Crow Country's Loop Reminds Me That Nothing Beats Classic Resident Evil

Earlier this year, a ton of indie games launched in the span of a week. Hades 2 and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Animal Well got the most attention, which makes sense. One is the sequel to a beloved and popular game, and the other is the successful payoff to Dunkey's gambit of starting a publisher that only publishes good video games. But if you look beyond the hype, there were several others that hit around the same time to similarly glowing reviews.

Indika, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:1000XResist, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Crow Country, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Little Kitty, Big City all launched within the span of a few days, with most arriving on May 9. I've been slowly making my way through the batch, though Hades 2 will have to wait until it hits 1.0. Little Kitty, Big City was a terrific, compact experience, and Animal Well is very mysterious and has been great in short bursts.

The well-received 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Lorelei and the Laser Eyes arrived soon after, on May 16.

Classic Resident Evil Lives On In Crow Country

Despite that, I won't be surprised if Crow Country ends up being my favorite of the bunch. Its PS1-style aesthetic looks fantastic and its "abandoned amusement park overrun by zombie-like creatures" setting is compellingly eerie. But the real selling point is its structure. It plays like classic 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil, and the🔯re are very few gameplay loops as satisfying as classic Resident Evil.

That loop is fairly simple. You arrive at a location — a sprawling complex in a Louisiana swamp, a huge castle somewhere in rural Spain, an abandoned police station in Raccoon City — and begin to explore. As you go, you encounter a bunch of locked doors. Each requires a unique object to unlock it, and classic Resident Evil has a way of making these objects bizarre and memorable. It could be shaped like an animal, or maybe it's a regular key with a unique pattern. Whatever it is, it's striking enough that you know exactly where to go once you find it. Then you go back, open the door, and gain access to a new area where the cycle repeats.

Resident Evil didn't invent this format. The series built on established ideas that Metroid had been using for years. The Nintendo explore 'em up marked important locations with bizarre bits of environmental design long before the first RE arrived.

As you look for keys, you're also discovering new and better weapons, scrounging for ammunition, and confronting enemies when you're flush with bullets or sprinting around them if you're cache poor.

The Resident Evil Loop Is Good When It's Good, And Still Pretty Good When It's Mid

When executed well, this loop is unbeatable. The hours I've put into Crow Country have been a blast. I'll find a door with a bronze keyhole, then 20 minutes later, I'll find the key. It's like a comedian making a callback to an earlier joke, and the rush of joy as I run back to the lock is like the burst of laughter you enjoy when a second joke hits right after you'd forgotten about the first. Discovering new areas is always a pleasure, and that's especially true when you have to use a little elbow grease to get there.

It's easy to mess this kind of gameplay up, but even when you do, it still turns out half-decent. I thought this year's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Alone in the Dark was adequate, and was bummed to see the developer behind it, Pieces Interactive, ಌ168澳洲幸运5开奖网:shuttered following its und🌌erperformance. It was a pretty fun survival horror adventure with some major issues, but it highlighted for me what Resident Evil does so elegantly. The enemies in Alone In The Dark wer𒁏e uninteresting, and the moments of combat were mostly just tense because the controls were iffy. You often found more than one key item at the same time, which messed up the pace. And the game too often resorted to variations on the same puzzle, instead of introducing fresh challenges.

Even then, underneath all those flaws, I had a pretty good time with it. A good loop is good bones, and Alone in the Dark's bones were good. Crow Country is at the other end of the spectrum, a game with the same basic loop, but improved because it excels in all the small details. I prefer the latter, but when I take the two games together, I realize that this might just be the best way to make a game. The floor is high, and so is the ceiling.