An Odd Fantastical Adventure Posing as Survival Horror

Clock Tower 3 is a weird little game.  It poises itself as a survival horror game but is mostly an adventure title with light action elements.  While it is not terribly frightful, its focus on story makes this 6 hour game a nice little diversion.  As Alyssa Hamilton, an English school girl, you'll try to get to the bottom of a family mystery and the disappearance of your mother.  This will lead Alyssa back in time and space to places such as bombed out World War II London and other bizarre and mostly unexplained locales.  The story is neat (and the developer's efforts should be lightly commended) but trying to understand Clock Tower 3's plot in its fullest is like trying to decipher all of the plot holes in the Highlander franchise.  Just go with it and you'll find an enjoyable yet short ride with wonderfully realized CG cutscenes.

Gameplay consists mostly of fleeing from your attacker to solve environmental puzzles.  You'll dodge their axe swings and hammer blows by fleeing through alleys and graveyards, occasionally flinging holy water (your only immediate weapon) to stun them.  Unlike most survival horror games you've got direct control over Alyssa in a fashion similar to God of War so you won't have to worry about "driving" your character around the environments.  You'll have a few recovery and utility items such as a ring of brief invisibility.  If the stalkers hit you too many times and send you into a state of panic you'll find you're controlling a girl fleeing in a drunken stupor tilting to and fro.  But you can apply a "lavender water" before the panic sets in or during to recover more quickly.  There are a few hiding places scattered about each stage and a few " environmental kill (well, stun)" spots also that allow you to trigger a cutscene where Alyssa shoves a book case on top of or throws a hot fire poker at the stalker.  These hiding and evade spots are ultimately under-utilized and just make a neat minor addition.  This means you won't be frustrated by waiting-in-hiding continuously as in a game like Siren: Blood Curse.  The game's puzzles are mostly key hunts but some require some typically strange logic such as lighting a lantern to cross a dark catwalk in order to retrieve a pair of wire cutters.  Alyssa never knew they were up there and there was no reason for the player to know but the game needs to connect these bizarre dots.

While nothing is exactly broken in Clock Tower 3 everything is not peachy. Its persistent "evade music" is repetitive and annoying.  Hammerman and Corroder are fine, but other stalkers are just too weirdly Japanese and feel really out of place.  At one point a stalker is torturing Alyssa's friend with a Pit and Pendulum-styled swinging blade that is actually pretty menacing save for the fact that it has spinning colorful toy pinwheels attached to it.  Clock Tower 3 really loses steam in its last chapter, forcing you wander slowly through large environments and collect items in a specific order before it allows you to proceed.  Trust me, shimmying along three ledges to get to a window which you're supposed to go through, only to find out you can't climb through because you forgot to read that memo on the otherside of the level is infuriating.  Its either reset or shimmy on back.  The final boss battle is probably the game's most difficult encounter but is ultimately annoying as you spend twenty minutes whittling its health down.

If you're a fan of weird character action games or supposed survival horror titles I'd recommend playing Clock Tower 3 for the first half.  You'll be chased by the best stalkers in these earliest portions and the game doesn't escape off into weird surreal directions quite yet.  At 6 hours total, you might as well finish the game but its gameplay mechanics, while serviceable, will begin to wear thin and the stages become repetitive.  Running from your attackers could have been a neat direction for survival horror games to explore even more but ultimately it ended with Haunting Ground and Siren: Blood Curse.  Clock Tower 3 makes for some interesting gaming simply because it is a fairly unique experience, providing something new in the context of its gaming brethren's formula.