Crow County has a lot going for it: a varied score vacillating naturally between cozy and ominous ambience, an impressively large game map, highly detailed environments, and a decent final twist. The best part of the game was that it forced you to examine all of the clues you had been given to figure out what to do next. That was where the game achieved the best balance. Knowing what to do next, for the most part, required you to think and pay attention, but not so much that it felt like a chore. The hints could be read as holding your hand too much, sure. I think that, in this case, they more functioned as puzzle pieces to be connected together rather than answers that gave it away.
Plotting my route across the increasingly unlocked sections of the map was decently interesting too, if not enthralling. I played on Hard mode so I had to be conservative with my ammo and med kits and think through my decisions. The resource conservation aspect, often one of my favorite parts of survival horror games, was fun and required some thought, as I mentioned, but I rarely felt like my decisions radically altered the map in a way that mattered. Due to the fairly repetitive enemy placement and the only so-so enemy AI, it didn't feel like I was making difficult decisions on which areas to clear or not. Each decision felt too simple and obvious. Besides, earlier on, when only the handgun was available, the enemies were too spongey and then when the shotgun eventually became available they were then too easy to kill. The balance was just too off.
The parts of the game that felt the worst to me was the puzzle design and the story. The puzzles were so simple and tedious that I soon stopped finding them charming. I could have excused how easy they were if they had been less numerous. A few would have been a nice nod to retro survival horror games of the 90s (on a side note: it disturbs me how casually I referred to the 90s as "retro"- I am old is what I am saying), but the sheer number of them made them feel like a chore to get through. I often over-thought some of them and was frequently disappointed that the actual answer usually ended up being way more lame than my convoluted solution.
The story fares a bit better, but it saves too much of the exposition for the very end. Pretty early on, you learn about 50% of the story and then don't get anything else until the climax. The superb score and the attention to detail do a lot of heavy lifting, but the story itself has too few two tricks up its sleeve. The characters too, aside from the protagonist, Mara, are largely one-dimensional and forgettable. Mara, to the credit of the game, is an endearing mix of snarky and straight-forward and her awkward interactions with everyone were a delight to witness.
Despite the fact that I have quite a few qualms about the game, I think that lovers of the survival horror genre and retro games will have a good time. I just think this could have used more time in the oven to polish it in to something truly great.
