It's hard to look back so many years, and criticize a game for the way it plays. Clock Tower was made for the PlayStation in 1997, and sitting comfortably in 2011, spoiled by games that control so much better, I've thought a great deal about how poorly I would've thought the game would play back as my 1997 self. It's a problem I wrestled with the entire time I tried to think of how to review the game.
Clock Tower is a survival horror game in which you play as either Helen Maxwell or Jennifer Simpson. Haunted by their memories of the villain known as "Scissorman" (aptly named, as he carries around a giant pair of scissors) from the previous game on the Super Nintendo, they try to get back to their lives and continue their investigation into who Scissorman is and where he comes from. Shortly after you begin the game, you find yourself in the role of one of the two female characters all alone at night.
And that's when the fun begins.
When the chase begins, you will be forced to throw Scissorman off the trail before you can continue the game in each Scenario, each one of which usually consists of finding a key piece of intel about Scissorman and then finding a way to escape the building you're trapped in. Considering the game's early survival horror roots, it's impossible to fight Scissorman off directly. Throughout the building you're in, there are set amounts of hiding spaces you can use to try and throw Scissorman off, or pieces of the environment, such as coat racks, ladders, pots and pans, etc, that can be used only once to fight back against Scissorman and escape.
The way the game keeps on you edge and manages to scare you is by making Scissorman act as a cheesy B-movie horror villain. The guy can be everywhere. The lockers down the hall you need to search? There's a chance Scissorman could abruptly burst out and engage a chase scene. The trap door in the kitchen? Walk by it, or try to enter it, and Scissorman could jump out at you. Searching boxes in a storage room? Scissorman may break out from behind a box and try to kill you.
Even while being chased, Scissorman can potentially pop out of nowhere.
Imagine this: You've just encountered Scissorman by him jumping out from the top of a staircase that you just walked down. Where to hide? You run to the kitchen with the sound of scissors clanging behind you and try to open up the trap door to hide under the floor. But then SCISSORMAN JUMPS OUT OF THERE EVEN THOUGH HE WAS JUST BEHIND YOU.
The way the game functions in regard to Scissorman encounters is both cheesy, and scary, and it's key to the Clock Tower experience. Though the game is essentially point-and-click adventure at it's core, and though you will spend alot of time looking for items and solving the infamous this-door-requires-a-specific-key-but-I-still-need-to-find-the-key puzzles, the bulk of the gameplay will be taken up with you being chased by the sound of scissors.
But that's where the bad parts start. Flaws in the gameplay that, even in 1997, I don't think I could accept. As I said, the controls of the game function as a point-and-click adventure: You move the cursor with the D-pad and it changes shape as it finds
objects you can interact with. The point-and-click nature of the
controls isn't really something I have a serious problem with, and
really, for what it is, it actually functions quite nicely. The problems
arise when trying to do things quickly, or when using items.
The character runs when you double click.. in theory. In practice, it's incredibly hard to actually keep the girls running at a regular pace because of the constant clicking required as the screen keeps panning with your movement. The way your character uses items is totally random, as they will sometimes use the required item automatically, and other times, require you to move your cursor to the top of the screen, click the item, and then drag it down to the object and interact with it manually, which is a tedious process.
Oh, and the characters I keep referencing? You have the choice to play as either Helen or Jennifer, but good luck figuring out how to select the character you want to play.
Immediately (and I do mean immediately) into playing Clock Tower you will realize one of the keys to progress in the game is to obsessively click on things multiple times to see if new dialogue pops up. You need to adopt this strategy right away for the game to let you out of the first rooms. The way the character you play as is selected, though, is by the number of times you talk to a specific character in the beginning area. If you talk to the NPC one time, you will play as Helen, but if you talk to him more than once, you will play as Jennifer. In a game that forces the habit of obsessive clicking onto you right away, you may never realize the mechanic that chooses the playable character unless you read a guide prior to playing.
And speaking of questionable mechanics, the way the game plays out and determines endings is downright boggling. There are multiple endings for each character, which really does make the replay value quite good, but you can accomplish things in the game in such a clearly out of order fashion. In one of my plays, I would find a character trapped, and he would ask me about a character I previously had found dead. My character (Helen, if you're curious) would say she hadn't found the person yet. I recognize this game is old, but that doesn't excuse the games events being as bizarrely out of order as newly shuffled deck of cards.
The way endings are calculated, as I mentioned, isn't immune to being as completely unrecognizable as the way the playable character is selected. Depending on the items you pick up, and what order you pick them up, as well as the characters you meet, and what order you meet them in, you could end up with an ending in which you kill the real Scissorman once and for all, or an ending where one of the side characters murders you and is secretly Scissorman himself.
The problem isn't the endings themselves, it's the fact that the way these endings are calculated make it impossible to tell how you just got the ending you did. All the mechanics are so completely invisible that the game may as well just play out totally randomly without any input from you at all.
But all that aside, the game is actually scary, does a very good job of replicating a cliche horror movie atmosphere, is really easy to pick up and play considering it's short length and good replay value, and is probably one of the best Survival Horror games to be made for fans of the genre. Some of the funk with the controls and the way the game is made are certainly inexcusable, no matter the age, but a certain leeway and open-mindedness is needed, no doubt, when playing this game in a much more modern video game era.
And I can guarantee you will never get the clinging sound of the scissors as you're being chased out of your head.
