With how often videos are randomly deleted, and how seriously spoilers should be taken, there has to be a pretty good reason to link a cutscene for a review. However, this is a case where trying to convey the game’s tone makes words fail me, even when it seems like a normal horror game at first glance. Watch this scene from the linked time (13:25 if it breaks), until its end at about the 15 minute mark. Don’t worry, it’s from the very start of the game and contains no significant plot details.

If you opened up that link expecting something gory or scary, well, me too. I played this soon after the original Clock Tower, which is one of my favorite Super Nintendo games, and one of the first that comes to mind when I think “kino”. It was a genre-pioneering title that still uniquely shines, so after hearing that Clock Tower 3 was also considered an underappreciated classic, I jumped right in, only to find… that. Whatever the hell that was. It’s not just that single scene either; in comparison to most of the other cutscenes, it’s actually pretty soberly directed. The experience feels like House of the Dead with its excessively energetic campiness, and the horror comes more in theme rather than atmosphere. Sure there are big unstoppable monsters to chase you through each stage, but the end is always a boss fight that can only be described as a magical-girl interlude rather than a desperate showdown. If all you ever wanted was a horror game that flies off the rails so hard that it rockets into space, then it will probably end up being your favorite game of all time, but by the end I was just sitting in my chair wondering what in the world I just witnessed. It wasn’t exactly a horror game, it wasn’t an action game, it was a... questionably-localized horror-themed magical-girl historical family drama? I grasp at straws at how to even wrap this up for recommendation purposes, since it’s certainly not great, the aforementioned boss fights are uniformly terrible and the level design is mediocre at best, but it’s just decent enough and so thoroughly unusual that I hope people keep playing it. We might never see big-budget games get this weird ever again, and I would gladly sacrifice some production value if it meant we could get some more games this hard to describe.