I’d say Clock Tower has been something of a white whale for me, but I don’t think it qualifies. It’s more like if Captain Ahab spotted Moby Dick several times but refused to get out of his chair because his spear was too far away. I have started up and watched the opening to Clock Tower at least three times, but didn’t play past, like, the second room. So, I felt that Clock Tower: Rewind would be a good excuse to finally play through it.

And its release date came and went. To my credit, I was really busy at the time. Like, really busy. A month after release isn’t bad, but you’d think I’d be all over it after hyping it up in my head for so long. This is Clock Tower. The godfather of modern horror games. That brand of awkwardness and deep themes that we love so much about Japanese horror games, a lot of that started here.

Anyway, obviously this review indicates that I finally played through it. I’m, uh, whelmed. Let me just say that it’s obvious things had to start somewhere.

SOMETHING ABOUT MS. MARY

The big contribution that Clock Tower made to the horror genre was having a mostly defenseless protagonist. Note that I’m rarely going to claim that Clock Tower was the “first” at anything. I’ve stated before that, when it comes to video games, the first is rarely actually the first. 1981’s Haunted House was a horror game that had a defenseless protagonist long before Clock Tower did it. No, instead, Clock Tower just kind of found the right amount of helplessness.

You play as Jennifer, who is one of a group of adolescent orphans who are led to their new home by Ms. Mary, a woman who is… Erm. The orphanage director, maybe? It sounds like the children are familiar with her, but the relationship isn’t really established. Anyway, the children have been adopted by Simon Barrows, a dude who lives in a creepy mansion with a clock tower.

Upon arriving, Ms. Mary wanders off. Jennifer leaves the group to try and find her, and suddenly there’s a scream, and the other girls are missing. Before long, this little dude with a gigantic pair of scissors shows up and starts pursuing Jennifer, and that’s it. That’s the game. Obviously, the front door is locked, and apparently, it locks from the outside. Must be a European thing. She’s not cool with leaving through the windows, and I guess she maybe doesn’t want to leave her friends behind for some reason (unless you get one of the “bad” endings). So, the only thing to do is wander around looking for clues, gang.

SNIP-SNIP! SNIP-SNIP!

Clock Tower is a point-and-click adventure game, which is always an odd choice on SNES. Jennifer moves on a 2D plane, but to interact with anything, you need to move the cursor over it to find out if it’s interactive. That cursor is touchy, by the way. I found it frustrating when I wound up just swiping it back and forth, trying to get it to land on the laundry basket or whatever. The PS1 and PC versions incorporated mouse control, but LRG didn’t include it, even on the PC version of Rewind. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it is a weird omission.

There isn’t that much depth to interactions. The Barrows’ house is very sparse, and a lot of rooms only have things that you can examine in them without them actually being of any use. There are only a handful of carriable items in total, meaning a lot of what you can do in the game doesn’t have much purpose. Like, if this was purely a point-and-click adventure, it would be a really bad one.

Thankfully, Clock Tower isn’t purely a point-and-click adventure. Another big part of it is avoiding the Scissorman. He shows up from time to time, accompanied by menacing music and the ceaseless “snip snip” of his sheers. Sometimes, he’ll have a unique entrance, like busting through a skylight or leaping out of a closet. Other times, he’ll just wander into view, and you need to haul ass.

Jennifer has a sort of stamina/health/fear meter, which depletes as she runs. With the push of a button, she’ll collapse to the floor to catch her breath. It’s important to give her breathers because if the Scissorman corners her, you have the chance to overpower him, push him down, and run past.

YOU SHOULDN’T RUN WITH SCISSORS

You need to find a safe space to hide, and those are sparse. I knew of one reliable, central spot that I’d run to each time Captain Snips would saunter in. That’s probably the worst part of the game. Every time the guy would appear, I’d have to stop what I was doing and go back to that one spot to hide for a moment before going back about my business.

What a gameplay loop. Snoop around, hide, repeat. And snooping around is really slow, which I could dig if I didn’t feel like I was running down the clock until Scissorman makes another appearance.

To its credit – and certainly where the game does succeed – the atmosphere is impeccable. Most of the time, you search in complete silence with nothing but the sound of Jennifer’s footsteps breaking the quiet. Occasionally, you can hear noises from other rooms to keep you on edge. I don’t think they ever relate to the Scissorman, but that might be my video game literacy spoiling a scare for me.

Some of the rooms are just inexplicably creepy. There’s one that’s just full of mannequins, and I don’t think it’s ever explained why. There are a few seemingly random scares scattered about, like sometimes when you examine something, it will zoom in on a gruesome scene and play the screeching violins from Psycho. Sort of jump-scare-like, but often more subdued. Say what you will about the value of such scares, but having them shout through the silence when you don’t expect it is enough to keep you on edge.

DESPITE ALL MY RAGE

The plot itself is so minimalistic. There’s very little depth, which, in some ways, actually helps it. The antagonists don’t really seem to have a whole lot of motivation, but it’s clear that a lot happened prior to the events of the game. Some of it is spelled out, but a lot of it is left to the imagination.

The fact that you never fully know what’s going on adds to the feeling that Jennifer is a helpless victim. You can’t reason with senseless cruelty; you can only fight or run, and Jennifer can’t really fight. Not knowing what is going on and not really having much opportunity to find out adds to the feeling that you’re not really in control; you’re just another rat in a cage.

There is a slew of endings. Eight, if I’m counting right. A lot of them are just variations of others. Usually, the path to the ending is different enough to make up for the lack of variety. However, the criteria for each ending are often very arbitrary. It’s not just judging you based on how thorough you are at stuffing your pockets and digging through drawers. Instead, it’s often whether or not you react to something it throws at you and where you go first. To see all of them, you’ll probably want a guide, since trial and error doesn’t begin to describe the process required to unravel things.

RELATING CLOCK TOWER TO STEEL BATTALION

The Limited Run Games version is, uh… I’m always grateful when a company goes to the effort of doing a late localization of a niche title, because they’re not going to get rich off of it. That said, this one could have been better. Beyond the issues with the lack of an analogue cursor, there just isn’t much that makes it an “enhanced” port. There are some decent extras, like an animated intro and some “motion comics,” but the quality of life stuff is mostly what you’d expect from a modern emulated re-release. I guess the best way to put it is that they don’t exactly elevate the experience but don’t hamper it either.

I’m not sure that games like Fatal Frame would have really happened without Clock Tower. It’s hard to say, because it’s not like horror games would just stop progressing if you took one out of the timeline, but video games were so often about player empowerment back then. So, without Clock Tower taking the slow approach, would other developers have taken the chance? I can’t say. I’m not a time traveller… yet. More likely, Steel Battalion wouldn’t have happened if Hifumi Kouno didn’t find a hit here. Who’s going to trust the F1 Pole Position 2 guy when he says he wants to make a high-concept mech game built around an arousingly large controller?

Clock Tower is one of those games where I’m not sure I really liked it much, but I’m glad I played it. I’m not even talking from a historical perspective. Yeah, it’s an important game, but it’s also a very unique one. An SNES game with such a dark presentation and such heavy atmosphere isn’t all that common, and Clock Tower does an impressive job of it. I just wish it was less of a chore to play.  

6/10

This review was conducted on a Nintendo Switch using a digital version of the game. It was paid for by the author.