Playing Clock Tower really cast modern technological freedom in a harsh light for me. It’s so interesting that a game so limited by the technology of its day tried so hard and managed so well to capture the aesthetic and stylistic overtones and moods and vibes of giallo cinema and very specifically of a couple of famous Dario Argento movies, but because of the SNES tech they were working with it was impossible to fully rip that filmmaker off in a 1 to 1 way, and they created something that has a clear and obvious influence but still a distinct and powerful identity of its own. Today it’s so much easier to just, mimic the thing you want to mimic, and it’s easier to get away with that without a clear understanding of what makes the thing worth mimicking. A lot of AAA games or big studio games are these empty facsimiles of other popular media and it’s hard not to yearn for a day where this was impossible to accomplish but trying led to interesting things instead of boring, repetitive hash.
Clock Tower isn’t a perfect game, and indeed the more time you spend with it (and its structure does encourage multiple replays) the more the sheen comes off the apple, but it synthesizes a lot of standard gaming stuff with its filmic inspirations in ways that are very cool and even occasionally novel in 2022. A point n click adventure game that is also a lurid slasher film, it incorporates action and stealth sequences that are a combination of proto-quick time event, stamina meter, timed stealth section, and trial and error puzzle solving that feels tense and enigmatic initially. Of course, once you realize the points where attacks are scripted and where you can hide and how to solve the environmental puzzles ahead of time, the game’s charm naturally expires as you check the boxes of various easter eggs and alternate endings, but that first time is always electric, and the tension of discovery on a second or third remained enchanting for me.
The thing I found most exciting about the game is the modular way the events of the story play out. It’s this cool schrödinger’s cat universe where events only happen if you see them happen? Like one of the first things that will happen is you’ll go into a bathroom and see one of your friends get murdered, which is the first time the famous Scissorman will appear. But if you don’t go in there she won’t die that way, or maybe not even at all! She might be thrown from a window (which won’t happen if you don’t look out the window when you hear a scream when you walk by it), and Scissorman might instead make his entrance crashing with another corpse through a stained glass window in the main foyer. If you know what you’re doing and you play it smart, you only HAVE to see that guy twice in the entire game, and only one of the many teenaged girls visiting this spooky boarding house will die. This is an interactive horror movie where how closely it resembles its gialli inspirations depends entirely on how much you the player opts into acting like a Horror Movie Sucker, and that’s a really cool approach that I don’t know if I’ve ever seen done elsewhere.
Of course the events that are here are an almost textbook Mid 20th Century Italian Horror Checklist, with the gaggle of beautiful women being stalked and murdered in gruesome and violent ways by a sicko dude, a subversion of the good will and power of authority figures in the lives of young women, intense and striking color pallet affectations in key scenes, last minute overarching supernatural implications, a deeply rooted investigative nature to the story, the emphasis on the unstable mental health of the protagonist and her parallels with the villain in this regard, delusions and hallucination, etc etc. These things don’t sound specific to any particular strain of horror on paper but Clock Tower is deploying them in a very identifiable way and it’s clear there’s a lot of intent behind the aesthetic choices the game is making.
Clock Tower was utterly surprising to me, even as a game that stuck hard in my vague childhood memories of being really really scared of the Scissorman lol, who is in fact quite scary, at least as scary as he is ridiculous. This is a premium example of a game that will not have “aged well” and while I think that on closer and more earnest examination it does have a lot of seams and rough edges, it’s also an obviously passionate and successful piece of horror media and a rewarding and ambitious experiment in the adventure game genre. Would that more games had aged as poorly as Clock Tower.
Clock Tower isn’t a perfect game, and indeed the more time you spend with it (and its structure does encourage multiple replays) the more the sheen comes off the apple, but it synthesizes a lot of standard gaming stuff with its filmic inspirations in ways that are very cool and even occasionally novel in 2022. A point n click adventure game that is also a lurid slasher film, it incorporates action and stealth sequences that are a combination of proto-quick time event, stamina meter, timed stealth section, and trial and error puzzle solving that feels tense and enigmatic initially. Of course, once you realize the points where attacks are scripted and where you can hide and how to solve the environmental puzzles ahead of time, the game’s charm naturally expires as you check the boxes of various easter eggs and alternate endings, but that first time is always electric, and the tension of discovery on a second or third remained enchanting for me.
The thing I found most exciting about the game is the modular way the events of the story play out. It’s this cool schrödinger’s cat universe where events only happen if you see them happen? Like one of the first things that will happen is you’ll go into a bathroom and see one of your friends get murdered, which is the first time the famous Scissorman will appear. But if you don’t go in there she won’t die that way, or maybe not even at all! She might be thrown from a window (which won’t happen if you don’t look out the window when you hear a scream when you walk by it), and Scissorman might instead make his entrance crashing with another corpse through a stained glass window in the main foyer. If you know what you’re doing and you play it smart, you only HAVE to see that guy twice in the entire game, and only one of the many teenaged girls visiting this spooky boarding house will die. This is an interactive horror movie where how closely it resembles its gialli inspirations depends entirely on how much you the player opts into acting like a Horror Movie Sucker, and that’s a really cool approach that I don’t know if I’ve ever seen done elsewhere.
Of course the events that are here are an almost textbook Mid 20th Century Italian Horror Checklist, with the gaggle of beautiful women being stalked and murdered in gruesome and violent ways by a sicko dude, a subversion of the good will and power of authority figures in the lives of young women, intense and striking color pallet affectations in key scenes, last minute overarching supernatural implications, a deeply rooted investigative nature to the story, the emphasis on the unstable mental health of the protagonist and her parallels with the villain in this regard, delusions and hallucination, etc etc. These things don’t sound specific to any particular strain of horror on paper but Clock Tower is deploying them in a very identifiable way and it’s clear there’s a lot of intent behind the aesthetic choices the game is making.
Clock Tower was utterly surprising to me, even as a game that stuck hard in my vague childhood memories of being really really scared of the Scissorman lol, who is in fact quite scary, at least as scary as he is ridiculous. This is a premium example of a game that will not have “aged well” and while I think that on closer and more earnest examination it does have a lot of seams and rough edges, it’s also an obviously passionate and successful piece of horror media and a rewarding and ambitious experiment in the adventure game genre. Would that more games had aged as poorly as Clock Tower.