Developed by SFB Video games, survival horror journey Crow Nation sees you enjoying as Mara Forest, a younger girl hell-bent on discovering the now-missing Edward Crow, enigmatic proprietor of the recently-shuttered Crow Nation amusement park.
The sport has a beautiful retro graphical fashion that evokes the likes of PS1 classics Resident Evil and Silent Hill whereas including a powerful quantity of density and element to environments. This added stage of element does make it exhausting to discern which gadgets may be picked up, nevertheless, particularly in areas the place the lighting is just too low, abetting the horror moderately than serving to it.
Whereas issues look contemporary out of the 90s, there’s a vastly superior diploma of consolation and playability. The sport controls just like the Resident Evils of yore, although there’s an possibility to change to a extra modern management scheme. High quality of life concepts are in every single place within the sport, together with on the problem stage, which even presents an “exploration” mode that absolutely disables enemy encounters. Whereas this may increasingly upset purists, it’s an enormous accessibility win, particularly with a lot of the map being value exploring.
Turning off enemies does take away top-of-the-line sides of the title, although. Creature design is phenomenal, masterfully toeing the road between grotesque and deadly, guaranteeing that each enemy encounter is a harrowing one. In a masterstroke, your gun offers greater harm the nearer enemies are to you, so the sport actively encourages placing your self at risk. It’s good.
Sound design additional enhances the temper, providing suitably creepy ambient tracks, distressing fight tracks — one observe particularly feels like composer Ockeroid was prompted with “horror castanets” and simply rolled with it — and naturally, the “save room” theme.
It’s really spectacular what SFB Video games has completed with such a small group. In case you like 90s horror video games — Resident Evil particularly — then you definitely owe it to your self to check out Crow Nation.