Hello everyone!

One year ago today, my brother Adam and I launched Crow Country here on Steam, and we were blown away by the response! We've been a 2-person company for nearly 13 years now, and have been making games together for over 20 years, but this has been our most successful year by far. So many people playing, sharing, streaming, recommending and reviewing the game, all around the world, has given us a huge boost of energy to take into our next games, so: thank you.

OK, on to the good stuff! One of the pieces of feedback we've received, here on Steam and elsewhere, is that the keyboard controls for Crow Country aren't as good as they could be. So I've been working to bring them up to the level of the gamepad controls (still our recommended way to play for now!).

That starts with a new default layout, which we've labelled CLASSIC in the settings. We took a good hard look at what other survival horror games do with their keyboard layouts, listened to comments about what's off about our old layout, and come up with something that I think should feel a lot better out of the box for new players.

Next we have a layout we've labelled MOUSE. This combines keyboard for movement/aiming and some actions, with mouse to rotate the camera, plus confirm/cancel and shoot/reload mapped to the mouse clicks (plus grenades on the wheel click, or E). Mouse support has been another requested feature, and this layout is similar to some of the Resident Evil HD layouts, so hopefully folks will find it useful.

Lastly, if you want, you can return to the old layout, now labelled ORIGINAL. Maybe you got really attached to it? Well, it's there for those who want it.

All three of these layouts can be selected in the Controls Settings menu from the title screen or pause menu. When using keyboard, you'll see the last two settings switch to keyboard-specific ones. You'll see we also added an option to use modern movement (rather than tank controls) on the keyboard - another requested feature.

One last (very minor) improvement is that if you have a controller plugged in, but start using the keyboard, you'll get keyboard controls shown. Previously controllers took priority over keyboard, now it just checks whatever you pressed last.

The requested keyboard feature we haven't finished yet is full key rebinding. With the way the game is built, it's a lot more work than we'd thought, but this update lays a lot of important groundwork to make things easier. I hope we can get it fully working soon!

A non-keyboard related update for this release - we've returned to compiling with mono rather than il2cpp. Thile il2cpp can result in slightly faster code execution, it doesn't have the mod and speedrunning tool support that mono does. So back we go! Sorry to the Crow Country speedrunning discord for having broken the autosplit for a while now, hopefully you can all enjoy running this up to date version at last.

That's it from me. Thanks again, until next time!

Tom-

Hello everyone!

The exceptionally talented designers over at Fangamer have just released an official Crow Country plush, complete with a set of accessories to theme him for Fairytale Town, Haunted Hilltop or Ocean Kingdom:

https://www.fangamer.com/collections/crow-country/products/crow-country-crane-game-plush


This little guy is based on the in-game plush found in the arcade and gift shop

Fangamer has more items in their Crow Country collection too, and we hope to have news on the physical editions soon!

Tom & Adam

Hello everyone!

Today over at Fangamer, the first official merchandise collection for Crow Country has launched!

Shipping is available internationally, though folks in Europe can get shipping from closer to home through Fangamer's European site:

US/World: https://www.fangamer.com/collections/crow-country

Europe: https://www.fangamer.eu/collections/crow-country


Fangamer have also opened up signups to be the first to find out about the physical editions, coming in 2025!

Sign up here: https://www.fangamer.com/pages/crow-country-physical-edition


Hope everyone has a great spooky season!

Tom & Adam

Hello everyone!

We've just released an update to the game that adds the promised new languages:

• Italian
  
• Japanese
  
• Korean
  
• Simplified Chinese
  
• Traditional Chinese

We've also spent the last few months working hard on optimising the game, both for faster loading times and better performance. That means it'll run better on lower end machines, and even use less battery on the Steam Deck.

We've had good reason to go after optimisation this strongly: we've also just launched Crow Country on Nintendo Switch! Plus, in just 6 days time, we'll be releasing on PS4. Like I said, Adam and I have been busy.

And finally, a little teaser of some more exciting news coming very soon...

What could it all mean...? Not long to wait!

As always, thank you so much for your support for Crow Country, it's what's gotten us through the last few months. The updates aren't done, so stay tuned for more news!

Tom & Adam