Crow Country Review (kteno)
I highly recommend this game, but it may not be for everyone, even those who enjoy the genre. If you're interested in the store description at all, then it's definitely worth checking out.
I'm going to highlight some of the things that people might dislike in order to help you make a more informed decision.
Crow Country is rather short, maybe too short for the price tag - I completed it in just over 6 hours while thoroughly exploring and backtracking. However it does offer strong replay value, with many hidden secrets, a scoring system, and new items and challenges that get unlocked upon beating the game. I'm definitely going to go back in for more.
The real charm of the game is the graphics and the overall presentation. I grew up in the Gamecube/PS2 era so I dont have any nostalgia for this style of graphics, but regardless it still evoked that classic, retro feel for me.
Every room is meticulously crafted to have a specific mood and feel to it, and the rooms change as you progress through the game.
The important parts of the story are directly told to the player, but there's tons of extra documents scattered throughout the park that you can look for that help to flesh out the characters and the history of the park. In my thorough search, I missed 4 of the 15 secret items, so there's definitely a good challenge in finding everything.
The puzzles and key item progression are all rather straightforwards. Serviceable, to where anyone could solve them given enough time, but left me wanting a bit more of a challenge, but I did still enjoy them all.
There's also an in-game hint counter that you can use up to 10 times in case you get stuck or lost. I ended up using it twice myself, but only to confirm that I was looking in the right spots. You can definitely complete the game without using them once, so I see them as a good accessibility option.
There is one "puzzle" I want to mention specifically though. While optional for a weapon upgrade, the solution is purely brute force, *and* contradictory to the clues given. For anyone wanting to know what it is going into it, the "puzzle" is in the Mush Room, and the "solution" is to eat every mushroom on the table and healing through the poison ones, instead of finding the safe ones. There are interactables in the room that would seem like hints, but they're all entirely irrelevant. I'm hesitant to call this setpiece a bad inclusion, but it is something I would say needed more work.
(Since release, a "hard" difficulty has been added. I have yet to replay the game with it, so I'm going to leave my original thoughts about the games difficulty.)
The combat is a bit too easy, and most of my healing was from environmental damage. I also finished the game with nearly capped resources when fighting my last enemies, and the only times I went below "caution" health was in the puzzle mentioned above. Granted, I explored a lot, but I never felt like I was really needing to manage resources whatsoever. The lack of a difficulty slider, besides "enemies" and "no enemies", is also something to make note of if you want a challenge. The enemies can be strafed around with no challenge at all, at least when using modern movement. The tank controls, while significantly slower, are probably the best way to play the game.
I don't find myself getting scared easily, and Crow Country was no exception. There were a few times I was naturally jumpscared, but the extent of the horror was in exploration and finding new enemies.
Despite all of the games flaws, it was an amazing experience, and I ended up finishing in one long sitting. I'll definitely be looking forwards to future releases from SFB Games.
9/10