One Avocadoan’s journey delving into the realm of survival horror.

It’s close enough to October to start talking about horror games, right?

Horror is, in relative terms, a recent interest of mine. As a kid it was often said that I had an overactive imagination. I was prone to nightmares after watching seemingly innocuous movies, like E.T. (I realize that this probably isn’t the best example, given that there are scenes in the film that could easily scare children, but you get the point.) Aliens were especially a big fear of mine, but even seeing a commercial for a horror film on TV was enough to scare me for weeks. Sleeping without a nightlight was a no-go. Suffice to say, I ignored any and all horror video games for a good chunk of my life.

I eventually began to grow out of these fears, especially during my teen years. I’m no longer afraid an alien is going to abduct me. (Watch as Blip immediately gets whisked away by a UFO.) But this shift didn’t lead to a curiosity for the horror genre right away. It wasn’t until watching The X-Files for the first time a few years ago that I really began to appreciate the spine-tingling chill that a well-made spooky atmosphere can produce. It was this that prompted me to first start picking up horror literature and, starting last year, horror games.

The first couple of horror games that I took for a spin were Little Nightmares and Little Nightmares II and I instantly fell in love. The grotesque monsters, the tension of the chase sequences, the excellent environmental and sound design, they all proved to be exactly the sorts of things I was looking for in a game at that point in time. It was upon finishing the second game that I decided that I wanted to explore this genre more, and so I settled upon the idea of spending October 2024 playing only horror or horror-adjacent games. I set out to find a variety of styles to try, including the unsettling barista simulator The Closing Shift, the puzzle platformer Inside, and the liminal walking simulator Pools, among others. Out of all of them, though, the one that stood out to me the most was the 2024 indie release Crow Country.

Crow Country follows Mara, a young purple-haired woman investigating the disappearance of the wealthy Edward Crow at his defunct theme park Crow Country. (It takes a lot of ego to name a theme park after yourself when you’re not a well-known icon like Walt Disney or Dolly Parton.) It quickly becomes clear that all is not right in the place that Crow built, and Mara must use her smarts – and weapons – to fend off grotesque monsters and solve puzzles so that she can uncover the truth of what exactly is going on.

There were a number of things that drew me into Crow Country from the jump. One of the biggest was the aesthetics. Crow Country goes for a deliberately retro PS1 graphical vibe, a callback to some of the foundational games of the survival horror genre. As someone who had just played and adored the similarly PS1-inspired 3D metroidvania platformer Pseudoregalia a couple months earlier (and the N64-inspired 3D platformer Cavern of Dreams not long before that), I was already primed to love the visuals. The polygonal models give everything the look of a dollhouse which really quite enhances the already wonderful atmosphere produced by the abandoned theme park setting and the nighttime gloom. Some of the monster designs look slightly goofy in isolation, but seeing one suddenly pop into your field of view still gives a little jolt of fear. And even among all the creepiness, there are some areas that look strangely and eerily beautiful; I’m particularly thinking of a hedge maze that you encounter at one point, but there are other examples as well.

The music also does a great job of bringing to mind amusement park vibes in a twisted and unsettling manner:

The story and characters were another big draw for me. The plot feels quite straightforward and simple at the outset, nothing too out of the ordinary, but there are some twists later on – particularly in the very last segment of the game – that add good depth to the proceedings. The world and story are further fleshed out through the use of memos and letters that can be found scattered throughout the park, detailing employees’ frustrations with deteriorating rides and laying out a conspiratorial scheme to avoid government scrutiny, among other things. These memos also act as a source of humor, alongside some of the dialogue and character interactions. Mara herself has a great dry and sarcastic sense of humor that comes to the surface as she comments on what’s going on around her. Surprisingly I found that this use of humor didn’t detract from the creepy atmosphere at all; it instead served as a nice counterbalance that kept everything from getting too grim. There aren’t many other major characters besides Mara, given the abandoned setting, but those who do pop up feel distinct and mostly three-dimensional.

But perhaps most important for the purposes of this column is the gameplay. As you may already know, or may have gathered by this point, Crow Country is a survival horror game, part of the genre popularized by Resident Evil in the 90s. One possible definition of Survival Horror (per Wikipedia) is as follows:

 “[A] subgenre of action-adventure games. Although combat can be part of the gameplay, the player is made to feel less in control than in typical action games through limited ammunition or weapons, health, speed, and vision, or through various obstructions of the player’s interaction with the game mechanics. The player is also challenged to find items that unlock the path to new areas and solve puzzles to proceed in the game. Games make use of strong horror themes, such as dark mazelike environments and unexpected attacks from enemies.”

