Okay, so, I know I said we’d take a bit of a break from horror after Spooky Month but I just have to talk a bit about this game as it was honestly quite the surprise for me! For a bit of context, I decided to pick up Clock Tower: Rewind, which is a remaster by WayForward of the very original Clock Tower game that never got an English localization, on Halloween not really expecting too much from it. Like, I expected to enjoy it but also to still find it pretty clunky and “of its time”. I mean, it’s just a remaster of a Super Nintendo horror game with a few quality of life improvements added in. And while I do think said quality of life improvements helped me enjoy the game a bit more than I would otherwise, I was really surprised by just how good the regular game still is even nowadays! So much so that I felt I should write this quick review and share my thoughts on it.

To give a bit more context, Clock Tower: Rewind is a remaster of the very first Clock Tower game that we never got over here in the west. A lot of people would point to the PS1 Clock Tower as the first game because as far as most people knew, it was! But it’s actually a sequel to this game. While this original game isn’t completely unknown it’s still less known than the PS1 game so I was pretty surprised to hear it was getting a full on localization and remaster by WayForward! Granted, I was surprised to hear about anything related to Clock Tower but still! I have always been interested in the Clock Tower series but never really gave it a try. So when this remaster was announced I figured this would be the best way to jump into the series! And I couldn’t have been more right.

Clock Tower is basically a point and click adventure horror game! You play as Jennifer, an orphan recently adopted by Mister Barrows along with your three friends Laura, Anne, and Lotte. All four of you are brought to his mansion way far out in the woods by Miss Mary. This is about all the context you’re given to start things off! You have a short intro of all the girls following Ms. Mary to the mansion and brought into one of the main rooms of the house before Ms. Mary goes off to find Mr. Barrows. And just like that you are playing the game! Like I said before this game is a point and click game. To control Jennifer and tell her where to go, you have to click different parts of the screen rather than just moving the analog stick or something. This is how it is for most of the Clock Tower series too. And while I was originally worried about this feeling super clunky and not being able to click certain things in time, especially since you’ll be controlling the cursor with a controller over a mouse like you would with most point and click games, the game actually controls super well! It was clearly designed with the controller in mind so it never feels too jarring to play the game this way.

After getting use to the controls and talking to your friends about how long Ms. Mary has been gone, Jennifer will volunteer to go look for her. However, the moment she leaves the main area a scream is suddenly heard! Rushing back in, Jennifer finds that all three of her friends are gone. And from here you’re free to explore around the mansion! But before you can get too far in, music will kick up as you get near a door down the hall. If you decide to check the door out, you’ll find yourself in a steamy bathroom. Checking out the shower, you’ll find Laura already dead! And more frightening than that, you’ll be face to face with the killer right after as they jump out from the bath wielding a large pair of scissors! Now, if you have ever heard anything about Clock Tower, it’s probably this guy. The infamous Scissorman!

This short guy with the scissors is who will be chasing you throughout the game and he’s become pretty iconic in the horror game scene. Like I said, if there’s one thing people have heard about the series, it’s him. While he might look a little goofy, he can also be surprisingly intimidating! Like I said, he chases you throughout the game and if he finds you your only option is to find some place to hide. You can fight back here and there with certain items in the environment, but most of the time that will only delay him and you’ll still need to run off and find a place to hide so he’ll lose the trail on you. If you checked out my post on Haunting Ground last month, I talked about how that game also had a similar system of running and hiding from your enemies rather than facing them. While that is more common now, it was still pretty original back when Haunting Ground did it, and it was especially original back when the original Clock Tower did it! As far as I can tell, Clock Tower is the start of this kind of horror, and while I’m not the biggest fan of this kind of horror, I actually really enjoy the way this game does it!

The main reason why I enjoy the hide and seek horror of this game compared to others is because it’s weaved in natural to the rest of the game. So many other games that try this sort of thing always feel like getting chased is more of a set piece, something that has to happen. It doesn’t feel natural at all. And while Clock Tower does also have these sort of moments, like when you run into Laura in the bathroom and Scissorman jumps out, they are far fewer. I felt much more panic when the Scissorman jumped out than the usual hide and seek horror game. It also helps that the game isn’t built solely around hiding from him. When you successfully hide from the Scissorman he stays off your trail for a bit. Giving you plenty of time to do more puzzle solving as you try to figure out where the rest of your friends are, what’s going on in this mansion, and how to survive.

As I was saying before, Clock Tower is very much a point and click adventure game and that goes beyond just how you control it by clicking around the screen to tell Jennifer what to do. Collecting items and using them to solve puzzles is the whole point of the game. And overall, it all felt very satisfying! I was actually rather impressed with myself that I didn’t need to look up a guide or anything with my first blind playthrough. I never felt like I had to have any insane leaps in logic to figure anything out. The only time I got frustrated is when I would figure out a solution to something but Jennifer wouldn’t do what I wanted her to do. Which sadly can happen somewhat often due to how the game wants you to solve puzzles. Here, let’s look at an example!

I want Jennifer to search that bird nest. Now, my first instinct was to click the box and have her push it over to the wall to climb up it and look through the nest. However, whenever I’d click the box, Jennifer would simply go over to it and climb over it. It got to the point where I thought I just couldn’t do anything with the nest. In reality I actually had the right solution, I just did it in the wrong order. What I was suppose to do is have Jennifer look at the nest, realize she can’t reach it, and then click the box. Doing this will have her move the box to the wall and look through the nest!

