Gaming🎮 What do you get when you mix Final Fantasy 7 and Resident Evil? My favourite Steam Next fest demo

[Royal_Lizard]

Do you ever hear a pitch for a game that immediately perks your ears? A combination of words or ideas that makes you think "well I have to experience this as soon as possible"? That happened to me with Crow Country, the latest title from SFB Games, a developer you'll probably best know as the team behind the puzzle game Snipperclips. Where Snipperclips is quite cute looking, Crow Country still is, somewhat, but is instead a survival horror game set in an abandoned crow-themed theme park that's inspired by Final Fantasy 7 and Resident Evil. Yeah, now that's what I call a good pitch. And the best part is, you can even try it out for yourself thanks to a Steam Next Fest demo. But first, let me sell you on it even more.

Crow Country puts you in the shoes of Special Agent Mara Forest, a mysterious character who's design quite quickly fits into the history of all time female horror game protagonists. Booting up the demo brings you to the start of the game, and tells you incredibly little - literally just Mara's name. Everything else is up to you to figure out, and boy do I love a mystery, especially one set in a fictional theme park that shut down due to the strange disappearance of its owner.

Right off the bat, aesthetically, you can see where the Final Fantasy 7 inspirations come in. While maybe ever-so-slightly more defined than the polygonal Cloud, Mara has a similar, toy-like design to her, which I personally think a lot of the OG FF7 character models have. Unlike Final Fantasy 7, and the PS1 era Resident Evils, all of the backgrounds are rendered in real time, as you are able to manoeuvre the camera, but it all retains that pre-rendered feel those classic games excelled at.

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