WARNING: MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR CLOCK TOWER II (1996)
Tonight, Dos Eat Dog reviews Clock Tower II (1996) for the PlayStation, also known as Clock Tower outside of Japan. For the purposes of this review, we will be referring to the game as Clock Tower II, to differentiate it from it's SNES counterpart, also called Clock Tower. The idea of a sequel to the first Clock Tower is a enticing one, but Clock Tower II never quite delivers on the amazingly atmospheric and creepy legacy of the first game. It pays tribute to Clock Tower in the form of recurring characters and items, but a lot of the essence of what made the first game special is missing. Beyond that, it's a survival horror game for the PlayStation, the console that spawned Resident Evil and Silent Hill, two juggernauts of the genre; and this game feels especially disappointing considering the acclaim that those two franchises enjoy to this day.
The Demon Idol, as it appears in Clock Tower II (above) and Clock Tower (below)
I came across this while investigating the statue`s bosom... A happy coincidence
The Dead End "Death Screen" from Clock Tower (above) and Clock Tower II (Below)
There are way more character interactions, and conversations in this game than in it's predecessor. I'm all for character development, it makes it more meaningful when that character has their life put in jeopardy. But that effect is totally lost in this game due to the terrible voice over dialogue. It doesn't help to build character, it makes you laugh at the characters. Every line is spoken as though it were being delivered by the automatic assistance you get when you call to check your balance at the bank. The actors sound like they're announcing the next stop on the metro, or reading off movie times. The effect is unintentionally hilarious. At a certain point I was just playing the game to see what monotone, bland piece of exposition the characters would spit out next. It's like the actors were chosen for their ability to speak loudly and clearly over their ability to deliver a performance. It' a release from the early days of fifth-generation consoles, and part of me wants to be impressed by the fact that it has voice acting at all. I mean, at least they made the effort, right? But the fact that it's riotously funny to listen to so detracts from the horror atmosphere the game is working to create that it's inclusion is an egregious oversight. What might be a small blemish on another PlayStation game totally ruins the sense of tension that survival horror games aim to build. Any chance of being scared totally evaporates. Beyond the fact that the acting sounds like aliens mimicking human interaction, it's poorly written as well. It has no flow, it's not conversational at all. The turn of phrase is really bizarre.
A new nickname for the scissor fingered runt in your life
The action of the game is separated between three scenarios, and the choices you make throughout the game will dictate which character you play as. You would think that having three different scenarios set in three distinct environments would make the game feel more varied than the 1995 clock tower, but the environments are generally small and rather bland. It just feels like there's a lot less going on in this game. There's fewer random scares, less haunted-madhouse flavor, less tension. Whereas getting lost in the first game was interesting because the mansion was so compelling (at least on the first couple playthroughs), getting lost in this game is frustrating. The game begins to feel like a grind after awhile, and the appearance of the villainous Scissorman becomes more of an annoyance than anything, as you retrace your steps trying to find the key to some puzzle. The inclusion of a world map with locations that you can visit in between the three scenarios is a nice touch, but there isn't a whole lot to do during these intermissions, and if anything the idea that you're in a populated city further deteriorates the sense of isolation that Clock Tower thrived on.
Having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card!
The hard hitting investigative reporters at the Oslo Week News will get to the bottom of it!
Returning protagonist Jennifer Simpson lives here... At least it's a step up from the Granite Orphanage? Maybe?
One of the strengths of Clock Tower was it's protagonist, Jennifer Simpson. She's was an atypical videogame star, a young orphan going up against a psychotic slasher villain.We get more insight into her personality in Clock Tower II, but this does nothing to enhance our opinion of her. In this game she seems... Well, kind of ditsy. This may just be a result of the poor writing; but, again, the effect is comical and it ruins the immersion. Ultimately the attitude that comes across from Jennifer just isn't what you would expect from someone trapped in a serial killer's creepy castle. It all seems old hat to her, as though the events of the first game have made her jaded to all this slasher movie nonsense.
I wonder if it's related to that corpse?
What does that even mean? I'm not asking you to fix the damn thing
Maybe because you've just been kidnapped by a serial killer
Statues that cry blood usually warrant a more extreme reaction
Oh, you're one of those "proud to be stupid" types
Your father was a doctor, Jennifer. A Doctor.
Do you like books now, Jennifer?! DO YOU?!
The game features a variety of playable characters, including Nolan and Helen. Half of Clock Tower II's endings are Helen endings, and half are Jennifer endings. I never did play as Helen, but it was oddly hilarious and satisfying to play through the Rick's house scenario as Nolan. I'm not sure if it was intentional, but to me he came off as a devil-may-care, Hemingway-style adventure type. He drinks the deceased Rick's booze, and critiques his paintings and design sensibilities in a comically self-absorbed way while he knows that the scissorman is somewhere in the house with him, lurking. When Nolan gets cornered by the scissorman, he belts him in the face like Johnny Everyman standing up to the beach bully, sending the fiend sprawling on the ground. The overall effect is not really in keeping with what I believe a game like this sets out to achieve, but it had me laughing, and that's got to count for something.
I've been wracking my brain trying to determine what qualities make something "look famous"
You know there's a killer in the house, right?
Clicking on the toilet will illicit this response. It's probably better for all of us that he doesn't elaborate.
The guy in the foreground lying in a pool of his own blood beneath a chandelier is Rick
Nolan, throwing laundry detergent into a dog's eyes...
