
Review – Clock Tower 3
I’ve owned Clock Tower 3 for a decent while now, but the reason why I hadn’t gotten to it wasn’t because I was waiting to play the earlier games for context. If there was one important detail I knew going into Clock Tower 3 it’s that it isn’t all that much like the previous titles. No narrative connections. But mainly, it sat on my shelf for the same reason I didn’t pick up Clock Tower Rewind right away: I dunno.
Clock Tower 3 wasn’t very well-received when it was released, but I’ve come to realize that PS2 horror was kimchi trying to make it at a McDonalds. It’s a very unique taste that isn’t going to go well with every palette, so if you try to put it in front of everyone, you’re going to get more gag reflexes than people who appreciate it. Even Silent Hill 2 got decent reviews, but not the kind that would imply that it would become one of the most celebrated of the era.
But, hoo gosh, Clock Tower 3 is a unique one. It’s maybe less kimchi and more fugu. It’s an acquired taste, at best, but there’s also the off chance that it will just straight-up kill you.

THE ENDLESS CHASE
Most of the staff from the first three Clock Tower games (yeah, this is the fourth) weren’t involved in this one to any large extent. Human Entertainment had gone bust in 1999, and its creative brains went scattering to the wind. Sunsoft bought up the rights to Clock Tower and partnered with Capcom for the next entry.
At the time (and even today to some extent), game developers and publishers were envious of the perceived legitimacy of movies and felt that, with video games gradually becoming more convincing facsimiles of reality, it was time to start crossing over. In particular, they touted Kinji Fukasaku, a prolific film director, and propped him up as the guy calling the shots. They also had Noboru Sugimura, who worked in television as a writer, but also had a hand in a lot of Capcom’s bigger budget stories, such as Resident Evil 2 and Onimusha.
But Clock Tower 3 touted over 400 staff on the credit roll, so it gets murky when it comes to whose fingerprints are on what. I mostly have this promotional documentary to draw from. It might not be the best source of concrete information, but it certainly suggests that this was an extremely expensive game to make and reveals why it’s such a tremendous mess.

DEAR DAUGHTER: LISTEN FOR ONCE, FFS. ~MOM
Clock Tower 3 casts you as Alyssa Hamilton, a girl who was sent away to boarding school for suspicious reasons. She receives a letter from her mother, who pleads with her to not return home until well after her 15th birthday. However, Alyssa quickly ignores this stark warning and returns home anyway. There, she finds a stranger lurking about, but it’s not quite as inexplicable as it sounds since her home was also used as a boarding house.
It’s kind of hard to describe the plot from there, especially since it’s not very structurally rigid. Alyssa begins by looking for her mother in the house, and before long finds herself back in time in 1942. She’s in a city that’s being bombed by the Germans, which is kind of inaccurate since German bombings had waned out by 1942. It’s not the only demonstration of a lack of research, but it’s also small enough that it can be forgiven, especially compared to how the story develops later.
Your goal is to help give peace to a girl who was brutally murdered at the time. You find yourself under attack by her killer, a big dude with a big hammer. Your goal is to find a way to help the girl cross over to the afterlife in the most cliche way imaginable. You do this by finding something special to her.
Actually, the whole “allowing dead people to pass to the other side by giving them some trinket” is present in the normal gameplay, as well. There are ghosts that will harrow you, but if you manage to match up a gewgaw with a corpse, they go away. It’s pretty dopey.
She travels in time on a few occasions, which gives you the feeling that the format is going to be a series of time-traveling ghost-soothing adventures, but that gets dropped after the second time.

SUBS AND DOMS
The big hammer dude is a “Subordinate,” which is an undead killer possessed by an “Entity.” We’re going into spoiler territory here, but Alyssa is the latest in a family of “Rooders,” who are people who fight Entities. Her Rooder power is at its peak when she hits 15 and declines from there.
So, Clock Tower 3 is actually about defeating a series of subordinates. Now, you’re initially told that, in order to do so, you first need to help out one of their victims, but that’s gradually brushed aside as the game progresses. Eventually, you just evade the serial killers until you’re allowed to fight them. This is where Clock Tower 3 comes closest to the original.
Most of the time, you can only flee, but occasionally, you can find things in the environment to fight back with. These are cool but somewhat pointless, as they only put the killer out of action temporarily. You’re also loaded with holy water, which you can spray in their eyes to temporarily stagger them. Finally, there are some good ol’ hiding spots. What I find amusing is that you can slip into a spot in plain sight, and the boss will instantly lose you. However, when they’re up close to you, it fills Alyssa’s panic meter, and if that caps out, she’ll burst out of her hiding place. Sounds dumb, but it never happened to me.
Like in Clock Tower 1, the whole fleeing from killers thing is kind of lame. As long as you know where the hiding spot is, you can just return to it whenever you hear the orchestra kick up with battle music and wait until your pursuer loses interest.

FIGHTING EVIL BY MOONLIGHT
Actually fighting the boss is something I didn’t see in Clock Tower, and it is absolutely strange here. At predetermined spaces, Alyssa goes through something that is just shy of a magical girl transformation where she pulls out a laser bow. You then have to eliminate the boss by hitting them with charged arrows. The highest charge puts little energy chains on them. If you get them chained down enough, you can use an ultra-powerful attack that wipes out most of their life bar.
Except, it’s kind of hinky. I’ve read, uh, somewhere, that you just need to hit them with three chainshots to render the boss vulnerable, but it wasn’t so easy for me. The game suggests you need to hit the boss from different angles to fan out the chains, but that was janky in its own way. Generally, I could do it, but it was sometimes a chore. And that says nothing about how the bosses have patterns that don’t really allow you to charge up easily. That’s expected, but the patterns are so limited that, every so often, it devolves into slap fighting. The boss will hurl an attack, you’ll dodge it, send a partially charged arrow, and then continue until something gives.
Also, the combat controls are just so much butt. It’s gluey and stiff at the best of times, but the worst part of it is that you can’t change your aim. Holding the attack button puts you in first-person and immediately snaps your view onto the boss. However, you can’t move from there. As in, you can’t aim. That seems like a vague way to put it, but I’m being literal. Once you’re in first person, you can’t move at all. So, if an enemy moves laterally out of the way of your shot, you have to fire the arrow, then hold the attack button again to simply look at them.
That’s so incredibly stupid, but what’s worse is that there’s a boss where pressing attack doesn’t lock on. So, you have to try to point Alyssa directly at them using a fixed camera perspective, and if you get it wrong, you can’t adjust. Somehow, I finished that fight on my first try.

HERE’S JOHNNY! AH-HYUK!
But the best and worst part about Clock Tower 3 is that it is simultaneously effective horror and also so damned goofy. For part of it, it ties in human tragedy and mystery reasonably well. It also has the habit of showing really grotesque scenes and gruesome deaths. But it doesn’t hold that very well. Alyssa constantly acts like she has moss growing on her brain, and then they throw in Dennis.
Ah, Dennis. He’s a kid Alyssa’s age (around 15), and he makes his entrance, flailing his way through her window. For some reason, the dude just wiggles. I can’t describe it any other way. In so many of the scenes he’s in, he wiggles for emphasis. He’ll throw his limbs around in comical ways, and it looks weird.
And I think that comes down to that film director I mentioned earlier. I watched a behind-the-scenes on it, and it seems that a lot of emphasis was placed on the cutscenes directed by Kinji Fukasaku. It sounds like his work wound up bleeding into the design and script in an effort to make the gameplay match up with his cutscenes. The cutscenes were central to the project. And, to be fair, the motion capture is reasonably well implemented, and the animation is detailed.
However, the other part that is clear is that Kinji Fukasaku didn’t really understand video games. So, when he was told that he wasn’t going to be able to capture the facial expressions of the actors, I think he decided that their body language had to be a lot more expressive. This leads to over-animation, hence Dennis’ incessant wiggling. There’s this unnatural quality to every cutscene, and you wind up with this tokusatsu (Kamen Rider, Super Sentai) effect where the actors throw their extremities around flamboyantly. It’s very strange and consistently undermines the horror.

IT’S AWFUL, YOU SHOULD PLAY IT
At the same time, it’s a big part of the game’s charm. As a story, Clock Tower 3 kind of shits in its pants. As a survival horror game, it barely plays the part. Laser archery aside, it isn’t an action game, and if it was, it would be one of the most inept to exist. But then you throw in a wobbly teen and send them to explore upstairs without telling them about the months-old corpse in the bathtub, then suddenly you’ve got the sort of camp that gets it to catch first gear and get you to the finish line. You should totally play it.
I’m not sure if that makes it clear, but Clock Tower 3 is a mess. A fascinating mess. And it’s probably the movie director’s fault. Now, don’t misunderstand. I don’t mean it was a dumb idea to have the project helmed by a famous movie director. Sure, the guy had never played a video game in his life, but he was clearly curious and wanted to try his hand. And what is this art form without experimentation? In 2002, a lot of this was still uncharted territory. It worked for Steven Spielberg with Medal of Honor, and Capcom was already trying to blur the lines between games and film with the Onimusha series.
But it clearly didn’t work with Clock Tower 3. Kinji Fukasaku may have been a great film director, but he took to it like a guppy to saltwater. And, unfortunately, he didn’t get a chance to try again, since he died the next year in 2003. Wait, that’s a really depressing way to end this review.
5/10
This review was conducted on a (software) backwards compatible PS3 using a disc copy of the game. It was paid for by the author.

