When the survival horror genre was going strong in the early 2000s, game companies wanted to find ways to make the experience different. One way was to make “run and scream” games as I like to call them. In an effort to be known for something other than Resident Evil, Capcom did just that with Clock Tower 3. The main game mechanic is that you can’t fight back with weapons when you encounter enemies. Instead, you have to run while inevitably screaming as you search for a hiding spot where the enemy won’t find you. Think Nemesis in Resident Evil 3 without so much as a knife in your inventory. Sigh.
This was the first Clock Tower sequel on PS2. The first two games on the PlayStation One used an archaic system called “point-and-click”. It was basically a side-scrolling game with a little wiggle room and the ability to travel both left and right. However, moving required positioning a cursor on screen to where you wanted to travel before pressing a button that would get you to head there—called point-and-click because the games are usually played with a mouse. How fucking primitive.
The first installment on PS2 plays out like a horror movie…and controls mostly like a survival horror game. It’s visually atmospheric, and you spend the whole time searching for items and solving puzzles while fearing that an enemy will pop out of nowhere and chase you relentlessly until you find a hiding spot. The only time you use a weapon is for the boss battles at the end of each chapter.
You play as a teenage girl. You’ve come home from school, your mom is gone, and a creepy man is lurking around your house. You explore for a while, pick up some items and notes that are well lit so you can easily see them in the environments, and gather holy water, which you’ll need to open marked doors to teleport to new locations and also to sprinkle on enemies to very temporarily slow them down when they chase you. You can fill your holy water bottle at fountains you’ll find around the locations you explore, which is also where you can save at any time.
Unlike Resident Evil at the time, Clock Tower 3 does not feature tank controls. You move in the direction you push the thumb stick. However, because the game uses fixed survival horror camera angles instead of an over the shoulder POV, when the perspective changes suddenly, you are still pushing the stick in the direction you were originally moving, yet your character is actually heading in a different direction. Initially a smooth transition, it quickly falls apart when you need to change direction. You essentially have to release the stick and let it reset so you can once again push in the direction you want to go. Not convenient when a murderous enemy is on your tail. And speaking of, while the default character pace is running speed, there are times you need to press a button to walk slowly for more controlled movement. That’s because kicking items like cans on the street, which can happen easily if you’re running, will cause enemies to hear you and come hunting. Eek!
Instead of health, you have a panic meter, which can be calmed by taking lavender that you find during exploration. If you do hit full panic mode, your character comes to a standstill, shakes uncontrollably, and begins to get dizzy spells…all while being chased. Fun.
Instead of trying to complete a chapter while being pursued by an enemy, the goal is to find designated hiding places. When you slip into them, as long as the killer didn’t see you hide, they will lurk nearby for a while looking for you and then finally give up. However, sometimes if they stand right outside your hiding spot for too long, your panic meter will go up and you will exit the hiding spot in a panic! These types of hiding spots can be used over and over again. There are other escape mechanisms that are one time use—essentially glowing booby traps you can use once to take down the enemy temporarily, leaving you in peace for a while.
And finally, during your travels you will occasionally be bothered by ghosts. Just what we needed. The ghost will follow you and choke you, but you can shake them off. You can also free their souls. They are always near a dead body waiting to get back an item they lost in death. The idea is to find the item—which is usually nearby—and return it to the dead body while avoiding the angry ghost. Here you are trying to help the damn ghosts, and they’re still attacking you.
Those are the basics of the game, so now let’s look briefly at each chapter.
FIRST CHAPTER
This is one of my faves. You get teleported to London and run around deserted streets and some shops at night. After an initial cut scene that gives you a backstory about the killer of the chapter, the chase is on!
The killer is a hulking deformed dude with a giant hammer who grumbles, “Alyssa, where are you?” whenever he chases you. Terrifying.
Learn where the hiding places are, but don’t fully depend on them. Sometimes they’re too far away to be of help. The killer will also throw you completely off course when you’re in the middle of trying to accomplish something. Good luck finding your way back after you’ve been totally turned around.
The most infuriating part of this chapter has you crossing a plank over a stage and then crossing back again. Fall and you die. This segment totally defies the original rules of the controls. For instance, you are moving left across the screen, so you don’t push forward on the stick, you push left. When you start to lose your balance, the idea is to gently push the stick in the opposite direction than you’re falling. But if you fall towards your character’s left (which is falling towards the bottom of the screen because you’re facing the left side of the screen), you have to push right on the stick to balance yourself, not up, which is actually the character’s right! WTF?
