Developed by SFB Video games, survival horror journey Crow Nation sees you taking part in 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 model that evokes the likes of PS1 classics Resident Evil and Silent Hill whereas including a formidable quantity of density and element to environments. This added degree of element does make it exhausting to discern which objects could be picked up, nevertheless, particularly in areas the place the lighting is simply too low, abetting the horror moderately than serving to it.
Whereas issues look recent 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 choice to modify to a extra up to date management scheme. High quality of life concepts are in every single place within the sport, together with on the issue degree, which even affords an “exploration” mode that absolutely disables enemy encounters. Whereas this will upset purists, it’s an enormous accessibility win, particularly with a lot of the map being price exploring.
Turning off enemies does take away probably the greatest aspects 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 larger 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 monitor particularly appears 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 achieved with such a small staff. When you like 90s horror video games — Resident Evil particularly — then you definitely owe it to your self to check out Crow Nation.