The Crow's Eye Reviews

While the mad doctor sounds a lot like The Joker, going by the trailer, the character fails to make use of it. Bit of a disappointment there. Although the trailers suggest a 1st Person Horror or Thriller Adventure game, it's actually just a a mix between physics-based JumpnRun puzzler a la Portal where you can jinx a solution "somehow" and Zelda puzzles. Story is... all over the place and failed to actually capture me. Most of the time Player-NSC interaction is limited to "oh, another audio tape to listen to" while you meander around the halls and tunnels of whatever this strange fever dream of architecture is you entered. There is no response or character development on player side (mute like Link or as you could also call it: Dead Fish Syndrom), which makes all the twists and plot reveals you are facing a bit ridicilous. To be fair, the game makes fun of this by itself after a while, having some characters mention that the protagonist never responds in any way. Still a sore point if you are aiming to have a suspensful horror-themed game here :P Graphics are level "eh, it works, so good enough". Since I fail to remember anything noteworthy sound- or music wise beyond the voice acting, you should not expect much immersion there... Voice acting is solid though, as you maybe have heard from the trailer videos. So kudos to whoever did that. Overall I am not recommending this game. There are better first person horror-themed games on Steam and the usual "grab it, if on sale" should not lead to a recommendation.

This is one of the best puzzle and story telling games that I have played in a long time. I got this last Xmas and I think that I only paid a $1 for it. The voice acting is great as well. A must play. 9/10

what an odd game. a curious mix of different game elements thrown into a blender and out comes...this. despite its dark look it's only slightly spooky and the 'psychological terror' is not that terrifying either. also there are no enemies and i'm fine with that. i prefer exploring in peace over being chased like a pacifist chicken. the story is not terrible but uninspired for the most part. same goes for the voice acting. not terrible, not great. most puzzles are trivial. until you find a new one and you are dumbstruck for 10 minutes before realizing they put the button on the bloody ceiling this time. there are some physics puzzles as well but for the most part they are ruined by the game's really poor physics engine. one wrong move and your ladder made from boxes explodes and sends boxes flying through the whole room. they added some jump & run platformer stuff as well but it's neither fun nor challenging with controls as clumsy as these. like all new games this one comes with crafting! but it really doesn't do much of anything. instead of straight bandages you find cloth and duct tape to craft bandages. yeah... oh and the graphics are usually decent or adequate. it took me about 7 hours of exploring to finish the game and i will need some extra time to get the game 100% completed. so that's really not too bad. let's be realistic here. i bought this game during the last sale for a buck and its retail price is 4 bucks. so it is quite obvious that you don't get some AAA production game here. it's easy to shun cheap games for being imperfect. at the same time people don't want to pay x10 the price for high value productions. it's not great but it's good enough for the price they're asking.

This game has trouble making up its mind what it is. A platformer or a story driven walking sim. Cuz it doesn't do either well. The platforming mechanics do not fit and are horribly annoying. And the story delivery is not great -- a genius doctor who talks like a psychotic clown? No.

Neutral review: I'm thrilled to see a designer who doesn't think finding batteries or matches is the height of gameplay. The game is decent, but for some reason one of the main characters decided to do a super over the top joker impersonation that was annoying and did not at all fit the tone of the game. I was having a decent time, then got to an annoying block puzzle, tried a few times and kinda gave up on the game. As someone who enjoys horror that isn't just refilling batteries and hiding from monsters, I would love to see more atmospheric games like this, and I'll for sure check out their next game. 6/10

I was under the impression that this was supposed to be a horror game. Of course, I bought this awhile back and I see on the store page that it is no longer labeled a horror game, which is great since it is anything but. I am not a huge platform gamer, so this game was definitely not for me. HOWEVER, if platform puzzlers are your thing, this game is not half bad. My one major gripe with it was the clunky jump. Your character has one pitiful jump, and even though you have a shot you can administer to slow time down so you can jump further, even that got annoying when you overshot your target and had to slowly fall to your death. The story was not half bad as long as you went around and actually attempted to collect documents and recordings. Otherwise, you would get hardly any story at all except for the nutty scientist's dialogue and even then that does not paint a detailed story. In your search to find your father, you really don't get much on that until the end, when you get a super boring speech from the nutty scientist that fills in that gap AT THE VERY FLIPPIN' END. If you like platform puzzles, go for it (that is the only reason I am recommending this one). Otherwise, do not bother.

