loading . . . Miniike's review of Crow Country | Backloggd good in every way i expected and would have been content with, absolutely amazing in ways that surprised me all the way up until the end. so idiosyncratic and original on a technical/aesthetic/narrative/thematic level that it doesnt even feel like a retro pastiche at all, at least not in the ways you expect from the indie scene typically...it feels most like an authentic work in a school of creativity that just happens to be quite old. still, i suppose comparisons must be made...in the same way signalis captures the way silent hill games would imbue seemingly mundane spaces with abstract emotion and disarming subjectivity, crow country has much of the grounded, living, Believable tactility of the spencer mansion...even more so than any ps1 game, as it takes its visual inspiration from the prerendered style but has no clean visual breaks between decorative and intractable objects. every supply, item, and interactive puzzle object feels firmly situated in the world, in a way that cumulatively gives as profoundly and engrossingly a Physical impression as singalis gives an emotional one.<br><br>the puzzles themselves, at least on the critical path, are often extremely simple and self-evident in terms of The Solving Process, but compensate by having the actual Answers be so sturdily delightful...i would often walk past a puzzle i had solved ages ago and get a little jolt of joy remembering the beautifully natural, playful logic. the whole game does well by feeling like a Curated experience, the different areas of the theme park shuffling you around in all the expected ways, which you then get to unveil in the back hallways which always maintain this cheeky/creepy sense of "i'm not supposed to be back here." as the day progresses into rain and nightfall, my emotional involvement w/ the map rly did feel like i was a kid let loose, fun and freeing and thrilling until i realize i have no way to get home and feel as tho i've been abandoned. it achieves this potency through its literalism, in an astounding way...tho it's also aided along by the incredible personality of the thing, from mara's charming offhand remarks to the web of npcs all on their own quest to the grotesque, pained specificities of the monsters appearances and movement<br><br>one last compare/contrast w/ signalis (which may feel like a weird comparison point to focus on, but theyre both in the same position of taking from the same source material, so i find it a bit more enlightening to compare them to eachother than to the source material directly)...signalis is imbued from the very start with this nonstop solemnity that creates the impression, before youve even begun to unravel any of its mysteries, that there's something painful on the other side. that feeling of dread, and the fact it made good on it, is a huge part of why my experience with it was so powerful. but crow country manages the opposite sensation...the majority of its runtime feels light and playful within genre context, not in a self-undercutting way (its atmosphere is still smth else) but in a way thats certainly pulling closer to the b movie territory of resident evil. that its final few narrative beats manage to be not only masterful in their own right, but put a genuine well-earned pit in my stomach that recontextualizes how i feel about the entire game, is a beautiful trick, and it makes it look utterly trivially easy. its the ultimate testament to how creatively cohesive the game is that it can shift the light just a little bit and reveal something truly awful that was there all along...a story that genuinely makes the Mankind's Overextending Exploitation With Disastrous Results of other genre fiction into something newly emotionally vivid. it could be crushingly pessimistic, and perhaps thats the most coherent way to read it, but it leaves you not with that pessimism, but with the flickering ambiguity you feel at every save point. that may feel like a cop-out, allowing for the "unearned" possibility for hope...but muddying itself into something unresolvable somehow only makes it harder to stomach than if it just took everything away from you. its exactly the note something this otherwise pristinely constructed needs to end on...the author releases their potentially suffocating grip and lets you just Live with their work without their assistance. absolutely unforgettable game...a must-experience even, maybe especially, for those disillusioned with the nostalgic throwback indie scene https://backloggd.com/u/Miniike/review/4423718/
