At first glance, Crow Country is a nostalgia piece. It pulls on the horrific sprawl of Resident Evil, populating its theme-park setting with brain twisters and monsters contorting into human shapes. It borrows from the toy aesthetic of Final Fantasy VII, its characters rendered in blocky, plastic proportions like Playmobil. Yet, it’s more than just a throwback, it lays bear the haunted roots of nostalgia culture.
Protagonist Mara Forest visited the titular theme park as a child, but it was not a happy experience. There, a strange man bit her and she gained some terminal illness, which is slowly killing her. She has returned to make things right, find out what happened, and stop it from happening again. She returns to what was, only fleetingly, a site of childhood joy. She finds death, its shadows, its echoes, its remnants.
Crow Country’s entire setting is a place of childhood play. The park is clearly designed for small children. It lacks thrilling high-rise roller coasters and is instead populated by graveyard ghoulies, thicket mazes, and fairy-tale stage shows. It’s all playful and encouraging. Even the “Haunted Hilltop” section of the park is more trick-or-treat than Horror Nights. But without the bustle of life–the parents and children to animate it–the park gains an eerie quality. This is not an original observation, of course. Theme parks are a common setting throughout horror, but Crow Country begins at the park’s gates and ends when Mara leaves them once again. The whole game is enveloped by this childhood environment. It is in the contrast between the toy aesthetic and its eeriness–between theme park and haunted house–that Crow Country builds its horror.
Crow Country departs from its influences in that it does not have fixed camera angles. Instead, each room is a miniature diorama. The angle mimics peering over a dollhouse, lifting off the roof to see inside. For a time, the world outside is distant; you only see this room, its little objects, and its traps and puzzles. This is, of course, true of most video games, where there are only so many places you can go, but Crow Country draws its lines decisively and artificially, much like its theme-park setting. Yet, the theme park is continuous–interlocked. Like any survival-horror game, it is a set of keys and locks, each contingent on the other, one door opening another. Crow Country’s world is a microcosm, apparently siphoned off, but actually the wider world in miniature.
Crow Country spoilers ahead.
Fittingly, the theme park itself is deceptively large, intercut with hallways and dug under with hidden depths. Mara wanders through backstage rooms and offices as much as playgrounds and rollercoasters. Eventually, she descends to the park’s secret mining facilities, an underground environment made of metal scaffolds and endless abysses. Much like Resident Evil’s manor, Crow Country has a secret industrial heart. However, much like the theme park itself, the mine is segmented. Each section holds a “root,” a large tentacle-like object made of precious metals that the park’s owner, Edward Crow, has been secretly mining. As the game progresses, the theme park becomes dirtier, overwhelmed with monsters, laced with traps and obstacles. The sun sets. The park turns as dark as the abyss below.
That structure, from the world above to the world below, and from day to night, mimics the game’s plot, in which hidden things come to light. Edward discovered the roots touring the land with his father, wriggling in the dirt by their campsite. As an adult, he began to mine them, obscuring the operation with a cover story about a mine in Brazil. But then the creatures started coming through. Edward quickly discovered the creatures are, in fact, human beings. Edward Crow’s mining of the portal has distorted what goes through it. The more the portal was mined, the more it stretches out, blob-ifies, and melts the people who pass through it. They cannot speak–only reach–and their touch contaminates. The portal is to the future: a prophetic warning of disaster and the planet rendered uninhabitable. But Edward keeps mining, obscuring this truth rather than spreading it widely.
Yet Edward has a curious reverence for the portal. He calls the creatures who come through it “guests,” almost like they are visiting the theme park. One root he leaves intact, building a shrine for his childhood discovery. The rest he mines out, leaving them gaping like severed limbs. That might seem a curious contradiction, but it is mutually reinforcing. His own past is all that matters to Crow; the rest can rot.
Crow Country taps into a vein the rest of culture is also mining. The recent novel Birnam Wood concerns a billionaire secretly mining lithium underneath a New Zealand national park, an echo of Crow’s extraction. Nobody would bat an eye at a reclusive millionaire having mining assets in Brazil, but a mountain of gold from a US backwater? That might be controversial. Both works call into question what violence is further unseen, when it’s in countries outside of the global North.
Crow Country has parallels to Alan Moore’s “Illuminations” as well, which is a short story that concerns a middle-aged man traveling back to the pier of a childhood vacation, only to be horrified when he finds himself actually traveling back to the past. The story turns nostalgic longing into pure terror: the kind of thing only a fool would actually want. Returning to the past with the knowledge you have now means returning as you are now, not as a wiser past you–an adult in child’s garb.
Crow Country builds out a span between secretive economic exploitation and a personal longing for the past. Edward Crow’s mission is in exact contrast to those of “the guests.” They transport themselves from the future to the past to try to save it. In contrast, Edward maintains an imagined past to destroy the future. The one section of the park that is inaccessible is an unbuilt sci-fi section a la Tomorrowland. The future is unknown, far off, and those with the actual power to predict who are suffering the future’s atrocities cannot be heard. Notably, Crow Country was not always called such. It used to be called Condor Country, presumably by its native inhabitants. That past is totally lost, completely overwritten, only found in Crow’s own admission that the land was not always his. Nostalgia is by nature selective, often violent in what it chooses to omit.
To be clear, Crow Country is not exactly a startling work of horror. It is cute, and at times cuddly and warm like a worn VHS tape. But its treatment of nostalgia gives it hues, depths, and darknesses. That is what is so scary about it. It is that refusal to be merely cute, its desire to remember but not to commemorate, that makes it such a textured and lovely work. Any game looking to the past to make a future has a lot to learn from it.
More Best Of 2024: