Clock Tower 3

More than any other game except perhaps Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Clock Tower 3, released for the PS2 in 2002, deliberately basis the bulk of its horror gameplay on the frenzied panic of being pursued. Such is, I feel, one of the sensations which games can portray with a directness impossible in other media, and it taps most effectively into a deeply primal and therefore universal fear that quickly becomes terror. In a few very brief instances, it succeeds in this; however, I should avoid overstating its success, as what merit it can claim, that it at the very least embellished the pursuit-based horror game with a few interesting concepts, is marred by pervasive sloppiness and lack of direction at almost every level of narrative and gameplay. 

Clock Tower 3 has no substantial commonality with the earlier games in the series, all of which were released in the mid and late 'nineties in the point-and-click format, except to borrow names and aesthetic devices, the most prominent of the latter being a schoolgirl protagonist and the eponymous clock tower. This installment follows the bewilderingly under-developed story of Alyssa Hamilton, who at boarding school receives a letter from her mother imploring Alyssa to go into hiding while offering no explanation as to why. In no circumstance, says her mother, is she to return to the family mansion. Thereon Alyssa promptly returns to the family mansion to find it abandoned but for a black-clad and rather heavy 'dark gentleman' in the dining room, who smirkingly tells her that her mother is gone for ever before he walks off into the mansion's depths. Of course, he has disappeared when Alyssa quits the dining room, and her subsequent exploration of the mansion leads her to a capacious secret passage, where she discovers a vial of holy water, which will serve as her main defence throughout the game. While searching her mother's room, she panics upon hearing an unseen piano inexplicably begin to play Chopin's Opus 66, fleeing then to the corridor only to find that it leads no longer to the mansion, but to the past, during the Second World War in London. Here the game begins in full.

The first chapter, of five, introduces the game's basic disposition: the player must appease ghosts of wrongfully killed persons, all the while finding documents revealing the circumstances of their murder, by restoring certain 'sentimental items' to them and allowing to ascend, evidently, to heaven. Throughout the chapter, you will be pursued by a vicious and supernaturally powerful murderer, against whom your only defence is holy water, which will stun him for several seconds. Eventually, after evading the murderer and restoring the 'sentimental item' to the murdered, you will face your pursuer in a boss battle in which your vial has become a bow you use to kill him. There is no deviation from this model.

Amongst the most annoying aspects of the game is its persistent lack of narrative continuity, not even for its occasional ridiculousness as much as the frustration it causes in figuring what one is supposed to do in order to move from one objective to the next. This is particularly frustrating given the fact that, for the majority of the game, you are progressing through environments with your adversarial murderer -- or 'Subordinate', as one learns they are called -- right on your heels, meaning that there is very little room for exploration and experimentation. In a better game, the narrative might give you a clearer idea of what you are supposed to be doing, and, if not the narrative, then the gameplay and map layout might suggest some sequence of overcoming an obstacle, e.g. Eternal Darkness. Or, if none of those, then the map might be such that exploration would eventually develop some sense of direction both spatially and diegetically, e.g. Silent Hill 2. However, the placement of objectives demands enough backtracking that, without a clear objective, one has no choice but to run rather aimlessly around the map until he fortuitously encounters what he needs to advance.

As an example, the first chapter places you in bombed-out London, where you are lead linearly enough along a path narrowly demarcated by the usual dead-ends, destroyed bridges, and piles of rubble, to your encounter with the Subordinate. Henceforward, one's sense of direction is lost. Particularly upon entering the performance hall, where you find the ghost of the murdered girl you must appease, it becomes difficult to determine which way is forward. Still, I should say that the maps are small and simply enough laid out that it is no great feat to find your objective eventually, but it is most vexing that the logic which carries you from one point to another is well near absent. If, for instance, you turn one way down a corridor, you will come to a catwalk where the only points of interest are an extinguished lamp, and a narrow board leading from one catwalk to another, but which you are not permitted to cross for its being, Alyssa tells herself, too dark. So, rather that transposing the unlit lamp with a lit lamp in the same area, the next objective is evidently to find some means of lighting the darkened lamp. One must assume that that lies beyond the other end of the corridor you took to get here. That takes you eventually to a costume storeroom, where you interact with a wardrobe full of costumes and find a box of matches, as if it were the most obvious of things that costumes all have matchbooks in their pockets. With box of matches in hand, you again brave being bashed to death by the hammer-wielding Subordinate in order to return and light the lamp, and cross from one catwalk to the next.

Here, one encounters another persistent and irksome feature of Clock Tower 3, that of guiding Alyssa across a narrow board from one platform to another. A related and equally persistent obstacle, if it can be called such, is to get from one platform to another by letting her automatically put her back against the wall and inch along a narrow outcropping, a task requiring only that you push the control stick in the proper direction and wait for it to be over.

