As a
sub-genre of horror movies, the slasher has proven reliable for providing
audiences with cheap scares and z-list actors with work. The formula was
established in the Sixties with the likes of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho
and the Italian ‘Yellow’ films, before really hitting its stride in the
late Seventies and the Eighties with films like Friday the 13th and A
Nightmare on Elm Street. Nowadays, the slasher is largely the preserve of
the hack director seeking to replenish the cocaine bucket as cheaply as
possible. The slasher should translate well into a video game format - it’s a
genre that wears its murder-stiffy on its sleeve after all - but for whatever
reason there’s rarely been a decent slasher game. There's Obscure and Until Dawn, sure, but slasher games are mostly like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre game that was basically an obstacle course
in which you play as a man with a twizzling nob sticking out of his chest.
Clock Tower, released for the
Playstation by Human Entertainment, was
one of the first attempts to properly capture the structure and feel of the
slasher; thrusting you into the shoes a teenage girl whose only method of
self-defence is to flee and scream. Like how most of my dates end really. For
its time Clock Tower was revolutionary; whilst horror games were settling down
into the gritty struggle of survival horror, Clock Tower sought to do away with
the cocktail of weapons and healing items and replace them with…nothing. A
horror game which locks off all the player’s defensive options may seem quaint
nowadays - what with Amnesia, Outlast, Penumbra, and the whole cottage industry that’s sprung up around
overacting Youtubers like PewDiePie. But
back in 1996 Clock Tower made a game about a man coming out of the closet genuinely
chilling – like how gay lawyers must have felt when watching Philadelphia.
Video game naming conventions being as nebulous as they are, Clock Tower is
actually the second game in the
series. It’s the sequel to Clock Tower
(1995), later renamed First Fear,
and this game directly follows its story. Which is problematic as the 1995 game
was exclusive to the SNES and never released outside of Japan. But I quite
liked the effect this disparity caused as principal
antagonist Scissorman already has a mythos built up around him. It captures the
sentiment of a good horror sequel without being inaccessible the player. The
setup is thus: 12 months after the events of First Fear, traumatised sole
survivor Jennifer is in therapy trying to recover when another series of grisly
murders breakout – prompting Jennifer (or secondary protagonist Helen) to seek
the truth behind this mystery. Not a masterpiece of storytelling by any means,
but what do you expect from a slasher setting? The first one’s always teenagers
fucking and getting killed, and the sequel’s usually the hardened survivor
trying to finish the job.
The game handles fairly uniquely, combining point-and-click adventure game
exploration and puzzle solving with tense survival horror. As is the case with I Have No Mouth, the player navigates
their way through the world by clicking on the screen to either move in that
direction or interact with a particular object. But whereas I Have No Mouth, or
say Broken Sword and Monkey Island, featured mostly static
screens where the player is free to spend as long as they want trying to solve
a particular puzzle, Clock Tower added the looming spectre of the Scissorman
into the mix. He shows up at scripted (and occasionally, random) intervals,
forcing the player to flee or try and fight him off. But as a point-and-click
game on a console without analogue sticks inevitably moves like a cripple
trying to walk up the down escalator, the escape scenes are even more tense
than intended. Yes, Scissorman stalks towards the player like he shat himself
two weeks ago and still hasn’t gotten around to changing his pants; but it’s
still initially tense when you’re trying to figure where you’re supposed to
hide, or what you’re supposed to use to fight off Scissorman. Even if some of
this impact is lost during that one time you escape by throwing a blanket over
your pursuer. This really happens – it’s like an episode of Scooby-Doo.
Clock Tower trades in the Dario Argento-esque
dreamy atmosphere of the original for an out and out recreation of the slasher.
A warts-and-all recreation that sacrifices the supernatural atmosphere (replete
with murderous mirrors) found in First Fear in favour of cheesy dialogue, even
cheesier scares, and a disposable cast of characters. It’s a cheesy slasher
filtered through a Japanese perspective on Western horror. The final third of the
game takes place in a castle for fuck’s sake. Looking back on Clock Tower it’s
difficult to see exactly what was scary about the game. As a villain Scissorman
really hasn’t aged well, he looks like he’s been kicked by a horse and he’s definitely
not ‘all-there’. That infamous scene with him spazzing out in rocking chair is
meant to be on par with Psycho, but Scissorman instead comes across closer to Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.
However, Clock Tower does still offer a unique and eerie gaming experience. It’s
the lack of any sound other than ambient white noise in most scenes which helps.
Noise is only really used for the chase sequences or to otherwise scare the
player. I still feel that Clock Tower does ‘run-away-and-hide’ horror better
than, say, Outlast. Because in Outlast it’s haunted house attraction style catharsis, and you
can run away in any direction giggling. At least in Clock Tower you have to be
more proactive and tactical in order to escape. If Clock Tower was your house
and it was being burnt to the ground, it’d make you find all the crest pieces before you could
escape.
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