You Cannot Hide
From Scissorman
MICHAEL CRISMAN
Sadistic adventure
set in a creepy
mansion with a
monster named
Scissorman after
you. Yes, please.
Part point-and-click adventure game,
part pants-shitting induction device, the
original Clock Tower is one of the most
sadistic games programmed for the
Super Nintendo. So of course it was
only available in Japan.
All that
changed when a group of ROM hackers
and translators decided there was no
reason the English-speaking world
should be spared the terror of spastic
colons.
Clock Tower is one of those easy to
learn, hard to win games, not because
the
puzzles are overly difficult but
because
of
the
game's
own
semi-random nature. The scares in this
game are entirely of the jump variety,
with the heroine stalked through the
corridors and rooms of the creepy
Barrows
Mansion
by
Tyrion
Lannister's homicidal step-nephew,
Scissorman.
Much like Game of
Thrones, everybody in the game is
fated to cruel, callous and seemingly
random deaths. Which of the game's
nine different endings you get often
depends on who you've seen (or not
seen) get killed by the time you reach
the climax.
Making progress more difficult is
Scissorman's adoption of the horror
movie trope where the killer can
literally be anywhere and appear at any
time. Though it may frustrate your
inner temporal
physicist, it's
entirely possible to escape from him by
running up the stairs and into a
bedroom, only to have him pop
out from under the bed and
resume the chase. Being a
simple Norwegian
orphan
unskilled in any form of
combat, your options for
defending
yourself
are
16
extremely limited, and it's easy to
exhaust your stamina in a matter of
seconds trying to fight him off.
The best part about Clock Tower is how
effectively it manages to scare the
ever-loving crap out of the player using
the 16-bit resources of the Super
Nintendo to their full potential.
Capcom uses the jump scare effectively
in Resident Evil, and Konami is the
master of psychologically getting under
your skin with Silent Hill, but the
Clock Tower franchise leaves them
both hiding under the bed. Even when
you know what you need to do and
where you need to go in order to escape
the mansion, you are left with that
dreaded feeling of neither wanting to
press ahead or turn back, because
neither option guarantees your safety.
If you've played your way through
Outlast this generation and want to
experience its spiritual ancestor, grab
your favorite Super Nintendo emulator,
the Clock Tower translation patch, and
see where it all started. Oh, and
seriously: use the bathroom before
playing. There's nothing macho about
skid marks.