Crow Country - Minimalist Games Today

The moment the ending credits rolled for Crow Country, there was only one thought in my mind: that was a good game. The game had good mechanics, felt good to play, and presented and tied up its narrative well. A short and sweet experience that was neither too ambitious nor too stale. A genuine breath of fresh air, in an industry that has been charging headlong into a different direction. 

 

A visit to the local theme park yields more than expected

Crow Country is a survival horror game developed by SFB Games, released in May 2024. You join the main character in exploring the eponymous theme park, Crow Country, to find the owner and unravel the mysteries surrounding the strange monsters that haunt the place. Taking control of a young girl, you will fumble through the tank controls to shoot and evade these strange mutated beings, creeping slowly towards the truth. The game is a nostalgic return to the awkward controls of earlier survival horror games; most readers would be familiar with tank controls from games like Resident Evil 4, or the earlier games in that series. The cute pixel art of Crow Country also lends it a retro aesthetic that fits well both these controls and the settings. As the player gradually adapts to these clunky controls, the game ratchets up the difficulty, keeping up the tension as we finally confront the big baddie, which ties up the loose ends and wraps up the game with a satisfying ending. 


To be frank, I don't have much criticism of Crow Country - it feels as if the developers had set out with a vision, and had achieved it in its entirety. It does not feel like a game that had bigger ambitions that were cut, or one that had gone through a process of tumorous growth and pruning. This has become a rarity in the gaming space.

A game can be far too ambitious, and far too bloated for its own good. The 2025 nominees for the TGA Game of the Year award were all open-world games, with the exception of Hades II. More than that, with the exception of Donkey Kong Bananza, all the nominated games takes at least 30 hours to finish the main story, and more than that to actually properly complete. As much as I enjoyed the spectacle of Clair Obscur, or the immersion of Kingdom Come, games these days seem to skew onto the side of quantity first and foremost.

 Simple analog, a long-lost tradition 

This may not seem like much of an issue when the games are of such quality as to be nominated as game of the year - but when we look at the second-tier offerings, we find ourselves in a quagmire of games that seek to do far too much than they are capable of delivering. It's a long time coming, and I appreciate Crow Country in its little niche, fulfilling the needs of gamers that have far too large of a games backlog and far too little time.

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