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One thing that made the early Resident Evil games so unique (so I've heard, I wasn't alive then) was how much visual fidelity they were able to achieve on that hardware. They did this by using painted backgrounds, and actually rendering the bare minimum, blending those with dramatic camera angles. It's beautiful, and is able to set such a perfect tone for what it's trying to do.

Crow Country looks exactly like that. The flat textures, the hexagonal cylinders bulging from their lack of polygons, the aliasing trail of your gun's scope, stylized art direction that looks perfect (just google some screenshots it's so pretty). And then, the game tells you to use the right stick and the camera swings around you. It's so cool. It's so so cool it's incredible.

So obviously, the art direction is the main attraction to this game, and it works so well. It's going for the ps1 crunch and nostalgia, but being on modern systems it can actually do more things, and it does, I think. Like, I'm not super familiar with what the ps1 actually can and cannot do. But there are some really nice subtle touches with particles, Mara has really expressive animation for how limited her model is. She sways while walking, she'll duck her head under curtain rods, lean if you turn while sprinting, her head turns if there's something you can interact with nearby, so she looks attentive during gameplay. Whenever you interact with a note, it'll rotate itself so as the reading menu comes up, it's character model is actually facing you.

So yeah, the art is fantastic, and they know how to leverage that for atmosphere. It's a survival horror, but mostly it's really comfy. It's the rainstorm outside as you are cuddled up with some nice tea inside. The art direction is stylized in a horror way, but it's also a bit cartoony, so it feels like Halloween, that mixture of cheese and scares. It does manage to get some good tension though. While lifting the curtain in the theater and seeing the dead eyes poke out from under it, hearing the shuffling noises on the other side from something out of view; scrambling away from giant monsters into a dead quiet arcade, seeing the games and lights without any power. There were a few rooms that I walked into, and immediately felt I didn't want to be there. It does have some decent scares in there.

Narratively and Gameplay wise it's... uhh okay. Like I don't think there's anything crazy special about those. They aren't bad, just not notable. Towards the end of the game, some puzzle pieces finally start to fall into place. You need to go deeper underground, but your path is blocked by the former excavator. He won't let you pass, and you're trying to convince him, confronting him about the police officer dead from a gunshot and a gun slowly starts to pull into frame. Then some rattling in the pipes and the vent cover knocks him off the edge and hey! It's your friend! It's a moment of narrative tension whose knees quickly gets knocked out. Talking to some NPCs, there some tension about if you're gonna kill the main guy. And your character seems kinda cagey about it. But I, the player, had no idea that was what we were here for. I thought we were here for good reasons, so it just seemed wild. And they aren't huge issues, they just felt like they confused the narrative a bit. And the narrative isn't the main pull of this game so it's not a huge deal either way, but it could've been more. There is some interesting stuff that Crow learned about the consequences fo his actions, and made a conscious choice to continue. That's kinda neat. But it's not tons. Like it's a normal "businessman bad" kinda thing.

And also the main character looks like this and she has purple hair and introduces herself with "If anyone asks, my name is Mara Forest". So basically she's transgender canonically pretty much. There are tgirls that look like this in real life.

It took me like 6 hours and I suck at video games, this game is so incredibly worth it please please please play Crow Country.