Review: Clock Tower: Rewind Is a Chilling Piece of Video Game History

If you are a fan of the survival horror genre, then you owe a big, hearty “thank you” to Human Entertainment and its 1995 classic, Clock Tower. Clock Tower: Rewind is the enhanced international remaster, marking the first time that the game appeared in regions like North America. Since it’s a remaster rather than a remake, you get to experience the first fear in all of its wonderful, old-timey glory.

Despite its dated graphics, B-horror campiness, and the fact I never actually played Clock Tower myself, the Clock Tower series holds a very special place in my heart. When I was a wee lass, I saw my friend play through the second game. (Not Ghost Head, I’m talking about the actual sequel.) However, I didn’t understand what was going on. He got Ending C, in which Jennifer dies, and when the paramedics are retrieving the sole survivor of the whole incident, we see that the survivor is the second Scissorman. The camera dramatically pans down on him and his eyes snap open, implying that he will go on to continue his reign of terror.

Somehow, I must’ve confused this scene with a nightmare I had and was under the impression that he was in an air vent. Strange how your mind can play tricks like this on you, especially when you were in the unlucky half of kids who suffered from chronic nightmares and night terrors. But the point is that because of this misunderstanding, I grew up with an irrational fear of looking into air vents, worried I’d see some crazy murderer staring out at me. So playing Clock Tower: Rewind wasn’t just a way to enjoy a piece of horror game history. It was a way for me to reclaim my ability to look into vents without fear.

The story of Clock Tower: The First Fear is fairly simple, since it’s not a very long game. It starts with Jennifer Simpson and three other girls from Granite Orphanage going to visit the Barrows mansion after the patriarch of the family adopts them all. Their teacher, Mary, tells them to wait in the foyer, as she’s going to go fetch Mister Barrows, but when Jennifer tries to check up on Mary, she hears an ear-piercing scream sound out through the night. And thus begins Jennifer’s jaunt through the Barrows house of horrors as she has to elude and survive the implacable Scissorman. Throughout her journey, Jennifer may come across the gruesome corpses of her friends and canonically, she is the only one who survives the night.

While the idea of a helpless horror protagonist isn’t so rare these days, Clock Tower: The First Fear pioneered it. In fact, during development, some people actually thought that a horror game in which you can’t shoot or fight your way out of trouble wouldn’t work. Time certainly vindicated director Kono though. Whether you enjoy the Clock Tower series or not, it’s hard to deny its overarching influence on the horror genre as a whole, considering it’s basically the first survival horror game.

Jennifer cannot fight off the Scissorman. She can only hide from him using set evasion points throughout the manor. For example, you can hide in one of the storage rooms behind the armoire. Throughout my playthroughs, Scissorman never caught onto my hiding spots, meaning that you could potentially use the same place over and over again. This must be a limitation of the AI. Future instalments like Haunting Ground (even if it’s more a spiritual successor rather than a direct sequel) had stalkers like Daniella start to wise up to your hiding locations and they’d drag you out if you tried to re-use them too much. Even disregarding the limited technology of the 1990s, I can understand why Human didn’t want to make Scissorman too smart. The manor’s not that big. So on the off chance that you’re unlucky enough to trigger Scissorman too many times, it might lock you out of progressing the game if Scissorman could start catching onto your hiding points.

I will note that Clock Tower: Rewind features a rewind function in which you can turn back a short amount of time. Because all of my runs were perfect, I never had to use it. Okay, that was a joke. The reason that I didn’t really rewind time a lot is because early on, I was testing it to see precisely how much time I could undo. However, I must’ve bugged it out because the game became unresponsive. I could still open up the main menu, but Jennifer wouldn’t move or investigate anything. So, stuck in a random bathroom, I had no choice but to restart the game. Thanks to that incident scaring me off from the mechanic, I only rewound once to test Scissorman spawn logic. It was still possible to clear the game though, so I wouldn’t worry too much about that.

As you can imagine, the goal of the game is to escape the Barrows house. You can collect various items throughout the house to help you with this endeavor. There are some items you desperately need to pick up or else risk a dead end. For example, if you hadn’t found the Ham in the house and you triggered the scene in which Jennifer is in a cage, you’ll have no choice but to restart the game or load up a previous save file. The game also randomizes where certain rooms are or what items you’ll need, so there’s quite a bit of trial and erroring you’ll need to get through. Once you know what you need and where things generally are, it’s a lot smoother sailing.

