What the hell happened here? We were thrilled to learn the new game from the developer of the excellent Tangle Tower was set in a theme park. True, Tangle Tower is about solving a murder, but it has a great sense of humor and colorful characters full of life. Crow Country is full of the opposite; it's a run-down abandoned theme park where the theme seems to be 'nauseating dread'. What inspired such a horrific new direction?
"It's not as much of a departure as you might think," claims Adam Vian, creative director at SFB Games. "Crow Country is a narrative-focused atmospheric game about exploring a single location, solving puzzles, and unlocking secret rooms. So is Tangle Tower." For its new game, SFB is adding frights to that mix because survival horror is Vian's favorite genre. "It's just such a perfect, satisfying balance of ingredients. You have to engage your brain, you have to think ahead, you have to make decisions, you can make mistakes. It's all about getting just the right amount of player agency within defined parameters."
Caw blimey
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You play as special agent Mara Forest, who is searching for Edward Crow, the owner of Crow Country, who's been missing since he closed his park two years ago. The game's set in 1990, appropriate given how it looks. Glance at the screenshots and you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd accidentally skipped ahead to PLAY's RetroStation section. Crow Country is a love letter to PS1-era horror, when pre-rendered backdrops were the norm. "The environments are fairly detailed, and most objects have some kind of texture on them," explains Vian. "When combined with the various camera filters, it ended up evoking the lush pre-rendered background art seen in PS1 Final Fantasy and Resident Evil games. Quite honestly, this happened by accident... and now it's become my USP."
Considering those detailed environments, it's striking how pared-back the character design is. Mara looks like she'd be more at home in a doll's house. "Compared to the environments, the human characters are even simpler, rounder, and they tend to not use textures – just flat colors," says Vian. "This helps with visual clarity, but also I find that they're just more appealing and endearing when behind that extra layer of abstraction. Mara doesn't even have a mouth, because half the time it would look 'wrong' for the emotion she is supposed to be feeling, so I just got rid of it."
Our first cautious steps inside the park do little to calm our nerves. The eerie music sounds like something they'd play at James Sunderland's funeral. Several crows are picking at a bloody patch on the floor ("Some kind of dead animal?" wonders Mara). The edge of the screen is just a blur of pixels until we take a step forward, functioning like fog in Silent Hill. In fact, Crow Country is giving us flashbacks to the theme park Heather endured in Silent Hill 3, one of Vian's personal favorites.
"I like games with a strong, tangible sense of place," he says. "The RPD building in [the original] Resident Evil 2, for instance, is so well realized I feel like I can smell the paint on the walls. I'm also a big fan of watching urban exploring videos on YouTube. There's nothing better than a partially decayed abandoned building." Er, agree to disagree?
If you share Vian's passion for decaying buildings then you're going to love wandering around Crow Country. We thought we looked bad after a couple of years of Covid lockdown, but we're an oil painting compared to the state of this place. We find a body of gross green water, with a mechanical contraption in the center making several wooden ducks rotate in a circle. A nice idea for an attraction, except the ducks have a horrible, jerky motion. At least Mara moves more smoothly – or not, depending on what era of gaming you prefer.
"You can use the D-pad for tank controls, or the analogue stick for modern controls," says Vian. "I was a stubborn old-school supporter of the tank controls in Crow Country until the day I – grudgingly – added modern controls. I quickly realized it was better, and never looked back. I've really let myself down there." Don't be hard on yourself Adam! We think it's an ingenious compromise, likewise with the ability to move the camera somewhat freely. Was locking it in place ever considered?
"Doing fixed camera angles well is actually incredibly difficult," explains Vian. "You're basically committing to showing each area of your game as maybe two or three considered compositions, like paintings. Each one has to be both functionally useful and an artful composition. That's hard! It's much easier to just always keep the camera at the same height, and at the same angle. Even though the Crow Country camera 'moves' to follow the character, in many ways it's more rigid and uniform than the fixed cameras in Resident Evil. For example, I never have to show the sky. Or the ceiling." Well, we're sure the full game will never be so mean as to take nasty advantage of that...
Fatal Attractions
It's not long before Crow Country stops simply laying on the atmosphere and goes in for the kill. Soon we're being attacked by pulsating piles of goop, which slither towards us, and shuddering zombie-like creatures that come in a worrying variety of increasingly large sizes. A vent bursts open and spiders pour out, like the zombie dogs leaping through the windows in the original Resident Evil. Worst of all is a traumatizing gray monster with long, stilt-like limbs. We lose all our precious handgun ammo to it pretty much immediately.
But it's the horrors the game doesn't show you that stick in the mind. We enter a digging site with a large hole in the ground and a dreadful moaning coming from it. A chain leads into that hole, shaking as if someone (something?) is stuck on the other end. A notebook nearby describes how a digging company refused to keep working. 'They wanted to know the full size and shape of the thing they were excavating. They wanted to know what it was made of. They wanted to know how long it had been there'. Um, ignorance is bliss? Crow Country is full of writing like this. Often darkly comic, discoverable notes do an excellent job of setting up mysteries and promising fresh horrors to come. Get your ticket booked for a proper visit when it releases sometime in 2024.
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