Players that devour games like Resident Evil and Control alike, not to mention the just-released Alan Wake 2, should keep their eyes on an indie that popped up on Steam recently: Crow Country. It’s an indie horror game with that vague aesthetic of the PSX era that channels the likes of not just the early survival horror like Resident Evil, but the more esoterically strange and scientific scares of games like Parasite Eve.
Thus, the game description: “The year is 1990. Edward Crow has disappeared. The owner of ‘Crow Country’, he has not been seen since he unexpectedly shut down his park two years ago. The silence is broken when a mysterious young woman named Mara Forest ventures into the heart of the abandoned theme park in order to find him.”
The screenshots and trailer feature both stumbling, zombie-like enemies as well as distended biological horrors. “Crow Country’s story explores reckless human greed and the idea of an unforgivable sin,” say the developers. It’ll also feature an Exploration Mode where you’re not attacked, for those who quite love stories like this but don’t love survival horror gameplay.
I’m finding the trailer and screenshots appealing because they have much the same aesthetic as the original Final Fantasy 7. On top of that, however, they’re very well filtered—the fog, pixelation, and lighting add to the aesthetic rather than undermine it or hide technical limitations. Plus, one screenshot has a nice map of the theme park that implies a kind of map game that has you retreat familiar ground over and over. An appealing concept to me.
Developed by indie studio SFB Games, Crow Country doesn’t have a release date yet—it’s just listed as Coming Soon on Steam. SFB previously developed games like Haunt the House, Detective Grimoire. SFB is also behind Tangle Tower, which we’ve called one of the best detective games on PC and which you can read a bit more about here.
You can find Crow Country on Steam. It doesn’t yet have a release date.