It's an interesting game at first, it has good atmosphere and good voice acting. The story has potential in the first hour or two but then it goes completely downhill and by the end I couldn't even care anymore. Some puzzles are annoying as hell, graphics are serviceable at best and ugly at times. I wanted to like it but it's not as smart of an experience as I thought it would be, it's not smart at all actually. It's too long for its own good and you won't remember it shortly after you finish it. To be fair I bought it for under 1 euro and for that price it delivered enough content but I can't recommend it for anything higher. I will change it into a mixed review if that option ever becomes available but until then I'll have to give it a negative.

A little Puzzle horror game... it was kind of unexpected but was also good, the ambiance was nice and dark, The story was okay, not the best, but the puzzles... Oh man, the puzzles... dont get me wrong I love puzzles and every horror game ends up having some... but some puzzles can be too much, but then again, it could be me that sucks on time management puzzles, and parkour. Anyway: [list] [*]Game in general: [b] 7/10 [/b] [*]Story: [b] 5/10 [/b] [*]Gameplay: [b] 7/10 [/b] [*]Puzzles: [b] 4/10 [/b] [/list]

The Crow's Eye is an odd little game that seems to have found its way to a lot of horror fans through Youtubers and online publications alike but I really didn't find a single drop of fright in its lengthy playtime. While the setting (Crowswood Medical University) feels like Outlast, the game is a strange mash-up of Portal-esque FPS puzzle/platforming, walking sim note reading and exploration with a small touch of fetch questing n' crafting. It's a weird realm where fun meets frustration's middle finger in an adventure to discover what happened to the students and professors that vanished at the university many years earlier. The full mixture of game styles and mechanics is like an unusual blend of the aforementioned Portal, The Initiate 2, original Half Life and Outlast. I should be honest right off the bat that I didn't like it as much as any of those games but there is a certain flavor of each inside this crackerjack box and enough quality in the design to make it fun on its own. Once your character has arrived and is trapped inside the vast complex, it's immediate that getting out of this madhouse isn't going to be an easy task. Crowswood is a decaying, dangerous place where a taunting voice lets you know your a** shouldn't be there. You can fall to your death, you can fail and you'll need to spend some serious time assessing certain situations. Graphically, things look dingy and bone-bleached. Since there are many more locations in TCE than say the Initiate there's a lot more to see and do here in this game's dilapidated edifices but I'd say that things like the Initiate and recently Harthorn have very similar presentations when you're talking aesthetics. It's not an eye-melter, specs chomper by any means yet I wouldn't expect a long forgotten, obviously up to no good medical university to look gorgeous. The sound is similarly of adequate quality with some atmospheric hum n' drone music going and although I appreciate the effort that went into the story/voice-acting, the delivery is ludicrous at best. At its best I got some B-movie laughs, at its worst I wanted to take on the main villain in a brass-knuckle hurricane. Your eyes may or may not get tired of rolling. And there's more of it than you might expect. A bucketful of Orville Redenbacher is recommended for all of it. On a positive note, I do appreciate that the devs at least spent extensive time and effort on including a fairly expansive tale for such a low-budgeter. Gameplay is much better and consistently the experience's major muscle. You can run, crouch, jump and you're going to need to do them 'em all and improve your agility through lots of physic's leaned puzzles...some of which require a decent amount of momentum from your keyboard/mouse meathooks. You'll be getting a gravity gun that you'll need to cross chasms with, ascend to high-up n' over the moon ledges, use it to blasts boxes and trigger switches to proceed and much, much, much more. It's inclusion lends TCE's its edge as well as conjuring my reasons for calling the game the VHS version of Half Life and Portal. I truly appreciated the variety of situations that you must successfully first-person Lolo your way out of. Sadly, the crafting interface is pretty rudimentary and felt like it could have been eliminated wholesale without affecting the game's overall quality. It's not a stinking garbage heap by any means, it's just so shallow and completely centered on very trivial collection/click a button dullness that it started to enter my head, "Why can't we just find the items we need instead through exploration?" Strangely, the last line of my prior paragraph is a paradox when I consider my opinion of the game. While I certainly had a decent time making my way to the end and appreciated the amount of content, in-depth story beats, vast amount of puzzles (and their variety) and overall passion put into the game's making, etc. by the end of my 9 hour, no walkthrough finish, I felt that things were a bit too long winded. There was a redundancy to some of the later puzzles as the story went off the rails and the game kept piling on new sequences after its best ideas had long since come and gone. You might tell me to eat crow for that (that was lame and I don't apologize) but that's how I felt. I'd give this one a very respectable 6.5 out of 10. I'll mention in closing that there is some jank to the game's most demanding mechanics when the controls are on the table although it wasn't anything I couldn't get comfortable enough with to stop me from beating the game. A solid effort for certain; personally I'd go for a sale yet there's enough to challenge you here that paying full-price isn't something you'll regret in the morning.