Before starting Crow Country, I had no idea what the term meant. I was certainly aware of some of the big names of the subgrenre – your Resident Evils and Silent Hills and the like – but I knew very little about how they played or how they differed from the wider world of horror. It was Crow Country that introduced me to some of the key mechanics of survival horror games past and present.

Progression in Crow Country comes largely down to solving puzzles, frequently involving finding a needed object or piece of information in one location and bringing it elsewhere to unlock new areas. This is, as I understand it, common to games in this genre but works especially well with the rundown amusement park setting. There are multiple different themed areas to investigate and unlock, and as rides originally started breaking down employees took parts from other rides or attractions to jury-rig solutions. I found the puzzles to generally be well-balanced; none were terribly difficult, but I did find myself stumped every once in a while.

Limitations on the player are a key part of how survival horror games ratchet up the tension. Sometimes this is done by restricting the player’s inventory to a set number of spots. Crow Country does not do this – as far as I know, Mara’s inventory is unlimited. Where limitations do come into play is in combat. It seemed to me that the game can be a bit stingy with its ammo at times and the enemies often felt like bullet sponges. (Although that likely is a result of my lack of familiarity with the genre at the time. I don’t know that veterans of this kind of game would have the same issue.) You can certainly take out a good chunk of the enemy population if you want to, but you won’t be able to defeat them all. This injects some good strategy into the mix: Which enemies should you kill (if any, even), and which should you just try to avoid? Which path should you take so as to encounter the least number of enemies? I very frequently found myself having to make these sorts of calculations.

Crow Country introduced me to other common survival horror mechanics as well. Saving can only be done in specified ‘save rooms’, locations devoid of any threats that allow the player to take a breather and gather their thoughts. Save rooms in Crow Country are always signaled by the presence of fire – a fireplace, for example, or even a burning barrel. There are multiple different kinds of weapons that can be found over the course of the game, from the starting pistol to a shotgun and even a flamethrower. Each has distinct advantages (the shotgun hits harder than the pistol) and disadvantages (the shotgun takes longer to reload). And on the control front, Crow Country offers both modern and tank controls. Tank controls were famously used in the original Resident Evil games and other early examples of the genre, largely to make it easier when dealing with fixed camera angles. Some modern games (mainly indies) include them as an homage to those early titles, even if – like Crow Country – they don’t actually use fixed camera angles. When I played Crow Country back in October 2024, modern controls on PC could only be used when playing with a controller; keyboard-and-mouse users, like me, were locked into using tank controls. (This has since been rectified.) It took a lot of getting used to, but eventually I actually came to like the tank controls. Okay, ‘like’ may be too strong of a word – let’s go with ‘tolerate’.

Even after finishing Crow Country, I was still quite vague in my knowledge of the genre of survival horror. I just knew that at some point in the near future I wanted to find another game like it. Luckily I didn’t have to wait long. Only a couple of months later I came across a trailer for the 2021 indie sci fi horror game Signalis. I was instantly intrigued. Not only did it look incredibly surreal in a way that spoke to me, to my untrained eye it also looked like it shared some gameplay similarities to Crow Country. In February of this year, I decided to give Signalis a try.

Signalis follows LSTR-512, or Elster. Elster is a Replika, a manufactured cyborg, whose scout ship has crashed on a desolate, snowy planet. Upon returning to consciousness, she realizes that her human copilot is missing and heads out to a nearby mining facility to find her. Unfortunately, something seems to have gone seriously wrong in the facility – the humans have all disappeared, and most of the Replikas have transformed into corrupted, zombie-like versions of themselves. From there things get spoiler-y and, well, hard to explain. Signalis has perhaps one of the most complicated and fractured narratives I have encountered in a video game. Characters seem to suddenly change identity and personality, events appear to loop on themselves strange ways, new information will often contradict old information, and you’ll even sometimes find yourself thrust into a first-person dreamlike sequence that doesn’t seem to have much direct bearing on what is currently happening. There’s a reason you can look on YouTube and find hour-long videos attempting to untangle the game’s plot.

It’s something that I might find frustrating in another game. But with Signalis it just works for me. Part of it is that the enigma of the complicated narrative fits well with the cosmic horror theming. The unsettling and disorienting nature of the plot enhances rather than detracts from the growing sense of dread. It also allows for much debate and interpretation of the game’s events, something that I enjoy considering. But I think that perhaps the biggest reason the lack of clarity doesn’t bother me is that the game retains a pretty strong emotional core based around Elster’s search for her human companion. Even when I don’t fully understand what is going on, I still feel invested in that particular throughline.

Like Crow Country, Signalis goes for something of a PS1-style visual aesthetic, although it has a darker, grungier, and more anime-inspired (at least in the cutscenes) look. Signalis also goes with a top-down approach, something that I understand is rare in the survival horror space. Initially set in the aforementioned mining facility, a large chunk of the game takes place in metal corridors. This can make things a little confusing at times, but the map is quite helpful and there enough changes in scenery – whether through cutscenes, sudden shifts in the narrative, or the occasional unusual room – to keep things from getting too monotonous. Some shots are straight-up breathtaking.

