When the Crow Sings

When the Crow Sings delivers a haunting, emotional narrative wrapped in a dark, atmospheric setting. Though its slow pacing and minimal gameplay may not appeal to everyone, the storytelling shines. Rating: 7/10 Video Gameplay - https://youtu.be/0UKboD7fgwc

Well-made game with likeable characters (Yule my beloved). The sound design in this game is extremely well-done, and the art style is great. A standard playthrough only takes around 2-ish hours, but you can really understand the characters/plot more by taking alternative dialogue options or actions. Just replaying the game for the different endings reveals more and more about the backstory of the compound. My only gripe is that it's not immediately clear how to proceed at the end of the game, and you can get softlocked if you miss out on the third night cycle.

A beautiful game with rich worldbuilding and lovable interesting characters. Stylistic graphics over photorealism proves to be the better option once again as the environment and character models look great and will surely age well. The character portraits too are wonderful matching the models perfectly and their designs are all great be that the human or animal characters. Additionally I can always appreciate stylish menus in both the main menu and the journal. The music is very effective in setting the atmosphere. In most of the areas the songs are cozy and relaxing, with the exception of one where the eerie background music really sells the desolation. Plus in tense situations the tracks change to a faster pace. Gameplay consists mostly of walking around and doing fetch quests for the characters with two mini-games and one mechanic with the crows that is woven into the player character’s personality very nicely. The difficulty of the two mini-games can be adjusted in different ways, though I find the default difficult fine as is, only choosing to dial it down personally for convenience. I do have a little gameplay nitpick in that after talking to a character once or failing at one of the mini-games you have to walk a few steps away and then back at the character/task to be able to interact with them again. This looks especially weird when it comes to talking with the characters. As for the story you get some insight into the world, but only so much as to prompt a slue of questions with very little concrete answers, so I hope there will be more games set in this world that answer some of them and further expand on all of it. Meanwhile the characters are another strong point of the game, they are well written each with their own quirks and further complexity shimmering through with the moderate amount of conversations we get with them. In the end, while short, the game is very high quality and given that it is surprisingly free! I can definitely recommend it for anyone with even a modicum of interest in worldbuilding and character interactions with its pleasant to look at presentation as the cherry on top. There is also some replay value as you can only hear half the conversation topics of most character per run.

"When the Crow Sings" is a weird furry friendly adventure game where North American animals turn into furries. The game is short and takes place in a small playing area, and involves mostly just clicking through badly written visual novel text because the developer missed the part about good game design being all about "show, don't tell." The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here. On the matter of pricing and value for gamers, most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's often nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of shady pricing schemes that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game. Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable, or something you might want to spend your time on. Despite having no up-front cost, this failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 6 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.

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one of the greatest experiences of my life

very fun game! it doesn't take very long to get the good ending once you figure out the correct chain of characters to speak to. i appreciated how it's also pretty difficult for the average player to get the bad ending unless you intentionally choose the wrong people to speak to. i will say it's a shame the good ending doesn't require you to speak to every character and if you pick wrong you could end up wasting a night, missing out on two interactions instead of just one. i loved the creative direction of this game. the artists did amazing! all the characters were very likable with plenty of optional dialogue for the player to engage with if they so choose. as an animal crossing enthusiast, i was a big fan of the character voices and designs. also, i've only known yule for 2.3 hours but if anything happened to him i would kill everyone in this compound and then myself

i got lost and stuck at noon with no quests left to complete