...And escaping into the woods
There's also a whole new supporting cast for you to interact with as you progress through the game, and ultimately one of these individuals will be revealed to be the Scissorman. For the most part, these characters are really nothing more than victims for the Scissorman to murder, and having them around kind of ruins the sense of isolation established in the first game, more than it raises the stakes. It doesn't help that the characters are all kind of lame ducks. Professor Barton is the playable character of the prologue, and he is a bit of a pick, quipping at one point that Jennifer is "Nothing more than an another research subject!". Clicking on a plastic Halloween mask will incite him to say "People certainly buy stupid things". Assistant Inspector Gotts has a weak running gag where he corrects people about his professional title, even as he lies mortally wounded on a dungeon floor. A little boy named Edward seems as though he was one of those hyperactive kids whose guardians have chosen to control his behaviour through liberal doses of medication... Glassy eyed and stone faced, he is the only other survivor of the Clock Tower murders, and the fact that he did not appear in the first game should be a red flag.
I encourage you to include this turn of phrase in your day to day life
Ohhh, you also survived that terrible murder spree at the Barrows mansion? Small world!
Boy, did "Assistant" Inspector Gotts ever pick the wrong day to quit smoking
Look closely and you'll see the ghosts that belong to those Nephilim sized skeletons
Rick's house has more interesting hiding places than the other environments
What the scissorman lacks in brains, he makes up for with stupidity
Arguably, Clock Tower II may have more variability than it's 1995 SNES counterpart, but that doesn't really translate into replayability in this case. There are more endings, more settings, more characters; but the experience on the whole is less rewarding, and fosters less of a desire to replay the game. There may be more variables and more endings, but somehow the game just feels less random, and less enticing as a result. At a certain point, you're just going through the motions. I got what can only be described as a terrible ending; everyone died, including me. I had no desire to go back and play the game again, and instead pulled up a number of youtube videos to see what the other endings were like. They were filled with the hilarious voice over dialogue I had become accustomed too, and some of them were painfully cheesy.
Should have given Edward his ritalin
A video featuring some of Clock Tower II's endings, showcasing some of the absurd dialogue in the game. Obviously, this video contains some major spoilers
The game looks dated, there's not really any way around that. At the same time, it's kind of cool to be able to move your character into the foreground and background at will, compared with the largely two dimensional approach of Clock Tower. Interacting with the environment is functional, but your character will do the same bending down motion everytime you click on an object, even if that object is located at eye level or above them. You have no control over your camera, a feature that has become common place in modern games, but that's not really an issue here. Generally the angles that the camera selects are pleasing and artful. The character portraits that indicated your level of panic in the previous game are gone, and even though they aren't a critical gameplay element, they're sorely missed. Especially since the bottom portion of the screen is perpetually dedicated to a black bar used for dialogue. In this game, panic is relayed by the color of your cursor, and it's effective in a gameplay sense, but less aesthetically pleasing than the portrait system which allowed you to get to know the game's characters better... Even though they were just 2D, you got a sense of their mood and personality through viewing their portraits. It's like in this game they decided: "Now we have such accurate 3D characters, there's no point in including portraits!". But for the most part the people look like their heads are honeydew melons with potatoes for noses. The opening cinematic of the game suffers from the same funny dialogue as the game itself, but it's actually decent looking graphically, revisiting the death of Dan Barrows from the first game.
The opening cinematic for Clock Tower II (above) recreates this scene from Clock Tower (below)
The character design for this game's Scissorman is adequately horrifying. He's a hunched-over madman with a masked face and a limp. In some ways, he's scarier than the Scissorman in the first game, whose massive shears seemed somewhat comical next to his childish frame. Whereas Clock Tower's Scissorman was an impish, childlike demonoid for whom murder was a game, Clock Tower II's Scissorman is more of the escaped mental patient variety of psychopath. He's an acceptable replacement, even if some of the mechanics of the game make it so that he becomes more of an annoyance than anything else. It's also kind of cool that the identity of the Scissorman changes depending on which ending you get, but that highlights another issue: it's difficult to have a sequel to a game that's main feature is it's multiple endings, because the very existence of a sequel invalidates most of those endings.
Scissorman, chillin' watchin' some 'toons
Scissor man playing hide and seek in a locker
The soundtrack of the game is, perhaps, the highlight. It's the one thing that doesn't suffer from being dated. It's a timeless, creepy, horror soundtrack, and it's elevates tension to a surprising degree whenever it kicks in. The graphics and the dialogue seem stilted in light of what modern games have been able to accomplish, but a good soundtrack is a good soundtrack. It inspires a pavlovian response, however... Eventually I became conditioned to be annoyed by the Scissorman chase theme, because it meant he was coming around to interrupt my puzzle solving.
Overall, the game was a pretty big disappointment. Ultimately, despite the funny dialogue, it all comes off as a bit bland. And there's no greater sin for a video game than being bland. At least a truly terrible game will illicit an emotional response, this game just kind of falls flat. I would only recommend it to those with an interest in the history of survival horror games, or those who have played Clock Tower and wish to revisit the character of Jennifer Simpson, even though she's barely recognizable from the first game. I played through Clock Tower three times because I was hooked on the creepy atmosphere and the compelling background story; when I finished Clock Tower II I had no desire to go through it all again, even though the ending I got was largely unsatisfactory. It just felt like a grind, and it's hard to imagine myself returning to it when there are so many games out there that need playing.
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