Clock Tower: Rewind review – classic 90s survival horror remastered

The latest survival horror remaster goes back to 1995 and the dawn of survival horror, with seminal Japanese classic Clock Tower.

Video game publishers aren’t usually very good at being topical and rarely manage to get new horror games out in time for anywhere near Halloween. We’ve got a bumper crop this year though, led by the Silent Hill 2 remake but also including A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead, Fear The Spotlight, and, in early November, Slitterhead. Clock Tower: Rewind can also be added to the list, although it’s actually a remaster of a much older game.

Horror-themed video games are almost as old as the industry itself and in that the sense the original Clock Tower can’t claim to be anywhere near the first. It was originally released for the SNES in 1995, by which point the original PlayStation had already been out for almost a year and the first Resident Evil was mere months away from launch.

Coming out so late in the console’s lifetime, and given its unusual subject matter and gameplay, Clock Tower was only ever released in Japan. However, subsequent sequels made it to the West, along with spiritual successors Haunting Ground on the PlayStation 2 and obscure 2016 PC title NightCry, by original series creator Hifumi Kono. If you’ve never heard of any of these games you’re hardly alone but the original Clock Tower does deserve to be better known.

Although the term survival horror hadn’t been invented when it was first released, that’s definitely what Clock Tower is. Although it’s presented almost like a LucasArts style point ‘n’ clock adventure, which is a very odd choice for a SNES game. You play as orphan Jennifer Simpson (very obviously modelled on Jennifer Connelly, as she appeared in Dario Argento’s 1985 film Phenomena), who arrives at the Barrows Manor, aka Clock Tower, with a number of other orphaned girls.

Things very quickly take a turn for the horrific as the other girls disappear and you discover one of them dead, as you begin to be stalked by an evil little boy with a pair of giant scissors referred to as… Scissorman. That sounds silly, and certainly the game doesn’t have the most nuanced dialogue, but the atmosphere is surprising brooding from the first moments.

Jennifer has no way to fight back against Scissorman, or any of the other villains, except mashing the buttons if she’s caught and has enough stamina to escape. You never know when the evil monster is going to appear, as he roams around the mansion very much like Mr X or Nemesis from Resident Evil (which were almost certainly inspired by this game).

Occasionally you’ll be able to lay traps for him to blunder into but most of the time your only option is to run and hide, which is a wonderfully nerve-wracking experience despite the old-fashioned graphics – and thanks to some atmospheric audio.

The game is presented solely as a 2D side-scroller and so the only movement controls for Jennifer is left and right on the shoulder buttons. On the SNES, the D-pad was used to move a cursor around, which is used to interact with objects like door handles and light switches, as well as collect and use objects, just like an old school graphic adventure.

In this remaster moving the cursor is handled with the analogue sticks, which works fine but finding the sweet spot that activates a door or set of stairs, which is vital for escaping Scissorman, still needs to be annoyingly exact. That’s exactly the sort of thing you would’ve hoped remaster developer WayForward would’ve changed but in most respects this is exactly the same as the original Japanese SNES release, just with a run button and additional elements from the subsequent PlayStation edition (but not its FMV cut scenes).

WayForward know their 2D games and have worked on recreating everything from Advance Wars to Rose & Camellia and once you accept that they’re trying to change as little as possible this is a very thoughtful remaster. The main change, as you might guess from the title, is that you can rewind time at any point, if you get into an unwinnable position or fumble a button press. It doesn’t rewind very far though, so it certainly doesn’t make the game easy. Although you’ve also got modern save slots too.

Although escaping Scissorman is certainly difficult the hardest part of the game is working out the various object-related puzzles, which requires a lot of trial of error and scouring every location for useable objects – which is not easy when you’ve got an evil schoolboy running around with a giant pair of scissors. Even then, the logic behind the puzzles stretches credulity and will quickly have you hitting up YouTube or GameFAQs.

If it was released new today, Clock Tower: Rewind would never pass muster, even as an indie release, but it is a fascinating piece of horror history and hugely influential on Japanese developers in particular. Finally getting the chance to play it with an official translation is very welcome and WayForward has done (almost) everything to present it in the best way possible.

On top of the game itself you’ve also got a new anime intro and theme song, plus multiple motion comic cut scenes, an art gallery, a pre-release demo from the 90s, and a lengthy video interview with Hifumi Kono. You’re also able to track the many multiple endings and play the game in its original, unaltered form, if you so wish.

At the end of the interview Kono talks about wanting to make a new entry, if he ever gets the chance. We’re not sure he will, given how much that’s likely to cost nowadays, but with so many horror remakes around at the moment we certainly wouldn’t object to seeing a bigger budget return for Clock Tower.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £17.99
Publisher: Wayforward
Developer: Wayforward (original: Human Entertainment)
Release Date: 29th October 2024
Age Rating: 16

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