Crow Country is filled with secrets and unlockables, many of which are a lot easier to reach on a second playthrough. Achieving an S-Rank allows you to unlock a tremendously powerful item for future playthroughs, though by the time you've successfully got an S-Rank you'll probably have tracked down most of the game's secrets. Getting an S-Rank is also necessary to get all of the game's achievements, making it an important step for completionists.

To get an S-Rank in Crow Country, you'll need to beat the game while meeting several different requirements. The end-of-game grading is based on four key points: Heals Used, Secrets Found, Hints Spent, and Lives Used. This guide will break down these requirements and discuss strategies to assist you in hitting each goal.

Heals Used

Easily the hardest of the four requirements, you'll need to complete the entire game without healing more than ten times. This proves especially tricky when you also need to get every secret since this will require a lot of backtracking and put you at greater risk of taking damage. A good way to minimize your use of healing is by checking the inventory whenever you're worried about your health and only using large med kits when you're critically low. It would be best to use Mara's pistol to disable traps at a range and use the environment to eliminate enemies at a distance, since this will reduce the need for healing.

Secrets Found

This requirement isn't too bad, as long as you know where to go. Getting an S-Rank means you need to find all 15 of the game's secrets, which is far too involved a process to detail here. Check out this guide to all the secrets in Crow Country for the full details.

Hints Spent

Another easy one here, you just need to not use any hints throughout the playthrough. Since the critical path through the game is the same on each playthrough, you can accomplish this pretty easily by remembering where to go and in what order to do things. An easy way to keep track of what to do next is to check what key items you have, and remember how to get each one. A note in the game (Found in the Garage area) shows the order these key items can be obtained, and knowing this order makes it easier to keep track of the next step.

The order of key items is: Bronze Key, Crank Handle, Ruby Gemstone, Chain, Mask, Trident, Silver Key, Data Disk, Acid Bottle (Fill It), Gold Key, and Battery (Charge It).

Lives Used

Lives Used is also a fairly easy objective, since lives are disabled by default. To get an S-Rank, you have to beat the game without losing any lives, so it's best to turn them off entirely and save regularly when going for the S-Rank.

What do you Get for an S-Rank in Crow Country?

Achieving an S-Rank on a playthrough unlocks the Crow Wings, which allows Mara to fast-travel between rest spots in future playthroughs and adds Crow Wings to her outfit. This is massively useful for navigating the map, though you'll have already scoured the map for every last secret by this point. The Crow Wings could be very useful for collecting all the Crystal Crows, especially since the reward for collecting them all does not carry over to future save files at the time of writing (though the developers have indicated this will change in the future.)