Clock Tower is one of those niche franchises that horror gamers have mostly all heard of and almost no one else has ever encountered. North America first got to play Clock Tower on the PS1 in 1997 and it was sold as the first in the series. Little did most players know that there was an even earlier Clock Tower game on the Super Famicom (Jp SNES for those not in the know) released in 1995. Now Sunsoft (owners of the former Human Corporation) has partnered with publisher Wayforward to finally release the original Clock Tower game in English almost 30 years later as Clock Tower Rewind.
Clock Tower: Rewind is a bit more than that original release for the SFC though. The original Clock Tower was re-released with added features on the Japanese PS1 after the sequel and retitled as Clock Tower: The First Fear. It adds more rooms, weapons, cinema sequences and minor performance tweaks to the original, essentially optimizing it. Both the original SFC version and the Rewind version including First Fear are included on Clock Tower: Rewind and you can swap between the two when starting a new game.
You’re getting more than an old SFC game and a remix though. Clock Tower: Rewind includes (gasp!) a rewind function, a new animated intro, fully voiced songs, and even save states. All of that doesn’t significantly change the core experience of the game though. Instead it provides more of a quality-of-life update to the experience that makes Clock Tower more approachable. You’ll see why in a moment.
In Clock Tower you play Jennifer, an orphan who has been invited to live at the Barrow mansion along with several of her fellow young female orphans (not at all creepy or suspicious). After arriving at the mansion, Jennifer get separated from the group and as screams ensue in another room, things get weird fast. This is a horror game but it’s essentially a point-and-click interface controlled by a cursor. You can control Jennifer by using the L1 and R1 buttons to walk and using the X button to stop Jennifer. Hitting X again will cause her to sit down and rest, replenishing her health. The left stick and d-pad both control the cursor, allowing you to highlight interactable objects which you can select with the Y button. A allows use of the inventory and B is the panic button.
With those simplistic controls in mind, it’s time to explain how things work. Basically, Jennifer is searching the mansion for her friends and things are not going well. Depending on the paths you take, some or all of your friends might end up dead, murdered by a grotesque child with a giant pair of scissors. The purpose of Clock Tower: Rewind is to find out what’s happening and escape, ideally with your friends still breathing. To do so, you’ll have to search through the Barrows mansion, finding keys, hidden passageways and secrets in order to solve the mystery and escape. There are eight endings to the game and your choices and actions will unlock different events and lead to different endings.
Clock Tower: Rewind is rather unique as well because while it looks like a linear 2D game, it is very much not. The locations of rooms and items are randomized and shift during gameplay based on choices you make and in this new version, Scissorman and other enemies will attack you at random times as well, making it extremely difficult to figure out what to do and where to go. The mansion itself is designed as a three dimensional space represented in a two dimensional format as well, so the linking of various rooms is incredibly confusing with many areas looking remarkably like each other. This intentional location obfuscation makes Clock Tower: Rewind particularly difficult even if it is a remarkably short game once you learn what to do.
One of the best QoL changes is that new Jennifer can run up stairs and in places where she could not previously. This is a particularly slow-paced game and running everywhere really helps to speed things up a bit. You’ll still have to slam the panic button repeatedly to escape the clutches of Scissorman if he gets too close (and for other incidents too) but at least you can get where you’re going much quicker, wherever the heck that is.
Finding your way around the mansion with no guides or maps is an exercise in frustration at best and made even harder because some keys do not even show in your inventory. Instead they’re only used when needed and it’s easy to forget what you have. There are no clues of any kind and while once you get a feel for the game, some things become intuitive, the overall gameplay is anything but. Figuring out what to use where is a guessing game and you’re going to need those save states. None of the puzzles are particularly challenging though so there’s not all that much depth of gameplay here aside from the convoluted house design. Once you figure out how to evade enemies and search for items, you’ve mastered 90% of the game. The only QoL item really missing is a highlight option to show what can be interacted with in each room. The cursor is remarkably fast on the stick and the d-pad isn’t much better in Clock Tower: Rewind, especially when you’re trying to escape death.
