Clock Tower Rewind Review

12 years ago I wrote a piece on the original Clock Tower in what was only the 4^th post ever on this blog, where I called it the scariest game ever made.  In a way, that makes Clock Tower kind of special to me.  Since that post I’ve played several different kinds of horror games, from the David Lynch-like Harvester to the competitive horror of Dead by Daylight and the surreal maze chase scares of Dark Deception, so I have a much broader perspective on the genre than I did back then.  I also have a confession to make that affected my view on the game: at the time of that post my fear of Clock Tower was based on my viewing of someone else playing it.  I hadn’t played it myself.  I couldn’t.

Clock Tower was released for the Super Nintendo/Super Famicom in 1995, but wasn’t released in English, which I would normally question, but in this case it makes sense.  The game heavily features a pentagram and ambiguously satanic rituals at a time when Nintendo was very averse to religious symbolism in games on their consoles.  It also had some violence.  There wasn’t much in the way of blood and gore, but this was also a time when Nintendo got up in arms about the bloodless cheese fest that was Night Trap.  I’m not even sure how Clock Tower got a Japanese release, to be honest.

Nintendo got more lax as the years went on, but even Binding of Isaac over a decade later was initially rejected for Nintendo consoles because of its religious themes.  It’s funny how now they publish the Bayonetta games and a remaster of Night Trap is available on their console.

The original Clock Tower would be rescued from Nintendo’s nanny console and got a new version on the PS1 in 1997, shortly after its direct sequel.  The PS1 version added new content and changed some of the visual and audio effects for the worse, in my opinion.

You would think now that Clock Tower was on a system that allowed for more freedom of violence and religious symbolism that it was the perfect time for an English release, but no!  They translated the sequel instead, advertised the sequel like it was the first game and skipped the actual first game entirely!

This was such a baffling move!  Clock Tower 2, as it’s known in Japan, is so obviously a sequel!  It follows the plot points of the original game, directly references the events of the original game and one of the big twists only makes sense if you played the original game!

Sure, Persona 2 did the same thing, skipping the first of its duology, Innocent Sin, and only translating the second, Eternal Punishment, but at least in Persona 2: Eternal Punishment the ambiguity of previous events was part of the plot and in the context of the characters in the game it was a mystery to be solved that the player could follow along with.  Clock Tower 2 expects the players to know the original!  The first game was right there on the same system!

The Clock Tower games would consistently be released in English since the second game, but there was never an English release of the original.  It fell on the fans to make Clock Tower available to play for English speakers with English translated ROM hacks and bootleg SNES reproduction cartridges.  The illegal way was the only way to play, but even though they worked, some of these fan translated versions had the occasiona glitch, especially for the PS1 version, from what I’ve read.  They weren’t the most ideal way to play.

Now with Clock Tower Rewind, we finally have an official English release of the original Clock Tower.  We can finally play it for real and it only took

30

YEARS!

Well, 29, but who’s counting.

Clock Tower Rewind has 2 modes: the original “Classic” mode and the revamped “Rewind” mode.  For the sake of comparison and because I’ve been waiting for this SNES game for decades, I started with the original to experience what I’ve been (partially) missing out on.

In Clock Tower you play as Jennifer Simpson, an orphan who is adopted along with 3 other girls by a man named Simon Barrows to live in his big fancy mansion.  Mr. Barrows isn’t initially seen, however, as the girls are guided to the Mansion by their teacher Mary.  Get used to characters being hidden because it’s not long before everyone in the mansion goes missing and Jennifer finds her and her friends hunted by a deformed little boy with giant scissors.  The ultimate goal is to survive and find a way out.  I guess she could go out the front door, but there are probably zombified dogs out there.

I find the best way to describe Clock Tower’s gameplay is that it’s a point and click adventure game that sometimes switches to being a run-and-hide horror game.  When you’re in the clear you spend the game exploring the mansion, picking up items and figuring out what goes where, but every once in a while Scissorman will pop up to chase you, sometimes in the most unexpected places.  At that point priority one is to lose him, either by finding a hiding spot until he goes away or by getting him off your trail, like making him drop down a hole or getting something to chase him out of the room.

