As you can probably tell be my playtime, this is a pretty short game. It took 11 hours to play through twice, 100%ing the game. Overall it's a fun game, with a bonus scavenger hunt in New Game+ and a ranking system to get you to play at least twice.


I did my first playthrough on Murder of Crows, the highest difficulty. And I'm really glad I did. It felt a lot like classic RE with its resource management. But when I did my second playthrough on Survival Horror, the middle difficulty, I was surprised by how easy it was. It gives you a crazy amount of items. You can search trash cans and kick vending machines for ammo boxes or grenades! In Murder of Crows all the vending machines are broken and you can only find one pistol bullet in a trash can if you run out of ammo. Calling that difficulty "Survival Horror" is kind of wrong, IMO, it's a pretty easy and chill difficulty. Definitely play the highest difficulty first unless you're not confident in your Survival Horror skills.

TBH I found the camera and shooting kind of awkward. You can rotate the camera around, but it's stuck in a top-down view. But the shooting is kind of like RE4 (not the remake), where you line up a laser sight to get headshots. The camera angle and aiming feel a bit awkward, but I guess awkward aiming is half fun of classic Survival Horror games, so no big deal. Also, I usually like to use tank controls, but that also felt kind of awkward with the camera. Tank controls work best with a fixed camera, but you pretty much have to rotate the camera a lot, so the modern controls (whatever they're called) just plain work better in this game IMO.


I don't want to spoil the story, but, basically, I thought it had a really cool and unique idea for the origin of the monsters. Like RE, it's a story of how greed and negligence can cause a disaster. It's told mostly through notes, and then a lot of exposition at the end. If you play a second time, you'll see that some of the monologues and dialogues have a different meaning than what they seemed at first.


The simplistic 3D models with a grainy, pixelated filter are definitely charming. But I'm going to disagree with some of the praise here. I've seen other people say it's a faithful recreation of PS1 graphics. TBH, the simplistic shapes of the main character and some of the monsters felt a little less "retro 3D" and more "first project in Blender" to me. They're not bad, and I like the artstyle, but I just feel it's getting a bit oversold.


The atmosphere is mostly pretty creepy. It is an abandoned theme park full of monsters, after all. But it has some surprisingly silly moments, like the Mushroom Boys that will give you free weapon upgrades. It's definitely a unique style for a horror game.

There's a lot of things you can interact with, which helps make the game feel more alive. For example, You can even spin in a chair until the main character feels sick, if you want. I love little things like that, because it shows that the creator is making a game, not a product, and makes me feel that the creator actually had fun during development.

With 3 New Game+ bonus items, a scavenger hunt on your second playthrough, and 2 costumes (that I know of) with accompanying pistol replacements, there's decent replay value.

Overall, a solid experience.

Crow Country is like finding a very nice rock on the riverside.
It's really smooth to the touch, it feels hefty but not too large, it is very pretty and I'm sure I'll carry it around for a fair bit.

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It's got a lot of more Silent Hill than I initially expected. Inventory management is extremely lax, saves are unlimited and you'll have enough ammo to deal with most situations. There is also a nice bit of dynamic difficulty, so people that might struggle a bit will be helped out by the game to avoid a softlock situation.
The atmosphere, though? Extremely palpable. To my surprise, the story is actually pretty engaging (again, I came in expecting Resident Evil); especially in how it leads you through discovering what's going on. And I absolutely adore the haunted theme park setting. It's got some fun nods to the history of such places and it just makes each zone very distinct. On top of that, the protagonist is very likeable. A lot more modern in her writing, her reactions feel genuine while still getting to be cheesy sometimes, if not in a tongue-in-cheek way.
Visually, it's gorgeous. You feel every bit of dirt and rust in the park. Every abandoned animatronic and long-forgotten giftshop. Sound design is excellent in both the ambience and the spooky noises that creatures will make, sometimes warning you of what haunts a room before you actually get to see them.
Controls are silky smooth. A streamlined version of its inspirations, retaining the tension of having to carefully maneuver and aim at foes without the clumsiness of older games. I have no idea how they pulled it off.
All in all, a wonderful little package of a game which I will no doubt replay several times. Very recommended, maybe even more so if you want to get into the survival horror genre for the first time.

A short game, in some ways simple but very good at what it does. Has its moments of great puzzles, great tension from combat, even some pretty good storytelling absent of Resident Evil's narm. And, heck, they even throw in some videogamey humor at a few times without breaking the mood. The art style following the character art of Final Fantasy 7 was really appealing to me (especially since it evades prerendered backgrounds).

Some things I really appreciated: The game is pretty stringent about getting you to limit resource usage, but also has mechanisms to let you scrounge yourself back into place if you've become completely starved. Even if you find yourself out of ammo, it's surprising how many places you can find more sitting in hidden places, as well as special systems even for people that happened to waste everything. While the puzzles are often cryptically based around random notes, the game also has a resource-limited hint system built in - which can be useful, since sometimes you lose track of where you could keep making progress.

The game features traps and scripted enemy respawns, so that even when retreading old areas, it keeps combat and tension. The traps never felt cheap, and it even builds ways for you to use them against enemies.

While I'm often okay with tank controls in survival games in others like Tormented Souls, I ended up finding that the implementation of modern controls was convenient and preferable.

There you have it - classic survival horror with a great atmosphere, good unobtrusive writing, and a unique aesthetic!