Crow Country review: my first Resident Evil (complimentary)

Tangle Tower was a bizarre and cute level and click on homicide thriller set in a giant bizarre tower filled with vibrant characters, so what higher manner for the devs to fill time earlier than the sequel comes out than by making a creepy retro survival horror set in a regional theme park? Crow Nation is like if Resident Evil was made out of Duplo: extra chunky, much less threatening, and simpler than enjoying with a completely motorised Okay’Nex ferris wheel, however darn it, it is nonetheless time.

A big a part of of the allure of Crow Nation is the setting. It is 1990, and also you play as Mara Forest, investigating the titular theme park, which closed abruptly simply two years in the past. Mara is there to search out out what’s what, exploring the largely deserted and usually sinister themed areas of the park for clues. It is the kind of bizarre, unbiased theme park you get in small cities or areas with out a lot else happening, with an underwater zone, a fairy forest, and a form of Halloween city with a haunted mansion. Crow Nation’s janky animatronics and ill-advised crow theming is de facto well-observed; the set dressing is implausible and sinister even earlier than weirdly-jointed stick monsters and piles of animate gooo with tombstone tooth begin popping up. Therefore the Resident Evil comparability.

It is also fuzzy, such as you’re enjoying the sport through a VHS, and has barely clunky-but-adorable third-person capturing controls – exploration and paying consideration is usually recommended, as a result of that manner you’ll find a scope and a shotgun, for higher aiming and extra destruction, respectively. The enemies may be bullet spongey and do a bunch of injury, however they’re additionally simple to keep away from – although, should you do not prune an space a bit when you’ve the prospect, or ignore the mini-boss monster fabricated from spikes you see skulking round, then you definitely’ll have a more durable time afterward, because the monsters are liable to multiply.

Fortunately the survival a part of Crow Nation is fairly simple. You want bandages and medkits on your well being (Mara can solely actually take a number of hits, and he or she’ll begin limping round in a form of passive aggressive manner when she’s actually harm), bullets on your handgun and shogun shells for the shotgun, and antidotes for when the atmosphere begins producing poison traps. Grenades are available in very useful, too. However truthfully, should you simply preserve a watch on the market are quite a lot of all of them knocking round. You may solely save in sure locations, however each protected room has a stash of stuff you should utilize, and also you often get one thing from rifling via bins or kicking a drinks machine. Once you add jars and containers, some useful explosive barrels, and the truth that some kind of NRA-affiliated Father Christmas appears to have to simply go away containers of bullets round a theme park, you do not actually find yourself on the skinny finish of the useful resource wedge at any level.

That being the case, there is not quite a lot of menace in the identical manner there may be when, for instance, a bunch of zombie canines immediately bounce via a two-way mirror, or no matter it’s you nerds like, so it would disappoint you if you would like an actual survival horror problem. Nonetheless, Crow Nation has a powerfully creepsome environment. The story of the park unfolds out of chronological order, as you discover worker notes, newspaper clippings, and run into the occasional foolhardy NPC who tells you a bit of bit extra. It entails secret dig websites, experiments, and unusual powers of which we don’t ken – it would be a banger three half Physician Who episode within the Sylvester McCoy period, again when he was combating sea vampires alongside Soviets.

The park itself unfolds out of order as nicely, with a labyrinthine map linked with underground tunnels and worker service doorways that you simply unlock by fixing multi-part puzzles. These themselves are muddled up, too. You usually discover the reply to a puzzle earlier than you discover the puzzle itself, like the worker be aware that tells you which ones aquatic animals it’s a must to shoot to get entry to the shotgun, or one which complains in regards to the dinner present within the undersea-themed restaurant being damaged as a result of somebody nicked the trident. The map helpfully circles rooms with a puzzle you have not solved but, which is a pleasant contact.

The solutions to puzzles are equally easy, however require sufficient considering and noticing that you simply really feel triumphant for figuring them out: “Aha, the ruby I can use to repair the swan recreation is hidden behind a portrait within the haunted home, after which I can get the machine chain to activate the crane within the dig web site!” And when you’re backtracking and opening up shortcuts, the hazard across the park escalates, with shock assaults from worms popping out of partitions, spike traps hanging from the ceiling, and extra memorable set items to cope with. A sequence in a grim maze was a selected favorite, as had been the telephone calls I saved getting from park proprietor Edward Crow.

So whereas it is a more easy tackle a Resident Evil-ish method, I do not assume it is much less good. The emphasis is extra on the puzzles than the survival, however the consideration to element within the sound design, the wonderful planning of the map, and the creepy story and setting, are accompanied with a wink on the digital camera from time to time that actually put a shine on Crow Nation. It is realizing in addition to excellent, and I had a wonderful time at Crow Nation (although wouldn’t give it a suggest on journey advisor should you’re after a household vacation).

This evaluate is predicated on a duplicate of the sport supplied by the developer.