As a game from 1995, it’s not very long. Barring random Scissorman encounters throwing you off, it only took me give or take an hour or two for a good ending. It also lacks a lot of modern conveniences like maps, meaning that you’ll need to rely either on your memory or your own mapping ability. Thanks to the changing layout of the Barrows mansion, existing maps online aren’t that precise, meaning you will need to pay attention every time you start up a game. Thankfully, while rooms shuffle around, they only shuffle around within their respective hallways. So for example, you won’t need to backtrack all the way to the foyer if you want to look for the taxidermy room because the taxidermy room will always be somewhere in the west wing.

I highly doubt Human intended this, but the 1990s aesthetic was really charming. There are some random scares in rooms, which remind me a lot of how old educational DOS games and Fisher-Price: Dream Dollhouse would have random stuff move and make noises. Something else about the age of the game is that it uses a really interesting control scheme that you don’t really see anymore these days. When you move Jennifer around, she goes in the direction you input until you tell her to stop. If you want to interact with items, use stairs, or open doors, you would need to use the cursor (via analog stick) to point and click. It can make for some tense moments when you only have a limited amount of time to do something, but you’re fumbling through your inventory or trying to click on the right thing.

Old games aren’t all charming though and Clock Tower: Rewind has its fair share of annoyances. Actually, the main annoyance is the big man himself: the Scissorman. As much as he terrified me as a kid (granted, I was scared of the second one), he is a mere nuisance in this one. Since the only sounds you really hear in the game are Jennifer’s footsteps, the scare chord marking his arrival can be a bit of a jump scare. He’s relentless too, pursuing Jennifer no matter how many turns she takes or doors she runs through. However, the game is surprisingly generous to you. That’s fantastic, of course, but it kind of sucks away a lot of tension from the encounters and makes them a lot more annoying than scary.

The Scissorman is really slow compared to how Jennifer can sprint around the Barrows mansion. She gets tired though, and if the Scissorman catches up to her when she’s not at max stamina, he can overpower her and kill her. However, because of how slow the Scissorman is, it’s very easy for Jennifer to literally stop, sit down, take a breather, and keep going. It kind of sounds like a Hanna-Barbera skit when I describe it in that way, but I guarantee that it’s not supposed to be funny. This is a very serious game. 

As mentioned above, in order to make the Scissorman leave you alone, you’ll need to hide from him using certain spots in the mansion. Then you can continue your exploration. Sometimes you might need to tackle your way past Scissorman depending on how lost or turned around you get. Again, you want to be at maximum stamina to push past him or else you won’t survive. But this is yet another reason that he’s not as big a threat as you may think, as Jennifer at max strength can literally fight off his shears. A funny thing is that the Scissorman is invincible when he’s entering a room, meaning that if you try to leave while he’s in the process of entering, he’ll just kill you.

One of the extras in the game is an old instruction pamphlet in which Human warned against saving while the game is changing between screens. I’m guessing that something about Jennifer knocking down Scissorman while he’s between screens would destabilize the code, hence his invincibility. In any case, it’s not hard to avoid deaths. So it’s not that Scissorman’s scary, per se, and more that he can drive you out of areas and rooms you want to explore. This then forces you to have to backtrack through the manor, which is small in terms of scale but still large enough that it can be a slog. It makes the Scissorman more of a tedious obstacle to shake off than a legitimate threat. Not that this is a major complaint though, as that’s kind of what eventually happens in most horror games.

Something else I like about Clock Tower: Rewind specifically is that it’s basically a collector’s item. It contains motion comics (complete with voice acting), as well as little documents from the original release and such of the game. It’s really cool! I think that someone who’s really into Clock Tower would get a kick out of seeing all of that. The one thing that I don’t like is how distracting the alert is when you unlock a new scene in the motion comic. This is really annoying because you usually unlock more stuff when a scene is occurring or when you trigger Scissorman, so you have the giant notification pop up and block your screen while you’re trying to see or do something. An alert popping up after a run or when you return to the main menu, or even just a little blip in the corner, would’ve been much nicer.

I do genuinely want Clock Tower: Rewind to do well in hopes that we can see more ports or remasters of the other Clock Tower games. Honestly, I just want to see Haunting Ground, its spiritual successor. As for the main series itself though, it’s a little sad that Clock Tower 3 in 2002 was the last time Capcom really did anything with the property. As far as horror games go, Clock Tower isn’t exactly in my personal top five favorites, but it’s still such a highly influential and important work that I’m surprised it took this long for it to make its way out of Japan with an official English localization. While its dated graphics and gameplay may turn away some people, it’s definitely something to experience for yourself if you’re interested in this kind of history.

And no, I don’t believe that clearing this game cured my irrational phobia of vents. I suppose we’ll just have to wait until a Clock Tower 2: Rewind for that.

Clock Tower: Rewind will come out on October 29, 2024 for the PS4, PS5, and Nintendo Switch.