It’s pretty ingenious how Clock Tower is able to keep players slightly alert even when they aren’t in immediate danger.  As you’re doing the adventure game part it’s important to take notes of possible hiding spots and traps so you know where to go when Scissorman shows up and to add to the tension the locations of several rooms are randomized so you won’t know where everything is just because you played the game before.

Also randomized is where and when Scissorman will show up.  There are pre-set spots where he can get the jump on you, but even if you know all those spots going in you still don’t know if that’s where he’ll appear.  There are spots he can hide that the randomizer might instead put a cat in just to scare you or a key item you need, which means even if he might be there you have to look anyway.

Once the chase starts, Scissorman isn’t very fast.  He doesn’t run with those scissors because he’s a good boy who knows his safety.  You can easily outrun him, but rather than make him less threatening it gives him more of a presence because even when you don’t see him, you know he’s coming and anticipation is its own fear.  He’s like a ticking timer to death you can only extend with distance and he can only guarantee catching you if you take a wrong turn so he can corner you, really highlighting how important it is to be thinking ahead.  If you have enough stamina (this game’s health), you can fend him off once to get out of a sticky situation and run past him, but after that it’s “Dead End.”

Running and hiding while collecting items is commonplace now in games like Outlast or the Friday the 13^th game, but this predates all of those and the core gameplay principles held up as well back then as they do now, as do the graphics.  The dark colors, use of silence with sound effects and creepy music are perfectly implemented and I think if it were released today as a retro-style indie title it would be at least a modest hit.

Clock Tower succeeds in telling a good horror story to round out the experience.  The 90s were when storytelling in gaming really started ramping up, after all.  As you explore the mansion you find clues about the Barrows family and the main plot itself has buildups and payoffs for memorable scenes accentuated by consistently creepy musical scores and gloomy 16-bit close-up shots.  The story can play out in so many ways that there are 8 different endings so it’s a good thing the randomization keeps things fresh.

As effective a horror game as it is, the original Clock Tower is held back by some elements that come with being a game from 1995, with the limitations of the technology and the early days of game design.  Surprisingly there’s no 90s adventure game logic that was so pervasive at the time, but there is some 90s adventure game pickiness.  Some of the smaller objects to interact with can be obnoxiously difficult to notice if you aren’t eagle-eyed, but it’s at least softened by the cursor, which locks on to interactable objects and changes into a square so there’s minimal finicking.  Other times you know what to do, but the game demands that you first examine something else.  If I see a hole and a wood plank right next to it, of course I want to put the plank over the hole, but the game doesn’t let me do that unless I manually examine the hole first, as if it doesn’t exist until Jennifer makes a comment about it.

Just an ordinary plank of wood.

A strange quirk of the game is how Scissorman gets around.  He must have watched a lot of Friday the 13^th movies with photographic reflexes because he can teleport while offscreen both when chasing you and when he drops the chase.  He HAS to do this offscreen teleporting too because he can’t go up stairs and can’t go into certain rooms, which seems to be a limitation of his animations more than a conscious design choice.

It’s a quirk I think is interesting, but not exactly a flaw.  A flaw for some might be how slow the pace is.  Clock Tower is an atmospheric horror game that really wants the player to take in and process what’s around them, but that can also translate into being slow and boring.  It takes place on a 2D plane and you can run in either direction, which you’ll want to do because of the size of the mansion, but doing so drains your stamina, which becomes a huge problem if you happen to run into Scissorman because if you run from him with low enough stamina, you’ll trip.

You can run as much as you want outside of being chased and won’t die, which helps when traveling through the long hallways where Scissorman can’t jump you, but if you want to be on the safe side before entering a room you have to stop Jennifer and wait for her to recover her stamina, which can seriously take 90 seconds.