When you finally get to fight hammer man, you’re equipped with a bow and arrow during a magical cutscene, and then the battle is on. No aiming is necessary. You just run around a fountain, wait for hammer man to swing at you, which temporarily gives him pause, and then you hold down triangle to power up as much as possible and release to shoot (the only time you’re given an over the shoulder POV). There’s lots of running and aiming in the battle, and you can’t adjust your aim once it’s locked in, so the boss can just step out of the target range. It takes quite a while to beat him.
Note that you will find special red or green arrows throughout the game, but it’s best to save these for the final battle of the game, because there aren’t many of them, and your regular arrows are good enough for all the other battles even if they do make the battles last longer than they should.
SECOND CHAPTER
Before you even get to meet the second enemy, you do a lot more running around your mansion, and then tackle a lot of ghosts once you’re teleported to the area where this chapter takes place. As with all these older survival horror games, there’s no way you’d know where to go or what to do without a walkthrough.
Once you do meet the enemy, he is another bad ass right out of a horror movie. It’s a dude wearing an oxygen mask and protective smock and carrying a canister of acid he shoots all over you when he gets near you. There’s plenty of running around and another ridiculous plank crossing scene that is presented at an awful camera angle, plus this dude is on you even more than hammer man. And the one hiding space this chapter provides is a one-time use spot. Ugh. Again, you need to use a walkthrough. Without one, you’ll run in circles being chased constantly by the baddie without a hiding spot to temporarily rid yourself of him.
As freaky as acid man is, he’s also sort of campy. He even pounces on you by doing a butt bounce. Weird. The boss battle consists of running around a power plant room trying to aim your arrows at him without getting hit by his acid…or butt bounced.
THIRD CHAPTER
This one is infuriating and also sucks all the horror out of the game. Your enemy “The Chopper” feels more like a weasel of a superhero villain than a horror enemy, even if he does carry a sharp weapon in each hand. He hops and spins around you and taunts you jovially, which is annoying enough as it is. On top of that, in the first part of this chapter he chases you incessantly in a very minimal amount of underground sewer space. And this is while you’re trying to run around gathering items to help you escape the area.
And then you fight him the first time. That’s right. First time. You have two boss battles with him, and this is the easy one, even though it’s hard. It’s in a tight fighting arena, and he bounces around so much it’s hard to line up shots with him. Argh!
After you conquer him, you end up in a graveyard and have to teleport through several portals to reach different parts of the graveyard…where you have to collect items to solve puzzles while The Chopper haunts you along with glowing butterflies that leave you disoriented when they get near you.
And just when you’re feeling you’re in any easy part, you have to cross a cavern bridge that begins to crumble beneath you as the camera angle and dust clouds fuck you up. Argh. My suggestion is stay to the right and you should make it. Once you do get safely to the other side, you don’t get to save, because it’s right into a boss fight. Fuckers.
Fighting The Chopper in the graveyard is infuriating, will take you forever, and is only slightly more doable if you use a Codebreaker. Just saying. The Chopper is even more aggressive. He chases you relentlessly so it’s rarely possible to get distance enough from him to line up a shot. You get stuck on tombstones. You get stuck in a loop of getting knocked on your ass. And he flings blue boomerangs at you.
And that is the key to this battle. The ONLY time your arrows hurt him is after you’ve successfully shot one of his boomerangs with your arrow and boomeranged it right back at him. Then you get several opportunities to power-up your arrow and do damage to his health bar. Then it’s just running in circles waiting for certain verbal cues he gives that let you know he’s about to throw a boomerang again. The worst is when you miss the boomerang and have to start the process of waiting for him to throw another one all over again.
FOURTH CHAPTER PART 1
Here you have your friend with you, and he looks like Weasley from Harry Potter. In the first part of the chapter he gets captured by one of the enemies and you have to find him in a hospital. There are several ghosts to contend with immediately, and as you search the hospital you find the objects needed to set them free.