This happened more than a few times before I realized that I needed to do things in specific orders to make Jennifer do what I wanted her to. Once I figured this out, I didn’t have too much of an issue with it going forward but it can still be really annoying, and sometimes it made me think that I was doing something wrong when I actually had the solution, I just had to basically explain it to Jennifer. Like I was saying before though, I managed to get through my first playthrough without looking up a guide so it didn’t ever get so bad that I felt lost, but I can certainly imagine this getting frustrating for other people not just me. Hopefully people will also figure this out just like I did and start doing things in the correct order!

Beyond that, I suppose there’s not much else to the game! You’ll be exploring the mansion, solving puzzles to progress, and avoiding the Scissorman and that’s about it. Like I said before though, Scissorman is actually weaved into the exploring super well. While there is a chance you might just bump into him in the hallway, you’ll most likely find him while exploring around and checking certain things. That’s the scary part about Scissorman! He can pop out of just about anywhere! And while I did find that a little annoying at first, once I figured out a few hiding spots and ways to lose him, I didn’t really mind at all. It was honestly kind of fun seeing where he’d pop out of. It even made me nervous about checking certain places!

Like I always say with horror games, I’m not going to go too deep into the story in this review, but I did enjoy it! Learning about the messed up Barrows family and how it ties into Jennifer was a lot of fun and pretty creepy as well. So I’m certainly not spoiling it here!

Now if there’s one thing I feel some people might criticize this game about it’s probably its length. Clock Tower is very short. Like, if I had started playing earlier in the day rather than the evening, I’m pretty confident I could have finished it in one sitting. I think a single playthrough of this game will probably take you maybe about 3 hours, depending on if you get stuck on any puzzles. Now while that is short, even for a horror game, it’s mainly because you are meant to play through the game multiple times! The game has a bunch of different endings with a lot of differences between them. There are so many the game even has an Ending List on the main menu to help you keep track of which ones you have and haven’t done yet! And if you are thinking that it will be pretty boring playing through the same game over and over just for some different endings then I have some good news for you. Clock Tower actually features a lot of elements that change between playthroughs!

Remember how I said that if you checked the bathroom at the start of the game you’ll find Laura dead in the shower? Well you don’t actually have to check that bathroom, you can instead keep walking by! If you do, when you enter the next big room, Scissorman will come through the stained glass window in the ceiling with his scissor impaled in Anne instead!

This is far from the only change as well. Item locations will change too, even certain rooms will be in different locations which can really trip you up when you’re running to a hiding spot you think you know is there only to find a completely different room! Even one of the game’s bigger puzzles is different! I was super shocked by just how much variety there was between playthroughs! While I haven’t gotten all the endings, I have gotten plenty of them and was very pleasantly surprised by how fresh the game remained with each playthrough, certainly not something I’d expect from a game this old.

Now, I should say that a lot of these additions come from WayForward enhancing this version. I mainly bring this up since you can argue that this game might not technically be a classic if it’s only this good with the new features. But I argue it still holds up even without the new features. And it’s actually quite easy to experience this game without said features too as WayForward was nice enough to give players an option to play the original version of the game with the only change being the English translation! It’s how I figured out that quite a few things were changed for this remaster, with the biggest change being how stamina works. Jennifer’s stamina is basically her health and you’ll be able to tell how much stamina she has left by looking at her portrait in the bottom left hand corner of the screen. A blue background means things are fine, yellow means Jennifer is a little tired and as the portrait gets darker from there, until it gets red, it’ll show how tired she is. When she’s really tired, the Scissorman will obviously be able to catch her more easily and she won’t be able to fight back against him. You loose stamina by running and fighting back against Scissorman. You’ll be running a lot as well since Jennifer’s usual walking speed is pretty slow! Thankfully, regaining your stamina is a simple as waiting a moment and allowing Jennifer to sit down. Which is good since it would be really annoying if you had like limited items that recovered your stamina given how much running you’ll be doing. Now that’s how it works in the remastered version, in the original running uses a ton of stamina and doing basic things like moving boxes and what not for puzzles also uses stamina too. Recovering your stamina takes a lot longer and it’s generally just more annoying. You could argue it makes the game harder though! For me, I just find it annoying and am very thankful that WayForward changed this. But again, the option to play the original version of the game is still there! And I hope more remasters do this since this is a great way to provide a better, updated experience while also letting people experience the original thing as well.

Regardless of which version of Clock Tower: Rewind you decide to play, I think you’ll have a good time with it! I’m still amazed by just how well it held up even if I feel the modern changes do help the game a lot. Here’s hoping this game can help get more attention back on the series as a whole too. I’m not sure how many die hard Clock Tower fans there are out there, but they have been starving for a new game for a very very long time now… So here’s hoping Clock Tower: Rewind can help with that! Because I certainly know I wouldn’t mind playing more games just like this in the future.

But those are just my thoughts! What are some of yours? Have you heard of Clock Tower before? After reading this post, are you thinking about checking out this remaster? I’d love to hear your thoughts so don’t be shy!

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