also mean the limited space becomes its own boon since it’s easier to bait them to a quick doom. The creative use of the theme park environment in puzzles really helps with making exploration enticing even when there’s a good bit of backtracking, although shortcuts can alleviate that a touch.
The scope of Crow Country is intelligently considered, and even if you do set the game down for a bit, save points have binders with the notes you’ve found for reference so you can dive back in and make progress. A harder “Murder of Crows” difficulty does try to make up for the somewhat easy elements of a regular survival run, but it feels like Crow Country is constructed exactly the way the creators wanted, and while a few more themed lands with related puzzles and encounters could have added some spice, the way it holds together now feels so cohesive and well-considered, a game that hearkens to the past but holds many great ideas that are truly its own.