INTERVIEW: SFB Games Developer Of Crow Country

This week, I chatted with Adam Vian from SFB Games. He is the Creative Director behind the phenomenal Crow Country. If you haven't played it yet, Crow Country is a survival horror that is heavily influenced by the PS1 era of horror gaming. It has the classic mix of puzzles, jump scares and freaky-looking creatures that every good survival horror needs. I loved playing through Crow Country so I was excited to chat to Adam about it!

First of all, thank you for taking the time to do this interview, I am a huge survival horror fan and I LOVE Crow Country. So to start with, Crow Country seems very much inspired by horror from the PS1 era. What is it about that specific era that motivated you to make this game?

The PS1-era was a great fit for horror games because the lower fidelity of the visuals require you to fill in the gaps with your imagination. It's scarier when an enemy is a slightly undefined flickering mass of pixels, emerging from a draw-distance induced fog. Horror games often benefit from having more more rudimentary controls, too  - these days we expect a high level of smooth control over both the character and camera in a 3rd person action game, but clunky, slow-moving tank controls and fixed camera angles actually enhance the tension.

I found myself playing through PS1 horror games (not just Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but all of them, even the bad ones) and I realised there was some kind of timeless magic to them - some undefined x-factor that modern games weren't tapping into at all. I decided to see if I could capture some of that magic with my own horror game.

I was also inspired by the look of the original Final Fantasy VII - particularly the look of the blocky characters on top of the more detailed pre-rendered backgrounds. There's just something wonderfully charming about the little shoebox dioramas of that world - the way Crow Country's interior spaces float in a black void was lifted directly from Final Fantasy VII.

Well done on the success of Crow Country, it has great reviews and people love it! Talk a little about SFB Games and how you guys went from making Snipperclips (a puzzle game that is fun for the whole family) to Crow Country (a nightmare set in an abandoned theme park).

SFB Games officially consists of myself (art and design) and my brother Tom (programming and tech), and we've been making games together since we were teenagers. We started out making Flash games for browsers, and slowly progressed to making games for mobile, Steam, and now consoles. We usually hire a couple of friends to work in small teams, our in-office development team for Snipperclips was about seven people at its biggest. That felt like a lot!

We learned a lot from making Snipperclips, in particular I feel like I came away from that project as a much stronger puzzle designer - and it's puzzle design that's probably the one throughline of the SFB Games catalog. Snipperclips, Tangle Tower and Crow Country are all basically puzzle games at heart, and the rules of good puzzle design transcend genres entirely; it's always just about conveying visual information to the player, prompting them to think, making sure they're not being distracted and mislead, and so on.

Puzzles are key to a great survival horror game. What, in your opinion, makes a great survival horror puzzle and do you have a personal favourite puzzle in Crow Country?

On a basic level, puzzles in survival horror exist to motivate the character to wander back and forth between the rooms - and then you put enemies and hazards between the rooms, and suddenly you've got a functional horror game. But there's so much else they bring to the table. For instance, they're great way to force the character to meaningfully interact with the world around them - touching things, pushing things, pressing buttons, etc. When you do that, when you create a direct relationship between the character and the environment, the world of the game suddenly feels more real and tangible. For instance, in Crow Country, there are a couple of moments where Mara will need to kick something, and it'll wobble like it's about to topple over. Moments like that are actually incredibly important!

My favourite puzzle in Crow Country is probably the one in the arcade, for the pure novelty of being able to play the arcade machines, but mostly because of the Mermaid Quiz. It's a basic trivia game where the 'correct' answers would be considered correct in 1990, but are all actually outdated or disproven by 2024. That was just a fun idea.

The enemies that Mara has to face are straight out of a nightmare. Were there any forms of horror media that influenced those designs? Or did they just come from your own, unique, twisted minds?

The enemies are very much a product of the story, so I can't go into too much detail without spoiling things. I did approach their design with the intention of making them unsettling, perhaps even upsetting - they have multiple human-like qualities, but there's clearly something very wrong with them. By no means is this groundbreaking territory for horror games, of course, but there is one aspect of the enemies in Crow Country that's a little more unique. Some enemy types, the humanoid 'Guests' for instance, are randomised every time you see them. They'll randomly be hunched over to the side, maybe they'll have one big arm, or one really small hand - you'll never see the same one twice! I found using randomisation (with very specific defined parameters) was a good way to get forms that felt uncanny and unpleasant - plus, it lines up with what's going on in the story.

A favourite question of mine – what will surprise players the most when playing Crow Country?

Reading through reviews and discussion boards, it seems one of the things that surprises players about Crow Country is the depth of the story, the humanity of the characters, and the real-world themes it touches on. I think there's a slight tendency to dismiss Crow Country (and others games like it) as a somewhat disposable Resident Evil 'clone', but many players have been pleasantly surprised to see that it absolutely has its own thing going on.

Another thing that people seem pleasantly surprised to discover about Crow Country is that, at times, it can be quite light-hearted and funny.

Combat is always tricky when it comes to survival horror. You do not want to make the character too overpowered, but also you don’t want to make the character so weak they die every few minutes thus making death so frequent it takes away the fear of dying. How did you go about balancing the combat?

Balancing survival horror is a famously hard thing to get right - you want the player to be worried they're running out of resources, but you don't actually want them to run out - or else they might find themselves stuck. One way to do it is to have dynamic pickups - health items appearing only if you're not already carrying any, and so on. And Crow Country does do this - the trash cans and vending machines work on that principle.

As for how did I balance the combat? I don't think I did, to be honest. Or rather, at launch, the game was balanced for slightly less experienced players. That worked in our favour in some regards - many players who were younger, or more casual, or less experienced with the genre were able to pick up Crow Country and have a good time. But many players who were more experienced with survival-horror found it a bit too easy. Since then, we've added a hard mode and even balanced aspects of the original normal mode - so now I think it's about right. And for players who would struggle with the combat, or don't want to engage with it at all, we added a no-combat 'Exploration' mode.

Mara Forest is an interesting character, and we learn more about her as the game goes on. Talk a little about her as a character and if we will see her pop up again…perhaps in a Crow Country 2???

Mara was a lot of fun to write. I characterised her as being determined, clever and kind - but a little silly. She makes jokes for her own amusement, she'll talk to inanimate objects, she'll get annoyed and sulk about things. My favourite scenes to write were her conversations with well-meaning police detective Harrison James. At first, Harrison is in the position of power, attempting to tell Mara what to do - but eventually, it becomes clear that Harrison is in over his head and Mara's the one in control of the situation.

The amount of Mara fanart I've seen since the game launched has made it very clear to me how much people enjoy her as a protagonist. But as much as I like her, I don't see her appearing again. And when we make another survival horror game, I don't think it'll be Crow Country 2. We have too many other ideas!!

Thank you so much Adam for such an insightful interview. Crow Country is available for PS5/PS4, Nintendo Switch, Windows, Xbox Series X/S.