O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
Discussing Clock Tower is a bit strange. On one hand, the original game is still incredible in many ways and at the time was highly influential. On the other – it never figured out how to become a franchise, despite 3 further attempts. The latest entry in the franchise was released back in 2002, but several other attempts to re-create the experience were made since then… only for all of them to mostly fail as well.
Clock Tower: Rewind is the first official international release of that inventive original game. And it’s a mixed bag of a release, with a lot of good and some very bad.
Since you might not be familiar with what Clock Tower even is – it’s a horror themed point and click adventure game, originally released for SNES in 1995. It was the first game to popularise the concept of a “stalker enemy” and was deeply influenced by the Italian giallo film genre, specifically the Dario Argento movies like Suspiria and Phenomena. In many ways, it was an attempt to transfer that specific type of psychological horror/thriller experience with highly stylized lighting and atmospheric environments into an interactive medium, which it did mostly successfully.
For a point and click game, though, it is rather unconventional. You do control the character via the mouse cursor, however you also have direct controls for walking and running left or right. There are not that many items to put into inventory and some of the items you find have highly contextual use, that might not even come up depending on how you play through the game. Jennifer, the main character, has a stamina system that affects certain elements of the game and lowers if you run a lot and you can sit down to quickly restore it. Sometimes you get special events that make the character portrait colors to start rapidly blinking, at which point you need to mash a specific button to struggle to survive and failing that leads to an immediate death. And if you are chased by the “scissorman” (the stalker enemy of the game), you cannot interact with any elements in the game, other than hiding places or items that let you to defend yourself.
And a lot of the above is, actually, partially or fully random. That’s right – sometimes the scissorman can find you even if you hid as smartly as you could. When and where it spawns is also unpredictable, apart from a few scripted scenes. In fact, even the position of some key items and rooms themselves is random every time you play the game. You didn’t misread – as you explore the Clock Tower mansion, only some of the rooms you enter will have the same position every time you play, some have a number of potential positions they can be found it and the only way to know where it is, is to try.
Which you will be doing a lot, especially if you wish to get all of the endings in the game. The game itself is actually quite short, even if you’re playing it for the first time. And if you’re smart and explore a lot, it’s highly likely that you will get one of the better endings first try too. You might die a few times along the way, but since the game (even in its original version) saves on every room you enter, continuing and trying again isn’t a problem. You will, however, most likely not get the best ending because knowing too much is actually bad… It’s hard to explain the specifics, but the game basically works on the rule of “if you didn’t see it, it didn’t happen”. In other words, even if you know that a particular element of the room has a dead supporting character or the scissorman, if you didn’t see them by interacting, they’re not there. The whole flag system for the endings, in general, is far more confusing than it had to be, honestly, but you won’t care about it until you start trying to get a specific ending.
It’s not the only frustrating part of the experience either. Jennifer loves to go back to a certain “default position” after she comes closer to interact with things, meaning that investigating an entire room can be very slow, as she has to walk in and walk out every time before you can do anything else. Some of the available interactions are not very intuitive and require a bit of pixel hunting, at least on your first try. And the fact that starting to walk or run in a specific direction won’t stop until you press the button that stops the character, unlike a typical point and click adventure, can be very confusing too.
Nonetheless, the original game, both in the Original mode and in Rewind mode is still fantastic, despite some outdated or just odd concepts. It’s soundtrack is amazing, even though it doesn’t play often. And replaying the game is genuinely fun, even with the fact that some of the story flags are weird and some of the random elements are not good. But let’s talk about the release itself, because it’s both high quality and effort and low quality and effort at the same time.
On one hand, while the games are just ROMs of the original versions running under a different engine, a lot of quality of life improvements were added to the game. It’s good to be able to control it with a mouse on PC, the rewind ability (a common addition to old game releases and emulation) is neat, but rarely needed, there are cool bonus features included like the interviews and original promotional comics scanned, animated and voiced. There are scans of the different materials for the original games and even two cool new songs and an animated intro. The “Rewind” mode itself is a neat repackaging of the PS1 release of the game known as First Fear, backported inside the SNES version. Which has previously been available as a ROM hack called Clock Tower Deluxe, but now it’s an official package, easy to use on modern systems. And I recommend just sticking with this mode, but I am glad the original is also available for game preservation purposes.
On the other hand, so much about this collection feels half-assed. The “motion comic” I’ve mentioned gets unlocked in parts as you play through the game itself, and every time it happens you get a full screen gigantic notification that overlays over the game screen, that is still running. Ruining the first time experience for absolutely no reason. The “save system” is bizarre, as it is actually WORSE than in the original game. As mentioned, original title already saved all of your progress as good as a modern autosave system would, however to launch the game you must load what is essentially a “save state”. Meaning that while the game itself saves its progress, you cannot use that progress after you exit, unless you additionally manually save the game through the menu of this re-release. It’s incredibly stupid, inconvenient and will undeniably cost players hours of lost progress, while being a huge downgrade over the system found in a 1995 game. And apart from that, there’s just a lot of bad decisions – barely any settings, menus that do not work with the mouse (while the game does), lazily created borders for the game that do not fit the default (and best) scaling option… As I said – it’s like the team didn’t care and cared a lot at the same time, it’s bizarre.
Even so, there is no better way to experience the original Clock Tower and it’s a game that is absolutely worth experiencing. Yes a modern re-release NightDive style would’ve been far more superior (even if less of a game preservation success) and many people might find elements of the game confusing and unintuitive. But it is a great game with wonderful atmosphere and soundtrack and you should play it (and probably ignore all of the sequels and side-games, they’re not very good).