Point and Click horror games were always a favorite of mine. Sure, the gameplay is HORRIBLY limited, but they always managed to tell such interesting stories and have some creepy and disturbing monsters and images. Games like Sanitarium, Darkseed, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (NOT FUCKING FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S) were all favorites of mine. However, the game that started the point and click horror craze and launched horror games into the mainstream was a little SNES game, that was so disturbing and violent that it never got released in America until a few years later. That game we now know as Clock Tower.



The game follows a young orphan named Jennifer who is adopted by a man by the name of Mr. Barrows. They are taken to his mansion by a woman known as Miss Mary, who leaves Jennifer and her three friends, Laura, Anne, and Lotte, in the mansion to find Mr. Barrows. However, oce Jennifer leaves the room, the game suddenly becomes scary. So, throughout the game, you need to go around the mansion, saving as much of your friends as possible while solving puzzles. Your friends will start to turn up dead all around you, and you need to try and find a way out. Sadly, there’s just one problem with this game… YOU MOVE SO SLOW! No joke, I Think Jennifer may be a contestant for the slowest video game character ever. She walks at a snail's pace, so it’s good to know that there is a run button, because if not, then this game may never end. Now, I know I’ve been stalling long enough of what the game's main enemy is. So, here we go… The Scissor Man



The Scissorman, also known as Bobby Barrows, is a small, wrinkled man with large scissors that chases Jennifer around the mansion and kills one or two of Jennifer’s friends if you’re not careful. The Scissorman will follows you and the best thing you can do is hide from him, as he is not able to be attacked. In fact, I think the Scissorman started the whole trend of horror game monsters that chase you and are indestructible. Think about it, there’s Nemesis from Resident Evil 3, Lisa Trevor from Resident Evil: Remake, Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2, The Hunter from Dead Space, the Xenomorph from Alien: Isolation, and yes, the animatronics from (Ugh) Five Nights at Freddy’s. I think Scissorman started that trend, and here… Yeah, it’s still fucking scary. And then.. There’s the story of the game. Also spoilers from Clock Tower. I’m sure it won’t matter, since this was a Japanese SNES game that never got released and no one cares anymore… But spoilers anyway.



So, as it turns out, Miss Mary is actually working with the Barrows in an attempt to murder the girls to the two Barrows children, Bobby and Dan (We’ll get to the other one soon). If you run into Mary without figuring this out, she’ll drug you and lock you in a cage with Mr. Barrows, who's become a psychotic cannibal. You’ll need to find some ham before this happens and feed it to him, or you might as well kill yourself. Also, while I’m on the subject, be careful not to screw up, because death in this game means you need to go back to the beginning, so you’d better not screw up. Anyway, there is a way to avoid being drugged by Miss Mary. The only way to do so is to find the corpse of Jennifer’s father in a secret cell. As it turns out, he had come here to help with the birth of the Barrows children, and when he saw that they were evil demons, he was left to die in the cell… That’s the only thing I don’t get. I mean, Jennifer’s father was the one that died and Jennifer happened to be adopted into the same house where her father was… what an incredibly huge coincidence. Once you find this out and find Miss Mary, you’ll already know that she’s… A crazy bitch. And then she’ll try to stab you, so you’d best run out. After that, it’s just “Collect this and that and avoid the Scissorman”. Once you’ve found all the necessary items, a door to the Catacombs underneath the mansion will open, and here… Here is where you’ll meet Dan. Whose Dan? THIS is Dan!



I think I may never eat again, actually. How did this come out of it’s mother- Actually, I don’t want to know. Anyway, you lead him back through the Catacombs where you lead him to a pool of oil and set him on fire. In the PS1 version of Clock Tower, it shows that it was just a body made of corpses and blood, and the real Dan comes back in the next Clock Tower game… stupid, I know. So after that disturbing shit, you make it to the top of the Clock Tower, where you find that Bobby hates the sound of the clock tower's bells… Not sure why, but he hates them. And then Mary tries to kill you. Depending on what choices you’ve made, either a bird will come and save you and you’ll fucking electrocute her to death on a power box. Either way, you can save at least one of your friends, or you can make it depressing and have no one but Jennifer live (And that’s the canon ending). The other endings are just kinda “You Fucked Up” endings, as I like to call them, because Jennifer dies in them. Weather Scissorman hacks her up in the elevator or you leave in a car and Scissorman is right behind you. However, if you find your friends dead and leave in the car, it will say that Jennifer went back to the orphanage but was found dead a few days later. Was it suicide? Murder? It doesn’t say. It’s probably the most depressing, but the ambiguity makes it my favorite one.



So yeah. Clock Tower for SNES. It was a very simple and hard to play game due to the slow movement and the one life only mechanic, but it was still a unique and interesting horror game for the time. And I’ll definitely say this. It was sure as hell better than the later Clock Tower games we got afterward. I mean… What the hell were those games? But, at least Clock Tower for the SNES will have a part in horror game history, and that’s enough to make it a game worth checking out… or watching some random Youtuber freak out over. Take care.