Clock Tower is one of those horror franchises a lot of people have, at the very least, a modicum of knowledge about, but very few of them have actually played any entry in its nearly thirty year old history. Given how the original version was released only in Japan, and its further sequels had sold and reviewed quite poorly, I wouldn’t blame them if most people had only learned about it because of that one Jontron video from a decade ago. Clock Tower: Rewind is actually the first time the first game in the series is available in the West, courtesy of WayForward and Limited Run Games. And Capcom, somehow, as the company’s logo appears whenever you boot this game up.

Don’t lie. You are looking at this picture and thinking of the Scooby-Doo theme song. Bonus points if you’re thinking of the running sound effects.

I think it’s important to point out, right from the getgo, that Clock Tower: Rewind is not a remake or even a proper remaster of the original game. Just like most outings from Limited Run, running on their Carbon Engine, this is more of an upscaled re-release of the original, with just a handful of resolution and gameplay enhancements, and many extras outside of the game itself, ranging from neat unlockable animations to actual interviews with the game’s original development staff. This might be interesting at first glance, as you are allowed to experience the original Clock Tower as it was, but that also highlights how poorly this game has aged.

For the uninitiated, Clock Tower is actually a horror-themed point and click adventure, and not your classic survival horror in the style of Alone in the Dark or Resident Evil. Your movement is even more limited, your defense options are nigh-nonexistent, and the puzzles feel even more obtuse. The thing is that the entire game was made with a cursor as the main means of interacting with the environment… in a console. As a result, you move the cursor around with the d-pad, or, in the case of Rewind, the left analog stick. There is an option to move left and right with L and R, but all this does is make your character sprint endlessly in that direction until you tell her to stop, or if her stamina is depleted. In order to recover said stamina, there is a button dedicated to making her lay down on her knees.

Clock Tower: Rewind is full of neat little extras.

I can only imagine that playing Clock Tower: Rewind on a PC, where you can do everything with a mouse and keyboard, doesn’t feel this clunky. This console version, however, doesn’t have an option to change the control scheme to something more controller-friendly, like how Double Fine did with all the remasters of their classic adventure games. You can’t even move with one stick and use the cursor with another. Sure, this makes this port more historically accurate, but it’s also incredibly slow, clunky, and obtuse. You cannot even configure the cursor’s speed, which makes things a lot more dire whenever your character finds herself in a dangerous situation.

In Clock Tower, there is just one major enemy you need to worry about: an eight year old kid, dressed like a hellish version of Angus Young, wielding a gigantic pair of scissors. He will show up at random during your playthrough, and you need to figure out ways to avoid him, as you lack combat capabilities. You might need to merely run away from him, or hide under a bed, or atop a platform he can’t reach, for example. In many cases, however, you will find yourself in a dead end, with him killing you and basically ending your entire run.

I think this is the first time this orphan is inside a house with any kind of electricity.

Sadly, Clock Tower puts a huge emphasis on restarting the game from the very beginning if you meet your demise at the hands of the main baddie, or if you merely trigger an instant kill situation, from out of nowhere, in very unfair ways. I don’t find this to be interesting, or even challenging; it’s plain unfair. Even if, at times, the mere sound of the main foe’s theme tune was enough to bring shivers down my spine (I cannot praise the soundtrack enough), there were moments I simply felt annoyed. There is a new rewind mechanic that might help you out in certain situations, such as correcting an action which led to an instant death, but when you’re stuck in a dead end with the boss in front of you, or if you reach a point of no return without a necessary item, you gotta start a new save.

Even if I appreciate this new mechanic, which helped me out during one or two sticky situations, I didn’t feel that wasn’t enough. Clock Tower needed a lot more quality of life enhancements. At the end of the day, this is just a very expensive port of a clunky Super Famicom game, made way before survival horror became a mainstream thing. My main incentive to even consider starting a new run was trying to unlock some extra animations, because the game itself just wasn’t entertaining me. Had Clock Tower been added to the Nintendo Switch’s SNES online library, it would have made the same impact. It would have even had a better rewind mechanic.

This sounds silly (well, it is very silly indeed), but you won’t beat the game without some ham. Really. No joke.

Reviewing Clock Tower: Rewind was a mixed bag because, on one hand, I get it. I understand the importance of Clock Tower, and the impact that game had on survival horror as a whole. As a piece of gaming history, finally archived and widely available on the West, this is a fantastic release. The added interviews, cartoon animations and soundtrack are a neat bonus. But as a game, this has aged incredibly poorly. Considering how the developers have decided to keep the gameplay basically intact, this is still a clunky point-and-click game with obtuse puzzles, poor controls, and an annoying amount of cheap deaths. It’s more of a novelty than anything else nowadays, sadly.

Clock Tower: Rewind is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PC and Switch.

Reviewed on Switch.

A copy of Clock Tower: Rewind was provided by the publisher.