I’m excited to share “Crow Country Is a Game about Climate Change,” an ecocritical analysis of one of my favorite indie games of 2024. This essay also serves as a kind of “Ending Explained” story breakdown that was inspired by a few Reddit discussion threads that missed the point of what (to me at least) is a clear, powerful, and compelling artistic statement. How do we process the reality of climate change, and how can we face the challenges of the future?

Crow Country borrows heavily from the visual design of Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII, and I argue that it provides an interesting meta-commentary on their themes as well. Specifically, I think Crow Country uses its retro aesthetics to remind players of the political climate of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when environmentalism was considered an important bipartisan issue in the United States.

In my essay, I put Crow Country in conversation with two books, Colette Shade’s Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (2025) and David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2017). I believe that Shade’s discussion of the “lost environmentalism” of 1990s media like Captain Planet and FernGully can be expanded to video games, and I explain how Crow Country plays on that cultural nostalgia. Meanwhile, Wallace-Wells discusses a “crisis in storytelling” about climate change that positions its victims as cute animals instead of actual human beings, but Crow Country subverts this narrative impulse by demonstrating that its “zombie” climate refugees are none other than ourselves.

You can read the essay on Sidequest here:
https://sidequest.zone/2025/04/22/crow-country-climate-change/

Crow Country (on Steam here) is an incredible game, by the way. I enjoyed writing about it, and I enjoyed playing it as well. It takes about four hours to finish, and there’s an optional “no combat” mode that allows players to focus on exploring the space while engaging with the story and puzzles. If you’re interested, I posted a no-spoiler review of the game ( here ).

ETA: This essay was featured on Critical Distance (here). What an honor! I hope a wider audience gets a chance to read this piece, if only so that more people can appreciate the nuanced but powerful message of this incredible game.