Elsewhere, the narrative’s problem is less a lack of continuity than a lack of believability. At one point, Alyssa manages to open a door in the mansion previously locked, and discovers a bathroom in which one of the lodgers lies in a state of advanced decomposition in the bathtub. She is amazingly unperturbed by this discovery, and does not even alert the friend who has come over to help her find her mother.

In terms of combat, there are only boss battles. Otherwise, you can only slow down your pursuer by splashing him with holy water, or evade him by hiding. The boss battles could have been very satisfying, and they do offer an interesting mechanism, that of ‘binding’ your enemy. Upon raising your bow, you can no longer move, but the longer you draw the arrow, the more damage it will do. It reaches a certain point at which it becomes a ‘binding’ arrow, and hitting your foe with it will tether him to a spot like a dog chained to a poll. He will quickly disentangle himself, however, but if you manage to bind him from three different angles, you can get a critical shot against him, wherein you automatically shoot your arrow into the sky and summon a supernal shock wave which smites and gravely wounds him. This could have been very satisfying but for the frustration caused by your not being able to aim your bow and arrow. Alyssa will automatically target the boss when she lifts her bow, but she will not track him, and you can not oscillate from side to side at all. Furthermore, there is no combat mechanism beyond this, and so the boss battles, particularly the later ones, become tedious.

An interesting element reminiscent of the sanity meters in such games as Eternal Darkness, The Call of Cthulhu, and others, is the ‘panic meter’. Throughout the bulk of the game, Alyssa can not be physically hurt until her panic meter reaches full, causing her to run around in a blind panic that the player must struggle to control. Only while she is in full panic can she be hurt, and she will be felled by a single blow unless carrying a special item which takes a blow for her. In boss battles, however, you have the regular health meter, albeit the meter is longer for later boss battles.

There are very few puzzles, and those you encounter can solved easily by trial and error. At one point in the second chapter, there is a vase containing a moonflower sitting in front of a landscape painting in which the moon sits off to the right. Your options are to turn the flower in one of three directions in order to open a secret passage, an exasperatingly simple task strikingly similar to one in Killer 7’s ‘Sunset’ chapter, except I believe the latter was a conscious parody of what Clock Tower 3 took seriously. Generally, what other ‘puzzles’ you encounter are designed to cause maximum frustration for very little satisfaction.

Story and gameplay must interact very closely, and much of the true skill of game design lies in integrating these two intelligently and thoughtfully. Already there is plenty of evidence that Clock Tower 3 does not satisfy my prescriptions for a skilfully wrought game, but what of the gameplay and narrative if considered independently of each other?  Of course, a game may follow a wonderfully imaginative story though it want a compelling mechanism for interaction; and it may also offer an innately satisfying mechanism though the higher narrative be undeveloped or entirely lacking.

In the case of narrative, the game is all the more disappointing for its advertizing the directorship of Kinji Fukasaku, famous especially for his yakuza movies, Tora! Tora! Tora!, and Battle Royale. I am unclear whether the septuagenarian Mr. Fukasaku were employed purely for cinematic direction of the game’s exhaustingly many cut-scenes, or whether he were involved otherwise, but regardless, the story is ridiculous. Basically, you learn that Alyssa descends from a family of ‘Rooders’, women who are empowered in their adolescence to fight the evil ‘Entities’, which are ethereal beings that possess unusually vile murderers, turning them into ‘Subordinates’ and granting them eternal life by feeding off the souls of their victims. As a Rooder, she frees the souls of the victims by returning the ‘sentimental item’, thereby leaving the Entity vulnerable to attack by her enchanted – seemingly Divinely so – bow and arrow in the boss battle that ends the chapter. This alone seems a tiresomely vapid rendition of the battle between pure good and evil, but what interest there is in the story comes only much later in the game. That is, that the ‘dark gentleman’ whom Alyssa encountered earlier is the orchestrator of the Entities she has encountered, and that he intends to kill Alyssa when her Rooder powers peak on her fifteenth birthday, which not incidentally is two hours away. She soon learns that he is in fact her beloved grandfather, who has been her family’s patriarch since her actual father died under mysterious circumstances soon after her birth.

