Tangle Tower devs' love letter to Resident Evil hits Steam in May

rockpapershotgun.com:

Crow Country and its spooky, mutant-stuffed theme park will be opening its gates on Steam on May 9th, developers SFB Games have announced. It's the first of two games from the Tangle Tower micro-studio coming to PC this year, the other one being The Mermaid's Tongue, which will be picking up the adventures of their Tangle Tower detective duo on a marginally less spooky-looking submarine later this year. Crow Country, however, is a very different kettle of fish, combining chunky, PS1-style Final Fantasy 7 character models with early Resident Evil tank controls and panicked monster shooting.

You play as Mara Forest, a detective who rocks up at the eponymous theme park in search of its owner, Edward Crow, who's mysteriously gone missing. As you might expect, this ramshackle operation hides a very sinister-looking secret at the heart of it, and you'll need to solve puzzles, find clues and generally avoid being eaten by its lumbering menagerie of cursed sideshow attractions in order to get to the bottom of it.

Its very good Next Fest demo, which lets you loose with the opening section of the game, is still alive and kicking if you want to give it a go while you wait. There are lots of great throwbacks to ye olde Resi games here, including a beating heart health bar you can only see when you open your menu, fishing ammo and health packs out of bins, and manually aiming your reticule as you try and take down its nastier inhabitants.

The demo isn't for the faint of heart, but its freshly updated Steam page does bring good news on this front, as there will also be an Exploration mode available, which lets you pootle around the park without the fear of being attacked. A sigh of relief for all involved.

Crow Country is one of my personal most anticipated games of 2024 (along with The Mermaid's Tongue, of course) so I'm very pleased that we'll be able to poke and prod its horrible theme park in just a couple of months time on May 9th.