That’s the worst of the slow pacing for me, but the pacing slows down further when you aren’t in hallways.  Jennifer seems to ONLY run on the 2D plane.  Anytime you need to interact with something behind that plane, she’ll casually walk to it, interact and then if it’s not a door she’ll casually walk back to the front plane.  She even does this when Scissorman is right in the room!  The same thing happens with the stairs.

It’s comical to me how often I hear people complain about the stairs in this game.  It’s like the Barrows’ stairs are from the same family of villains as Classicvania stairs.

“I guess I’ll go up these stairs.  Even though it’s going to take my entire goddamn life.”- Jontron

“Staircases are the absolute worst in this game.  It takes an agonizingly long time to get up one AND down one too.”- Nitro Rad

“Someone needs to, just for us, make a mod for this game that includes like a pixel art overhaul and just replace these staircases with an up and down escalator.”-Liam Hemsworth

I guess playing Sea of Thieves has made me more patient with slow mobility than other people because I don’t mind the stairs, but I have to admit it’s pretty awkward when Jennifer runs from Scissorman, but then immediately switches gears and casually walks up the stairs like she’s not in a hurry.

The slow pacing is the hardest sell for the original Clock Tower, but I am pleased to report that in the new Rewind Mode, those issues are almost completely gone.  In Rewind Mode, Jennifer can run up to doors in the background, she recovers her stamina at a WAY faster rate, uses it up at a slower rate, dialogue can be sped up with a button press (not that there’s a lot of it anyway) and

YOU CAN RUN UP STAIRS!

Rewind Mode implements unused animation in the original game’s files to allow for said stair running, something it does all over the place.  If you look at the original game’s page on the Cutting Room Floor website, a ton of what it lists has been programmed into the game.  That means a handful of previously static objects in the game can now be used as weapons against Scissorman, adding even more content to the chases.  Rewind mode also adds all the content from the PS1 port of the game.  This means a new room, a couple new obstacles and more close-up shots.  The biggest changes for Rewind Mode, however, were made to Scissorman.

In Rewind Mode, Scissorman can now appear in hallways.  This makes a huge difference because he is no longer bound to appearing in pre-set spots.  The quiet hallways in the original were already unnerving with their dead silence, but I at least knew I wasn’t going to get jumped.  Now they’re unnerving AND I might get jumped.  Scissorman can suddenly walk in from offscreen, jump down from the second floor or simply already be in a room you enter to start a chase.  Nowhere is safe and the fear of anticipation is omnipresent.  Even better (or worse?) is that by once again utilizing unused animations in the game’s code, Scissorman can now follow you into any room, he can go up stairs and the game tracks where he is more realistically, meaning there’s next to no more offscreen teleporting.  Now there’s some offscreen super speed instead.

There is a new rewind feature for both classic and rewind mode that can help in those inevitable chases, but in a wise move it’s not as much of a bailing out of a bad situation feature as the rewind feature in U2’s Castlevania collections or the Mega Man collections.  You can only rewind for up to 10 seconds and you only have one button for it.  Even in rewind mode the pace isn’t exactly fast so 10 seconds isn’t a lot and only one button means you can’t be precise with it.  That means it’s just useful enough for backpedaling to save time, but you can’t bend reality to your will for the best outcome like it’s the Izanagi and make the game too easy.  Honestly I found it most useful for getting out of an animation I accidentally locked Jennifer into.  It feels more like another tool for the game instead of a cheat and the VHS rewind visual is a nice touch.

Clock Tower stands the test of time as a horror game.  I don’t know if I would still consider it the scariest game ever made like I did all those years ago, but thanks to the new unnerving close-ups and enhancements brought upon by Rewind Mode, it’s probably in the top 5.  It’s definitely a game the horror game streamers will get a lot out of.  It’s got everything from jump scares to disturbing imagery to surprising turns in the plot that are probably fun to watch reactions to.  There was already some great ones with the unofficial translations, but now that it’s an officially released product there will probably be more and I’m there for it.

