Clock Tower is a game I really want to like more than I do. You play as an orphan named Jennifer Simpson (named after the lead protagonist of the Dario Argento film Phenomena) who has just recently been adopted by a wealthy recluse named Simon Barrows. However, when the orphanage matron disappears upon attempting to summon Mr. Barrows, Jennifer’s attempts at finding her instead calls on the Scissorman, who is hell bent on hunting down and killing Jennifer and all her orphan friends. Now Jennifer must navigate the mansion, collect items, solve puzzles in order to find her friends, figure out the mystery behind the mansion, and avoid the Scissorman along the way.
When I think of this game — having actually beaten it several months before writing up this review — mostly… I feel sad, because this game was the originator for a lot of mechanics and concepts that became commonplace in horror… in addition to having just a lot of stuff that’s my jam. Things like the giallo influence, the way the narrative diverges based on what the player does, graded endings based off of what mysteries the player solves (and when they choose to end the game), confrontations where you need to hide from the monster (but don’t hide when they’re in the room with you, or else its instant death)... these are all things that’ve been copied and iterated upon by other games later down the line, but it’s neat to see all these things together, and it’s fascinating to see how these things are represented in the game that helped popularize these concepts in the first place. Combine that with a cool artstyle that manages to blend pixel art and photorealism, and a story that… really works to make use of its diverging narrative, you get a game that in some respects is just as effective and fascinating today as it was when it came out.
I just wish it was actually fun to play.
Here’s how it went down: I boot up the game, enjoy the opening cutscene, get a bit confused on what I’m supposed to do during the opening segments but mostly shrug it off as me needing to get used to the game, start heading to different parts of the house… then get informed that running is a limited resource and that I need to save it for when I start getting chased. I start walking around the house instead and… holy shit Jennifer is so slow. Like, seriously. This girl plods around the house as if her life isn’t in danger. It genuinely feels like it takes upwards of thirty seconds to walk from one end of a hallway to another, and given that this house is built out of a lot of interconnected hallways, getting from one end to another genuinely feels like it takes minutes. And given that the way puzzles are structured often places items at the opposite end of the mansion from where you use them, which creates a gameplay loop of walking very slowly to one end of the house, getting what you need there, walking very slowly to the other end of the house, using said item, checking where you need to go next, realizing the next thing you need to do was on the side of the mansion where you’d just been, sighing, then beginning the cycle all over again.
Scissorman encounters, sadly, are far too infrequent to break up this monotony — aside from the first one I got precisely two the whole game — and… maybe if I knew more hiding places it would’ve been different, but what would happen was that I’d be close to where I needed to be, he’d interrupt me, I’d run back to where the hiding place I knew was… but then that hiding place was on the other end of the mansion so when he was gone I’d have to walk very slowly back to where I was originally intending to go and holy shit actually playing this game is so miserable. It’s slow and dry and more than anything I felt bored going through the mansion. Barely anything happens and the guy meant to hunt you down never actually fucking appears and the entire experience is watching Jennifer plod along through this mansion over and over again with nothing to break it up. Maybe back when it was first released the slowness contributed to the atmosphere, but having played games from nowadays that manage to achieve that sense of looming dread, it’s clear that Clock Tower wasn’t really to veer the needle towards that balance, coming off as just... genuinely really annoying to play.
Which is a shame, because I do legitimately love what it’s going for in a lot of aspects. In terms of narrative — how what rooms you enter and what things you see diverge it, how you can effectively choose to end the story at any time and getting better results for how long you choose to stay/what specifically you unearth — it’s still absolutely fascinating and effective today and it’s really worth experiencing the game to see how it does these things… just so long as you watch somebody else do it, because actually going through it? Honestly kind of a pain! 5/10.
When I think of this game — having actually beaten it several months before writing up this review — mostly… I feel sad, because this game was the originator for a lot of mechanics and concepts that became commonplace in horror… in addition to having just a lot of stuff that’s my jam. Things like the giallo influence, the way the narrative diverges based on what the player does, graded endings based off of what mysteries the player solves (and when they choose to end the game), confrontations where you need to hide from the monster (but don’t hide when they’re in the room with you, or else its instant death)... these are all things that’ve been copied and iterated upon by other games later down the line, but it’s neat to see all these things together, and it’s fascinating to see how these things are represented in the game that helped popularize these concepts in the first place. Combine that with a cool artstyle that manages to blend pixel art and photorealism, and a story that… really works to make use of its diverging narrative, you get a game that in some respects is just as effective and fascinating today as it was when it came out.
I just wish it was actually fun to play.
Here’s how it went down: I boot up the game, enjoy the opening cutscene, get a bit confused on what I’m supposed to do during the opening segments but mostly shrug it off as me needing to get used to the game, start heading to different parts of the house… then get informed that running is a limited resource and that I need to save it for when I start getting chased. I start walking around the house instead and… holy shit Jennifer is so slow. Like, seriously. This girl plods around the house as if her life isn’t in danger. It genuinely feels like it takes upwards of thirty seconds to walk from one end of a hallway to another, and given that this house is built out of a lot of interconnected hallways, getting from one end to another genuinely feels like it takes minutes. And given that the way puzzles are structured often places items at the opposite end of the mansion from where you use them, which creates a gameplay loop of walking very slowly to one end of the house, getting what you need there, walking very slowly to the other end of the house, using said item, checking where you need to go next, realizing the next thing you need to do was on the side of the mansion where you’d just been, sighing, then beginning the cycle all over again.
Scissorman encounters, sadly, are far too infrequent to break up this monotony — aside from the first one I got precisely two the whole game — and… maybe if I knew more hiding places it would’ve been different, but what would happen was that I’d be close to where I needed to be, he’d interrupt me, I’d run back to where the hiding place I knew was… but then that hiding place was on the other end of the mansion so when he was gone I’d have to walk very slowly back to where I was originally intending to go and holy shit actually playing this game is so miserable. It’s slow and dry and more than anything I felt bored going through the mansion. Barely anything happens and the guy meant to hunt you down never actually fucking appears and the entire experience is watching Jennifer plod along through this mansion over and over again with nothing to break it up. Maybe back when it was first released the slowness contributed to the atmosphere, but having played games from nowadays that manage to achieve that sense of looming dread, it’s clear that Clock Tower wasn’t really to veer the needle towards that balance, coming off as just... genuinely really annoying to play.
Which is a shame, because I do legitimately love what it’s going for in a lot of aspects. In terms of narrative — how what rooms you enter and what things you see diverge it, how you can effectively choose to end the story at any time and getting better results for how long you choose to stay/what specifically you unearth — it’s still absolutely fascinating and effective today and it’s really worth experiencing the game to see how it does these things… just so long as you watch somebody else do it, because actually going through it? Honestly kind of a pain! 5/10.