Clock Tower (English Translation)

Released in Japan on September 14, 1995 for the Super Nintendo by Human Entertainment, the 2D, side-scrolling Clock Tower is one of the first survival horror video games.

I don't remember the first time I saw screenshots of Clock Tower, but it was long after the Super Nintendo's heyday--after all, the influential game never came to the good ole U.S. of A. In fact, Clock Tower was never released anywhere outside of Japan. Pictures of the game revealed great, atmospheric graphics. Later superlatives praised Clock Tower for pioneering the survival horror genre popularized by games like Resident Evil, but still, I figured I'd never get a chance to play it.

 

Human Clock Tower?

Well, in the past few years, video game reproduction carts may have oversaturated the market with a bunch of cheap fakes, but they've also allowed players to experience once exorbitantly expensive and rare titles, as well as English translations of once Japanese-only games. With that said, just in time for Spooky Season 2021, I've happened upon and played through a cheap, English-translated copy of Clock Tower.

 

The kind of place where they speak English. "Nice" is relative.

After playing through, I can say that this game definitely looks as good as advertised. You're introduced to your character and the setting through a cutscene composed of stills and text. You plays as Jennifer, a teen orphan being relocated to a remote mansion with several other girls. As the girls arrive at the mansion, the guide suddenly vanishes into the house's dark, huge, and scary halls. Jennifer decides to start wandering around...and that's when the murder begins.

 

She was a bit too contrary

I recently watched Dario Argento's Suspiria, and the style and influence from that film are apparent here. A girl is wandering around a spooky old mansion, the occult might just be involved, and there's not really any depth beyond that. Clock Tower even includes the Suspiria sequence where someone gets shoved to their death through a stained-glass ceiling.

 

Clock Tower is Argento-esque, but with a big pair of scissors

Rooms are highly detailed, atmospheric, and somewhat interactive. As far as music, there's not much, with most of the game being scored by ambient sounds and prolonged, creepy silences. However, the soundtrack is sufficiently suspenseful when it does creep up.

Scissor Dance, all the kids are doing it!

As Jennifer, you wander through the randomly generated mansion, picking up and using items. You look for keys to unlock rooms, solve rudimentary puzzles (i.e., this wall looks cracked, maybe I can smash a hole through it with this rock I found), and try to avoid a psychotic, scissor-wielding, adolescent mansion resident who sometimes pops out of nowhere. The scissors are...quite large. Every now and then during your mansion search, you happen upon your fellow orphans' corpses. Sometimes, you look into an evil mirror and die of terror. Speaking of terror, your character's anxiety often comes into play. If you've constantly been holding down the RUN button (which you'll frequently do because of how slowly Jennifer walks) and been getting freaked out by scissor kid, you're his easy prey. If not, you might just be able to fight him off and run away... 

And that's it: you traverse the mansion halls and rooms, trying to gain access to more and more areas, which unlock more turns in the story, until the end.

Some of those story turns are surprisingly grisly, though sadly, not surprisingly grizzly

So the atmosphere here is top notch for a 16-bit game, and the bones of survival horror are here. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of meat on those gameplay bones. Yes, Jennifer's digitized animations are stunning, but she walks like a slug crawling up a sun-baked hill. Moving around the house is frustrating enough when nothing is chasing you, let alone when there's a psychotic child bounding behind you with over-sized scissors. The controls are also clunky and unintuitive. Sometimes, picking up and using an object takes an act of congress. Also, your game saves automatically when you die. 

What happens if you die in an inescapable situation where you just happen to be pinned up against the wall by scissor boy? 

Why, you've got to erase that save and start the entire game over from the beginning! 

Granted, you could play through this game in two or three hours if you know exactly what you are doing, but if not, losing two or three hours of putzing around and finally getting close to the finish is maddening.

Metaphor for this game

This is a shame because there's clearly a special game underneath all of this frustration. The production values, despite the game's reportedly small development team, are excellent, but it appears they've come at the expense of the gameplay. However, if you can work through these frustrations, Clock Tower shows a striking attention to detail, with multiple story paths and endings--I just wish more effort had gone toward making the game fun.

 

Wait, this one's better

Graphics: 8.5/10.0

Sound: 7.0/10.0

Gameplay: 5.5/10.0

Lasting Value: 4.0/10.0


Overall: 6.0/10.0