It’s a good thing the main game is so well done because the extras are very basic.  There’s the completely untranslated manuals, booklets for the PS1 release, the motion comics based on those booklets, a music player, a long interview with the original creator, Hifumi Kono, and a tech demo.  Apparently this tech demo for the original Clock Tower let players (or investors?) interact with 3 of the rooms from the game to show off how good they could make their interactive environments look.  It’s all in Japanese and there isn’t much to do in it, but it’s a curious bit of history.

The motion comics are the best extra the game has, even if there are only 8 and they're short.  They’re unlocked by viewing the scenes they’re based on in-game as nice little unlockables for even more replay value.  The moody artwork was already top-tier to begin with and the addition of competent voice acting and musical scoring enhances them further.

Apart from the motion comics, what’s included outside the main game is ok, but I feel like the quantity is inadequate when compared to other modern re-releases of old games.  The few 3D cutscenes from the PS1 version are nowhere to be found, for instance.  I know they’re ugly PS1 graphics, but would it have been too much effort to put them in with the other extras taken from that version?  The PSP ports of the PS1 Persona games all have their original openings.  There is no high definition artwork or concept art to look at either, but with those it’s possible none of it could be recovered.

There’s a save feature for the main game, but there’s no quick loading feature with a dedicated “load” button on the menu like other retro re-releases and while those same re-releases offer a variety of screen filters and scanlines, Clock Tower Rewind only has one filter.

Unlike the developer interviews in the Samurai Shodown Neogeo Collection, there’s no way to control the videos of the interview with Hifumi Kono.  The whole thing is split up into parts that are just a few minutes each so you don’t need to re-watch too much if you accidentally press the skip button, but I thought video controls were standard for this kind of thing by now.  An interview with more than one person would not have gone amiss either, even if it was just with the composer of the new opening song or something.

I do still think there’s enough in the package to be worth 20 dollars.  The main feature, Rewind Mode, is probably the best version of Clock Tower that’s possible without making any drastic visual upgrades and the effort put into it is impressive, but even if it wasn’t impressive, this still has the original Clock Tower and that it’s now available at all is what’s really important.  It’s still a great game every horror fan should play.  That said, I recommend against getting it on PC.

It does have mouse support on PC, something that the original SNES version didn’t implement, but Clock Tower Rewind on PC follows an aggravating trend in PC games nowadays where everything, no matter how small, how basic or how old, needs to take up tons of space and require a top of the line computer.  The PC version of this game is over 7 gigabytes!

It could’ve fooled me that this thing is 7 gigs.  The only PC settings are a few resolutions and windowed or fullscreen mode.  Even still, my PC can run Mortal Kombat 11 and the remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 3 with no issues yet the videos in the extras of Clock Tower Rewind all have some audio stuttering and desynching.  The actual game runs fine, but this SNES game makes my beefy desktop computer run full force at all times, which doesn’t help the pervasive silence the game’s audio utilizes.  When I try to run it on my weaker laptop it just crashes on startup.  I should not need a hardcore computer to run a Super Nintendo game and some videos!  If this gets a low spec mode patched in and fixes the audio issues, I’ll change my tune, but as it is now it’s ridiculous.

Meanwhile on the Switch it takes up a quarter as much space, looks just as good and runs all the videos with no issue.  The only thing the Switch version misses out on is the trophies/achievements.  The PC version of the wonderful core experience will work if you’re a PC gamer with a powerful setup, but the poor optimization hurts the overall package and because of that I have to dock a full point from it.  I give the PC version of Clock Tower Rewind a 7 out of 10 and the Switch version an 8 out of 10.

Now that I’ve finally gotten to play this game, I guess I should play its sequel.  I SHOULD, but I have to settle for staring at it from behind a glass case where it remains unplayed and unloved because scumbag scalpers think a rational human being will pay 150 dollars for a 1996 PS1 game.