Her grandfather, though loving both his daughter and granddaughter, can not abide the former’s having married a ‘spineless’ commoner. Eventually, Alyssa learns, he kills her father. He leaves for Europe when Alyssa is twelve, and it is at that time that Alyssa’s mother sends her to boarding school until sending the mysterious letter three years later. During those three years, her grandfather has hunted all over the Continent for the castle of the long deceased Lord Burroughs, who sought immortality at an enormous cost of life to his subjects. His journal entries, which Alyssa discovers throughout the game, express only an unconvincing scientific curiosity in Burroughs, and it rapidly becomes obvious that his motivations run far deeper. Indeed, near the middle of the game, Alyssa hears of the ‘Ritual of Engagement’, for which it seems the dark gentleman is preparing, and she presently discovers that it involves the removal of her heart and imbibing of her blood in order to join her soul with her grandfather’s, thereby creating a new Entity in which they may be together for eternity.

Such is, I believe, a rather curious turn of the narrative. As it becomes increasingly evident that Alyssa’s grandfather was intensely bitter at his daughter’s choice of husband and the corruption of a long line of brave and selfless Rooders, one anticipates another tiresome indictment of obsessions with hereditary purity, as in the Harry Potter series. Instead, it becomes a far more interesting, albeit clumsy and disappointingly shallow, portrayal of the helpless fears of an old man approaching death. There is some overlap amongst these motives, but I believe he is coming to terms with an ambiguously sexual fascination with Alyssa, whose youth and nubility are closely linked with Divinity and, more importantly, immortality; with death, which connotes a powerlessness which is emphasized by his situation in a hereditary line where only females are blessed with superhuman powers; and with impotence, related to death. There is also a suggestion of his having learnt some thing that is forbidden to Alyssa and the Rooders, that is, that he has chosen after a femininely pious life to see what the other, darker side holds, the side where he as a male can obtain the power denied him by the good.

In this light, the significance of the actual clock tower in the game becomes clearer. After Alyssa dispatches the first two murders – both males who killed defenceless females and an effeminate mollycoddle of a man – the dark gentleman converts the squat Hamilton manor into a vertiginous and dilapidated clock tower counting the final two hours to Alyssa’s birthday and the Ritual of Engagement. The fiery tower thrusts up through manor, like a phallic spear, the floating clock face delivering Alyssa to the top, where she lies helplessly before her triumphant grandfather (is it too crude to mention here that the grandfather’s name is the casual form of ‘Richard’?). Indeed, even playing through the game once, the player will see this scene twice, in two different ways, the first being the cinematic sequence introducing the game, the other being a cut-scene. The latter has already been described. In the first, the dark gentleman cum grandfather stands before the mansion and conjures the tower, looking exultantly upon the crumbling and antient shaft he has erected, having conquered time and proven his virility.

As to the intermittently placed Catholic devices, such as the holy water, I can figure only that they are meant to emphasize the righteousness of the Rooders and lend to their battle with the Entities a sense of the somber and antient grandness of the Church. They also create a vague sense of Alyssa’s travails being somehow part of an epic, as each boss battle shows the number of the Subordinate’s victims, followed by how many years he was ‘sentenced to’, presumably by God, and, immediately before combat begins, the screen flashes the word ‘Judgment’, similarly to how wrestling games will begin with ‘Fight!’, or some Japanese combat games with ‘Hajime!’.

At no point is the game horrifying, and it manages only to startle once or twice when a Subordinate suddenly appears behind you, accompanied by a jarring chord. The designs for the Subordinates are far too cartoonish and the voice acting likewise. The character designs for Scissorman and Scissorwoman are particularly disappointing, given how emblematic of the series the former is, and yet here they are dressed like Pierrot and Pierrette working at a brothel catering to Goths. The dialogue is always as laughable as it attempts to be dramatic, the best example being near the very end, as Alyssa’s grandfather is about to perform the Ritual of Engagement and shouts ‘Nothing can stop me now!’ He is, of course, promptly stopped, but not before he can utter the classic villain’s ‘mwa ha ha ha!’ The music, too, is annoyingly repetitive, all the more so because some songs, as in the last chapters, consists of three or fewer notes, played over and over and over again – a stark contrast to the first chapter’s rather lyrical use of Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu.

Finally, there is the sidekick Alyssa discovers after the first chapter. Someone has described him as appearing to have some form of ‘wanker epilepsy’, and another has likened him to Ron Weasley from Harry Potter. Like Ron, he is an annoying and red-headed incompetent, and his inclusion must have been intended as a sort of lightning rod for the player’s frustration with the game’s other deficiencies, but he serves more to intensify than to dissipate them.

In the end, Clock Tower 3 scarcely seems like a horror game, and instead comes across as a forgettable adventure game. What potential there was in several of its aspects, namely the binding mechanism in the boss battles and being chased, is poorly handled. If there be any thing which makes the game worth playing, it is one or two of the cut-scenes. Beyond this, there is little to distinguish it.