Stone the crows! London-based indie studio, SFB Games is probably best know for its Nintendo Switch launch title Snipperclips, but its newest release, Crow Country couldn't be any more different. Heavily inspired by PS1 survival horror games in both graphics and gameplay, Crow Country sees you exploring an abandoned theme park in search of its missing owner Edward Crow, and you can watch me play through the opening 90 minutes of the game on the player above!
The games' nostalgia-inducing aesthetics definitely have the potential to feel a bit gimmicky, but they actually work really well and only serve to accentuate the creepiness of the story. The visuals have the same vibe as the pre-rendered backgrounds of PS1 games of old, such as Resident Evil, but Crow Country gives you the freedom to fully rotate the camera. This means you can easily explore all corners of the game's spooky theme park setting for the many items and lore drops that litter the environment. That's not the only quality of life improvement that Crow Country makes over the games that inspired it though, there's even the option to choose a modern control scheme, which is great news for those of us who find old-school tank controls more frustrating than fun to use.
Other standouts I noticed during my first 90 minutes of play time include the excellent audio design that contains sound effects and audio stings that made my skin crawl and a lot of imaginative but fairly simple to solve (so far!) puzzles. This is all wrapped up in a narrative that at first seems rather clear-cut but, by the end of the 90 minute stream at least, begins to hint at some much wierder goings-on with both the theme park and the game's protagonist Mara Forest.
If you like the look of Crow Country and you want to give it a go for yourself, there's a free demo that you can try on Steam right now, while the full game releases on PC, Xbox X/S and PS5 on Thursday 9th of May.
