It’s not surprising that people want more games like Clock Tower. While exceptionally clunky, it was a pretty unique blend of adventure, stealth and some survival horror elements that, unlike most horror attempts at the time, was closer to the slasher or Italian giallo thrillers in mood and themes, rather then zombie, monster or gothic themes. Yet, the last big budget title in that vein was Haunting Ground released back in 2005. So a lot of people backed the Kickstarter for NightCry and quite a lot of people were excited about Remothered: Tormented Fathers, which is supposedly the first game in a trilogy of games. And, well, this game is very definitely better than NightCry turned out to be. Then again, it’s not hard to achieve that.
Remothered: Tormented Fathers is a surprisingly competently made for being a first project. The controls are pretty well thought out, the basic mechanics are quite well designed, effortlessly transferring the point and click design of the first Clock Tower games into direct controlled action adventure scheme without the more survival horror-esque item use of Clock Tower 3. The game map is a several store mansion, that’s pretty well designed to not get lost in it easily, despite not having an in-game map. And the stalkers are genuinely creepy with their voice lines, while the whole escape and hide or use a defense item idea is rather solid. It’s clear that a very earnest attempt was made and some of it works.
Sadly, most of it falls flat. The stealth aspect is pretty terrible, as the sound mixing in this game is just dreadful and it’s usually impossible to understand the source of sounds and even the helpful music stings (that work like a distance/danger radar, essentially) can have false alarms. In addition, noise/distraction items are mostly useless, stalkers can see you in pitch dark rooms even if you’re not moving, while escaping from them via hiding or using defense items is incredibly easy. That is, until you are locked into what constitutes for “boss battles”, where the lack of both makes the sections essentially luck based and horrible. To the point where even the developers seem to clearly understand that so they divide those sections into ridiculous segments with some of the worst QTEs I’ve seen since 2010 or what not.
Speaking of which, holy crap how terrible the story and storytelling are in this game. Most of the game dialogue barely makes any sense or character consistency, the cutscenes are directed akin to old FPS demos of late 90s, with bizarre camera flybys and such and while some of the themes and ideas behind the story are pretty curious, this game doesn’t present itself as much of a “First of the Trilogy” as a bunch of pages torn from the book and presented in mostly chronological order, with no context and no continuation. Voice actors seem to be trying their best to make this horrible mess work, but with script like this, their attempts are often wasted. Same goes for the mess of the visuals, which mix some pretty good level architecture with ugly effects, character models and strange occasional artifacts where objects occasionally leave trails, like some badly implemented temporal AA solution.
Mercifully, the game is pretty short and it’s possible to stealth your way without rushing in under 5 hours, as that’s pretty much what I’ve done. Should you spend those hours on it? I’d say no, unless you absolutely need a new Clock Tower fix or plan to design a similar game and wish to learn on mistakes of others. It’s not a complete waste of time and might be worth a check if you get it in a bundle (like I did), but otherwise it’s not very good. Hopefully, if the series indeed continue, the next game will be better.