This creepy game is a picture-perfect throwback to PS1 horror
08.05.2024 - 15:27
/ digitaltrends.com
/ Giovanni Colantonio
Have you ever found yourself thinking that old video games used to be scarier?
I know I’m in that boat. Nothing creeps me out more than the original Resident Evil orSilent Hill 2. Some newer games might hit me with some extra jump scares, but many titles that really stick in my mind tend to be from older eras. There’s one obvious reason for that: I was younger and dumber then. But that only tells half the story. There’s something undeniably creepy about 1990s horror games made before the days of photorealism. It’s hard to put a severed finger on it, but a new indie game might help.
Crow Country, a new release from Tangle Tower developer SFB Games, is a retro horror game that looks like it was pulled from, the PlayStation 1’s library. It pays homage to classics like Silent Hill, putting players through a claustrophobic puzzle box filled with shambling monsters. In creating such a faithful ode, SFB Games gets to the heart of what made old horror games feel so scary, even if they look so goofy now.
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Creeping dread
In Crow Country, players take on the role of Mara Forest, a detective who is called to an abandoned amusement park in search of a missing person. She’s quickly roped into a mystery about the park’s owner and the nefarious things he was doing there. Its a riff on Resident Evil‘s Spencer Mansion plot, but with more animatronic crows. It’s an intentionally stock story, but it works as a light callback.
After a bit of exploration, a familiar gameplay loop presents itself. I have to find keys and solve puzzles to open the park and get to the secret at its heart. When I get a bronze key, I know exactly which doors to use it on. One puzzle room tells me I need to put an egg-shaped object in a hole to operate a mechanical swan. When I do that, I find another item that leads me to my next puzzle. It’s elegant and uncomplicated puzzle box gameplay. The park itself is small and nothing’s too obtuse. The whole adventure only takes a few hours to zip through, ensuring it doesn’t overstay its welcome.
There are monsters to shoot along the way, of course. It doesn’t take long before the park fills up with zombies, slithering blobs, and hulking flesh beasts. To attack them, I press a button to lock my character in place and then free aim from there to shoot them. Headshots do more damage, naturally, but shots also do more damage the closer Mara is to a monster. That adds a bit of extra tension, as it pays to put myself in danger. Granted, combat is mostly