Another interesting thing about Signalis is its heavy use of allusions to real-world art and literature. The King in Yellow, an 1895 collection of cosmic horror stories by Robert W. Chambers, appears multiple times both as an in-game object and through quotes and is used to draw thematic parallels. The Eugen Bracht painting ‘Gestade der Vergessenheit’, or ‘The Shore of Oblivion’, serves as the basis of the setting for at least one cutscene. The design on the carpet in certain rooms appears to be a direct reference to the Overlook Hotel from The Shining. Pieces from Chopin, Schubert, and Vivaldi make appearances. But perhaps my favorite example of real-world art in the game is the repeated use of the paintings from Arnold Bocklin’s series ‘Die Toteninsel’, or ‘Isle of the Dead’. The ‘Die Toteninsel’ paintings are so haunting and so intriguing that they really help to establish the game’s eerie and surreal atmosphere.

The paintings also serve as the namesake for one of my favorite tracks from the game’s soundtrack, the achingly beautiful and haunting ‘Die Toteninsel Emptiness’:

The gameplay of Signalis is similar to Crow Country in many respects. Unlocking new areas typically requires exploring a variety of rooms for information or objects that can be utilized to solve puzzles in other locations. The map proves quite handy for this, highlighting rooms that have not yet been fully cleared and including icons for certain kinds of landmarks. Combat primarily focuses on the use of firearms, with a number of different weapons that can be collected over the course of the game, although there are one-time use tasers or stun rods for close-quarters combat in a pinch. The game feels even stingier with its ammo than Crow Country. There were multiple stretches of the game where I had to make do with either no bullets at all or with the wrong ammo for the gun that I had on hand. Additionally, saving can only be done in designated save rooms; in Signalis, these are indicated by the presence of a glowing red computer.

Unlike in Crow County, your inventory in Signalis is severely limited. You can have a maximum of six items on hand at any given time, including weapons, extra ammo, key items, and healing items. Any items that you can’t carry with you can be deposited, reorganized, and withdrawn from crates in the save rooms. This restriction adds a whole other layer of complexity to the player’s decisions. Once you step out of the save room, what is your planned route? What weapons do you expect you’ll need, and what ammo? How many open slots do you think you’ll need to pick up any key items, and how many healing items would you like to have on hand? It makes every decision you take feel like it has consequence. To further complicate matters, and in another departure from Crow Country, enemies in Signalis revive after a certain amount of time unless their bodies are burned using flares. Said flares are – as can probably be guessed – not particularly abundant. With the amount of backtracking and moving between rooms that the game’s puzzle-solving requires, the player must carefully decide when to use a flare and when to risk leaving a dead enemy untouched (something that could come back to bite them in the long term).

Ultimately, I was very impressed by both Crow Country and Signalis. I adored the way they used their visual styles, storytelling techniques, and gameplay mechanics to produce a creepy, tense, and unsettling atmosphere in a manner that I hadn’t really encountered before. After having played both I became very interested in delving deeper into the survival horror genre, but I still wasn’t sure where to get started. The thought faded from the front of my mind as I moved on to other games in the meantime. It wasn’t until I stumbled across the Resident Evil games on sale a few weeks ago that I finally decided to take the plunge and also came up with the idea for this series. My plan is to play through as many survival horror games as I can (restricted to games available legally on PC), using these columns both to document my journey and to see how my opinions on the genre and its conventions change over time. From the perspective of a newbie, have some of the titans of the genre stood the test of time, and do the more recent offerings hold up in comparison? That’s something I’m eager to experience firsthand.

Survival horror games I hope to cover (in no particular order) – Resident Evil HD Remaster, Resident Evil 2 Remake, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (original), Resident Evil 4 (original), Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Resident Evil: Village, Silent Hill 2 Remake, Silent Hill 4: The Room, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Amnesia: Rebirth, Tormented Souls, Alien Isolation, Yomawari: Midnight Shadows, The Evil Within, Alisa, Dead Space (2008), Alone in the Dark 1, Alone in the Dark 2, Alone in the Dark 3, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, Curse: Eye of Isis, Dino Crisis, Darkwood, ObsCure, Cold Fear

Survival-horror-adjacent games I may cover if I have the chance – Stasis, Stasis Bone Totem, System Shock 1 and 2, Metro 2033, Look Outside

My Current Survival Horror Ranking:

1. Signalis (9/10)
2. Crow Country (8.5/10)

Up Next: Resident Evil HD Remaster

Header images courtesy of Crow Country‘s Steam page and Signalis developer Rose Engine.