Raven Country is not only visually nostalgic, but also hilarious and self-aware, making it a must-read.
It wasn’t until I sat down to play Raven State that I realized just how much ’90s horror had etched itself into my muscle memory. As games have grown and evolved beyond the blocky characters and pixelated gore I grew up with, my mind is still full of the things I’d forgotten. Like the sound of a cursor sliding over inventory items, or knowing I can reload from a menu, or knowing with absolute certainty that I’ll find more pistol ammo here than shotgun shells, which in turn are more plentiful than magnum rounds. Maybe that’s why Raven State feels like home.
Well. You know. If I were walking around the house melting down deformed inhabitants with my flamethrower, whatever.
Honestly, though, these retro homages? I’m kind of done with them. And when I say kind of, I mean completely done with them; when I say done with them, I mean I’m completely done with them. Maybe they’re more impactful to those who missed out on the experience the first time around, but I’m old enough to not miss out again, which is probably why I was more surprised than anyone that, after reluctantly picking up Raven Nation, I found it incredibly difficult to put it down again.
You play as Agent Marla Forrest, a firearms expert—haha; I’m going back to that, folks—assigned to find the missing Edward Crowe, the onetime founder and operator of the spooky theme park Crow Nation. Yes, it’s abandoned now—though the spilled soda and empty popcorn buckets suggest the exodus wasn’t long ago—but even in its heyday, it’s hard to imagine the place being anything other than deeply unsettling.
Like the ’90s horror games it emulates, the story unfolds through the notes, diaries, and newspaper clippings you find hidden around the park, though it remains delightfully obscure until the very end. Occasionally, you’ll stumble across other people who’ve wandered too far into the park—a young lad unwisely trying to snap some weird stuff with his Polaroid camera; a gleefully unhelpful high-viewing-distance park attendant; a lawyer who doesn’t know when to give up—though more often than not, what you stumble upon won’t be a mystery to you. quite It’s a human. Even if it looks like a human from a distance.
Of all the things Crow Country has to offer – and there are a lot – it’s the creature design that impressed me the most. While it all seems a little obvious and expected at first, developer SFB endlessly reinvents its decaying roster in increasingly surprising and interesting ways. No, they’re not fun to fight – even switching from old-school to modern combat schemes didn’t alleviate the frustration I felt every time it took Mara three and a half days to raise her gun when something lurched toward her. But whether intentional or not, it’s incredibly irritating – even though the ghouls are fairly goofy and easy to dodge, I often found myself stopping to admire these horrific extras from a distance.
The way Crow Country itself unfolds before you is also brilliant. Slowly stumbling upon the keys, power-ups, and items you need to unlock hitherto forbidden paths means the theme park frequently reinvents itself, offering new set pieces, enemies, and secrets for you to explore again and again. Yes, there’s a lot of backtracking, but given the many locked doors and blocked exits and secrets sprinkled throughout, I never once felt unsatisfied, especially when I found handy shortcuts and secret entrances. And thanks to the clunky combat and “save room” save system, I rarely felt invincible as I traversed the park’s dark corridors.
There is an option to play Raven State entirely without enemies, and while my first reaction to this is dismay at the suggestion—what good is a horror game if there’s nothing scary about it?!—I admit that I’d do that if I were to play it again. Like many old survival horror games, there are times when you have Running past enemies because you don’t have enough ammo to open the next area, but even though I managed to unlock all of Crow Country’s collectible secrets on my first playthrough, its environments are so dense and detailed that I enjoyed spending time rummaging through shelves and bins. No doubt, I missed a few items and notes while I was distracted by lumps of meat and skeleton puppets.
and cleverFull of silly jokes, apt one-liners, and a refreshing sense of self-awareness, Raven Country doesn’t take itself too seriously. Yes, it encompasses a lot of tropes and conventions associated with old-school horror films, but it’s also not afraid to poke fun at them a little from time to time. Both confusing — what on earth do you mean you’re “not allowed” to smoke?! — and mesmerizing, Mara is the perfect companion as you work together to try to solve this perplexing mystery.
Speaking of which, Crow Country’s puzzles are where it really shines. SFB’s puzzles are designed to be challenging without being frustrating—with a couple of exceptions—ranging from extremely easy to extremely hard and everything in between, though I spent half the game wondering if I’d accidentally left out a key item or weapon, so I’d often end up picking up ammo for a gun I didn’t own. There are some truly wicked tricks in the game—the combination you encounter in the opening five minutes won’t open a safe you stumble across a few minutes later—but if you get stuck, there’s probably a fortune-telling crow nearby who can help you out. (This is a sentence I never thought I’d write.)
Environmental traps feel overly painful, though. No matter how hard I tried to stay alert and how carefully I avoided them, the number of times I took unnecessary damage from gas-spewing crow heads or teetering chandeliers was humiliatingly high. I also learned to ignore soda machines and trash cans, as they never yielded me anything good (though is that because I’m an ammo hoarder and there’s already so much good stuff in the game that it wouldn’t do me any good? Who knows).
Is it scary? Not at all. At least not with the frenetic atmosphere of games like Amnesia: The Bunker or Alan Wake 2. For most, that won’t be a deal-breaker; Raven State is such a perfect imitation of the games it pays homage to, you’ll have too much fun solving puzzles and exploring the park to care that there’s little here that’s truly unsettling. For others, the effort that Sci-Fi Blast takes in crafting a true 90s horror flick might not be enough to make up for the distinct lack of horror elements. Me? I’m definitely in the former camp. Yes, the combat can be annoying. Yes, at times I felt like I was fighting the camera as much as those terrifying park guests. However, despite being unashamedly carved from a tried-and-true blueprint, Raven State still tells a compelling story in a memorable setting, and does so in a way that’s incredibly entertaining. What an unexpected surprise.
SFB Games provided a copy of Crow Country for review.