[i]The Crow's Eye[/i] is a rather ambitious little game from an independent Spanish developer. It tries to be much more than it actually is and combines way too many genres and components instead of focusing on a few instead. At first it seems like a psychological horror (in some way it is), but without the presence of any monsters (except for some large parasitic worms which do minimal damage before we shake them off), it could hardly be called one. For an adventure there are far too few items to use (we collect ingredients for the most part and craft mainly unimportant items from those). As strange as it may sound and totally not what one would expect from watching the trailer and the screenshots, the puzzle-platformer tag is the one that fits the game best: from time to time we have to solve various puzzles involving 3D platforming sections where we can actually 'die' (because we almost immediately respawn nearby - fortunately the game gives us an explanation for that at the end). The game uses the usual formula: we wake up amnesic in an abandoned university and soon start receiving instructions from a madman, who's seemingly greatly enjoying the fact that he can order us around. Sometimes he threatens us and puts our life in danger, usually by forcing us to participate in an experiment including devices he invented and some 3D platforming. It's hard to write about the story without giving much of it away. Suffice to say it offers more in the beginning there is a 2nd branch of the story [spoiler]involving human experiments[/spoiler], but we fail to get a proper explanation for that, since the game focuses on the less interesting path, which after a rather surreal endgame is clarified in a rather long monologue. Anyway we are going to learn who we are at around midgame and the story elements come to us in the form of letters and magnetophon recordings from many different characters, just like in [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/57300/Amnesia_The_Dark_Descent/]Amnesia: The Dark Descent[/url]. It also bears some similarities with [url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/7670/BioShock/]Bioshock[/url], the time it takes place in (1960s), the look of our health bar (a syringe) and the weird (music) machines we can save our game at (+ the found voice recordings). We spend most of our time trying to piece the story together, about ourselves and of the many characters we never meet but whom we read and hear about frequently. Our investigation besides the usual item/code using, lever-pulling, cube rotating puzzle mechanics is sometimes interrupted by said puzzle-platforming elements, which feels strange, somehow unfitting to the general dark and horror(ish) atmosphere of the game: the jumping from platform to platform seems as if we were playing a minigame, completely prescinding from the base concept of the game. During these platforming parts it is necessary to use the green syringe (which we acquire later on), in order to slow down time plus increase the distance of our jumps and get past fast moving objects. At some point we'll also be awarded with an electromagnetic device (also a torch so it replaces our lighter as a light source) with which we can pull ourselves to marked metal poles during these platforming segments. If we miss a jump and fall into the abyss (or deep water), we usually lose health, which we can replenish by using bandages (although it gets refilled at the beginning of each level). The execution of the platfroming would be OK were it not for the unity engine the game uses, which makes these sections feel a bit clumsy. The other puzzles mostly require the use of moveable glowing metallic cubes, which we can rotate and manipulate: sometimes we have to place them in into pressure pads, sometimes put them on top of each other to reach seemingly unreachable locations. Whenever we solve a puzzle, a a cutscene will usually show us the way where to proceed. The graphics seem nice, atmospheric even but as soon as we take a detailed look upon things we realize how simple it all looks. Still it does a fairly good job, especially regarding the outer environment. The run-down abandoned university is creepy and would provide a perfect place for a horror game, I mean if it really was one. What I really liked was the music which is always fitting to the current situtation: suspenseful on occasion and cheerful at times. The sound effects are OK, but the voiceovers are overplayed. (Oh and whenever we get an achievement, it makes a sound - I thought that was neat :)) [i]The Crow's Eye[/i] is a mediocre game that could have been good if it concentrated on the horror aspect (with stealth mechanics and monsters) instead of trying to blend in as much useless content as possible (there are also additional challenge levels for 3D platforming lovers). So unfortunately the suspense is greater throughout the journey as we play the game through, than the catharsis itself at the end. It's a shame since nothing is particularly wrong with the game (I wish there were no worse indie horrors than this one), it just can't live up to the expectations it raised. PROS + supsenseful plot and great atmosphere + various puzzles + music is good + rather cheap CONS - too many genres mixed in - no explanation of certain events despite the abundance of notes - not really the horror it implies - plenty of unused potential RATING 5/10