This is essentially a puzzle-light horror game clearly based on a variety of ‘70s and ‘80s horror movies and the scares definitely haven’t aged well either. While the preservation is wonderful here, the game itself isn’t nearly as fun or immersive as you might think. The puzzles are simplistic at best – find item, use item in correct place, search interaction points, rinse, and repeat. Dialogue is spare and surface level with no deeper analysis and even the scariest scenes just let you continue on after you die, going back slightly to give you another shot. Combined with the rewind option, that takes most of the teeth out of the terror here, even though Scissorman has some solid entrances and some of the death scenes are decent. Not spectacular mind you, but decent. Back in 1995 this would have been a solid experience but 30 years of horror gaming is a long time and Clock Tower feels like more of a curiosity or a relic rather than a serious horror game these days.
Clock Tower: Rewind is a pixel art game because, well, the ‘90s, and for what it is it looks particularly neat. The character animation is remarkably realistic and the designs are solid. The original game is in 4: 3 and if you want to see a larger screen, you’ll have to pick stretch mode which messes with the pixels a bit but overall it works regardless of which visual mode you prefer. The 1:1 original is incredibly tiny though and it’s weird that it’s included. The new intro is gorgeous of course and the border options for the screen have some nifty artwork as well if that’s your thing, evoking an almost arcade feel, but somehow taking away from the core experience.
Audio is significantly weaker though and most of the time all you hear are Jennifer’s footsteps. If the music starts playing, chances are you’re in big trouble and it’s time to run. That silence tries to create an atmosphere of tension and despair but it just doesn’t do that great a job and mostly it’s just running around trying to figure out what to do with incessant footfalls everywhere you go and only the occasional gratifying scream to break up the monotony. The new songs are particularly nice but there’s no modern soundtrack to go along with the tepid gameplay and weak terror levels that Clock Tower provides.
Speaking of issues, perhaps the most frustrating one with Clock Tower: Rewind is the save states. It’s a big deal to be able to save in a game like this and simply hitting R2 brings up the menu and allows you to save. There’s only one problem. It doesn’t really work. Saving only worked intermittently during the course of this review and it was impossible to get the game to consistently save. It’s unclear what the issue is with the save states as the continue system works fine, but for some reason, saving only worked once in a while, creating problems if you want to close the game and come back to it another time. That’s a weird issue to have in this day and age, so be aware that saves aren’t all they’re cracked up to be here.
That’s not to say there aren’t other positives about Clock Tower: Rewind though. There are a ton of extras here to supplement the gameplay. The Extras menu allows you to access the end credits and intro, and includes an interview with Hifumi Kono, the director of Clock Tower. Also included are an image galley, the original Japanese demo of the game, and directions on how to play (if you forget what the buttons do). A series of motion comics are also included and they’re by far the best part, 8 scenes from the prologue and The First Fear, retold in moving comic book format with outstanding artwork. As you play through the game for the first time, you’ll unlock all of the motion comics and they’re well worth a look. Finally there’s a music player with 44 tracks of Clock Tower music and sound if that’s your thing. While they don’t add a ton of time to the gameplay, the inclusion of all this additional content is nice, especially for Clock Tower aficionados and well worth spending some time investigating.
All in all, Clock Tower: Rewind is a bit of a mixed bag. This is an old and rather dated game, even with the QoL improvements and while it isn’t scary by any means, it’s an important game historically for the horror genre. It’s not a bad game, but at the same time, it’s not an updated modernized version either which would have been far more compelling in the long run, especially with an average run only taking a few hours. But at only $19.99 this isn’t a bank-breaker either and you’re going to get enough gameplay for your money if you try to complete all the endings. Just keeping Jennifer alive might be a challenge for most of us though and there are plenty of weird surprises in store depending on what pathway you take, so at least give Clock Tower: Rewind a shot. It might surprise you!
This review is based on a digital copy of Clock Tower: Rewind provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well on both. Clock Tower: Rewind is also available on Playstation, Xbox, and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.