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5.9 mid-normal
To my mind there is only one killer scarecrow movie worth mentioning, and that is 1988's Scarecrows by William Wesley. It was too short, lacked much in the way of character and plot (thieves steal money from an army base and land their getaway plane in the corn field of a cursed farm)... but it had atmosphere in spades! Mercenaries wandering around a spooky, rotten farm being preyed upon by murderous scarecrows... it was a short movie but it looked great!
Night of the Scarecrows, from Alien Concepts, Inc., is a matching game that reminded me immediately of the movie Scarecrows - and not only because of the similar theme.
It's Halloween night and your simple farming village is under attack from scarecrows! The neighboring crows have had enough and used their mysterious bird magic to animate the scarecrows hanging in your fields, sending them lumbering for the town gates. (Perhaps this jeopardy is somewhat deserved for creating such creepy scarecrows?) If the monstrous scarecrows get inside the village gates, all will be lost! It's time to grab burning torches, pitchforks, goats, and anything else and make a stand!
Night of the Scarecrows is a bit like Tetris in that you have a game board that slowly fills up and your main task becomes continually clearing pieces away before they overflow the bounds of the board. The top of the board represents your corn fields, and the bottom the village gates. There are four different types of scarecrows: pumpkin head, pail head, steer skeleton head, and bag head. Every few seconds, lines made up of random groupings of these scarecrows emerge from the corn and marching en masse with their fellows toward your gates below. Your mouse pointer is a lit torch; clicking on groups of three or more scarecrows burn them up. Any scarecrows below those you burn will fall back to fill the gap. Thusly must you keep the monsters from reaching the bottom of the screen. If you fail, the game ends and it's straight to the high score table to enter your name. If you survive a set amount of rows, you pass onward to the next level.
You can gain bonus points by burning increasingly larger numbers of scarecrows with each conflagration. Burn three successively larger groups back to back and get an extra hot 250 points. Burn four successively larger groups and get an extra red-hot 500 points. And so on, up to a 10,000 point bonus for eight groups in a row.
Each time you burn seven or more scarecrows in a single group, a crow will come to your aid. At any time you can click on a crow and select a scarecrow near the bottom of the screen. The crow will lift that scarecrow from the ranks and fly him back to the corn field. It will also grab any other scarecrows of the same type in that column. This is a handy way to weed out the ranks on the leftmost and rightmost columns, which - because they lack neighbors on one side and are part of fewer matches - always seem to be longer and nearer to crashing through the gates of your village. You can have three crows in reserve on your crow perch at any one time. It's best to save them for when you need them.
Another powerup is the humble goat. Periodically a goat will run bleating in fear through the field next to the gate. Clicking on it allows you to capture the goat and use it to butt through an entire line of scarecrows. Just click on the goat and tell it which line to run through. Like the crows, the maximum number of goats you can pen in at a time is three.
Finally, pitchfork powerups are awarded for burning two groups of the same type of scarecrow in back to back turns. You can possess a maximum of two pitchforks at once. Using one allows you do remove all the scarecrows of a certain type from the advancing ranks - very handy indeed for easily making large obvious groupings of the remaining scarecrows.
The miscellaneous artwork in Night of the Scarecrows is fantastic and everything a creepy Halloween game should strive for. The start and endgame movies are excellent and full of personality. And call me a crazy buffoon but I loved the simple bells that made up the tune on the soundtrack. However the game itself is quite noticably smaller in scope than the production values surrounding it! It occupies just a tiny portion of the center of the monitor. Not only that, but the atmosphere and smooth animation of the introduction movie have been replaced with jerky cartoon game elements. This is an iPhone game that somehow managed to find its way onto Big Fish Games because of its Halloween theme. You can probably find this exact game mechanic on a dozen Flash portals, free.
If you do get into this game, I recommend playing in windowed mode. Playing in the default fullscreen mode might give you tunnel vision.
I wish I could say I'll remember this one as fondly as I remember Scarecrows... but I can't. Certainly I'd be happy to play an adventure game or hidden object game featuring these competent production values.
Download Night of the Scarecrows