The enemies this time–that’s right, plural—are a nod to the original game. The original point-and-click game enemy was called Scissorman, and he chased you around with huge shears. Now there are brother and sister twins with big scissors, but once again, they come across as superhero villains. Imagine if the Wonder Twins decided to go on a cutting spree. Despite them not being scary, dammit if the game seems to realize they aren’t scary, so it offers up the biggest damn jump scare in the whole game.
You never encounter both twins at once—it’s always one twin or another. However, they do appear frequently like The Chopper. Worst of all, this is a two-floor hospital, and only one floor has a hiding spot.
Even so, this is a fairly short segment requiring a lot of back and forth running. There’s no boss battle, and eventually you end up at a castle.
FOURTH CHAPTER PART 2
This is a fairly small castle. It’s almost pointless to explore the small west wing unless you want to save the ghost in there. However, that requires finding the necessary item in the east wing and going right back to give it to the ghost’s corpse. Otherwise, you actually never go back to the west wing, and if you’re a completist you won’t successfully save all ghosts in the game.
The problem is that the scissor twins come at you constantly here, and there’s no hiding place! There’s one trap that you can use to get them once in the useless west wing, and another trap usable just once in the east wing.
There are also limited saves and holy water refill stations, so you will be doing a lot of backtracking to save and replenish. Problem with that is it often requires running through a hallway of knight statues that hack at you in a sporadic pattern. Tedious.
There’s some fetching to find items to insert in statues to open new doors, and then there’s a whole section you would never have a clue about conquering properly unless you use a walkthrough. It requires going down elevators hidden in iron maidens in each corner of the knight room (argh) to unlock doors down below in a prison. Once you do, you then have to pull a lever and run perfectly in a straight line to a door that unlocks on the other side of the prison. If you run even slightly off track (and you will), walls come down and block your path. Guess what. You then have to go back up in the elevator to the knight room, get to the iron maiden that takes you back down to the switch, and try again.
Meanwhile, you’re going to want to return to the last save room several times, because when you least expect it, you are thrust into two boss battles in a row without a save in sight. That save point? Through the hall with the knights. Argh!
FIRST FINAL BOSS
It’s the scissor sister, and she’s really annoying…mostly because for whatever reason they’ve decided that for this boss battle only, you don’t get auto aim on your arrows. And by that I mean you don’t get auto aim plus you can’t adjust your aim. WTF? You have to run in circles then try to get her in front of you as she teleports around the room, then press the arrow powering button and hope she’s in your sights when it switches to the over-the-shoulder view. If not, you need to let go of the arrow button fast or she’ll whack you good.
Other than her regular attacks, she occasionally sends a wind around the room that you can try to dodge until it goes way.
SECOND BOSS BATTLE
It’s the scissor brother. He’s actually easier than his twin simply because your auto aim is back. He does, however, have a few more attacks than her.
After you defeat both of them, you get to save. Then you climb winding stairs, pull some levers, crawl your way through a bunch of gears in the clock tower, and finally reach one more save room before the final battle.
FINAL BOSS
Not even the Codebreaker can save you from this horror show, because the code for the powerful arrows, of which you only have four at most, does not work. The only way to seriously beat this boss would be to have infinite powerful arrows.
You’re on a round arena platform with two open holes in the floor. Can you fall into them? I don’t know, because somehow I managed to avoid them. It was everything else I couldn’t stay away from.
The boss has a double life-bar. He relentlessly throws purple orbs at you. When they hit you they hold you mostly in place. This gives him the time to hit you with another orb…and then a third. Once he hits you three times he can one hit kill you.
If you manage to get past taking down his first life-bar, he adds blood puddles to the ground, which also catch you and hold you in place. This gives him the opportunity to walk right up to you, pick you up, and suck life out of you to replenish his life-bars. Yep. Not only does his second life-bar replenish, his first one does, too. This is the part of the game when a smart person gives up, because your lame normal arrows will never take him down.
If you are some sort of video game pro, once you defeat him it’s not over. You have to run around the holes in the floor to get to a specific spot to hit X in order to trigger a cutscene. The boss is still able to attack you, and if you die before getting to the hot spot, you have to fight the whole boss battle over again.
I can’t believe I thought this was one of my favorite horror games at one point.
In the meantime, we get to see the pop singer perform for the party—a song that sounds totally like the Sinitta 1988 dance track “Cross My Broken Heart”, only in Spanish.
