• Price: $19.99 USD
• Developer/Publisher: Unbound Creations
• Release Date: August 15, 2024

A review code was kindly provided by Unbound Creations. We thank them for allowing us to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

From the team behind Rain on Your Parade and Headliner: NoviNews, Just Crow Things is an adorable sandbox adventure game in which you control – you guessed it – a crow! Commit some “CROW-minal” mischief and poop on pesky humans, steal or destroy their property, and help your fellow animals out.

You can begin your reign of terror on unsuspecting humans right away; instead of a traditional main menu, they made it so that you control the crow directly on the menu and have her hop onto the Start, Settings, and Credits buttons to make your decisions. With humans wandering around the menu, you can get a head start on dropping some poo projectiles! 😈

The actual game begins with a tutorial level to learn the basics of Crow Control. You can fly, swoop, grab, and poop. Once the tutorial is over, you can play the first of the game’s ten levels.

Characters in each level – mostly animals – will need your help with a variety of tasks. By completing their quests you earn “Crowputation”; you need a minimum of 100 points to complete a level, but there are a total of 150 points worth of tasks in each one.

A “frequent flyer” across levels is the mother squirrel who keeps losing track of her babies and asks you to find them and bring them to her. Others may request your services for more mischievous tasks that disrupt the humans’ activities.

Force them to abandon areas claimed by animals by dropping some droppings on their heads. Commit a federal offense by defacing their mailboxes, break their nice flower pots, and poo on their Porsches (Or any other car brand. I chose that one for alliteration purposes!)

Of course, these acts should not be emulated in real life, but it sure is funny in the game! I laughed so much playing this, watching my crow character pick up tools like a blowtorch or baseball bat and use them to spread chaos.

Outside of completing both well-meaning and mischievous requests, another way to earn Crowputation is to complete the races in each level. I don’t know if I’d call them “races” so much as “time trials,” as you aren’t actually racing anyone, just trying to fly through (or onto) rings in a certain amount of time.

There are gold, silver, and bronze tiers with progressively longer time frames for completing the races. Thankfully, you can make these easier by changing things up in settings, and you only have to beat the bronze time at minimum to earn the Crowputation points.

I really appreciate several of the game’s features. For one thing, there’s a helpful map you can bring up; this shows you the location of quest givers and races, but it also conveniently displays the location of any important items so you don’t misplace them. I also liked being able to track the tasks in a level.

They also included an optional feature that happens to be one of my favorites: the photo mode! Entering this mode freezes everything in the frame, but you can then move the crow around to your liking to make for a better image. I had a lot of fun messing around with photo mode – I want to say I took about 50 pictures. (That’s separate from my screenshot count.)

Appearance customization, which enhances the photography experience, becomes available right after you finish the tutorial. You get a certain amount of points for completing tasks in each level, and you can unlock precious little hats by earning 100 and then 150 Crowputation total in a level. Additional hats are hidden in levels or around the world map.

There are an astounding 45 hats and 8 skins to unlock. You can also change your scarf color, as well as the pitch of your voice. My only real complaint is that we can’t just change our crow’s appearance within a level; you have to do so at a specific location on the world map.

I think it would be nice if we had the ability to change the crow’s “skin” to plain solid colors (separate from the unlockable skins) like they did with the scarf. More scarf colors as well as different eye and beak colors could have been interesting, too. They did add DLC for Rain on Your Parade at one point, so perhaps they could do something like this at a later date?

Don’t get me wrong, though – I definitely love what’s already in the game. I had a great time flying around levels ranging from New York City to the French Riviera to a fantasy land and more.

Finishing the game unlocks New Game+ mode, which allows you to play in Sandbox Mode. This mode spawns different tools and foods, and you can have even more fun with the game beyond the base content.

As someone with a very weak stomach, I’m usually not a fan of humor related to bodily functions. But I had to play this game when I saw the crow, and I’m glad I gave it a shot! All of the critters are so darn cute, there are a lot of fun pop culture references, and it’s a very player friendly game that’s not too hard. It’s just an…“in-CROW-dible” experience. 😉