![]() ![]() Slender: The Eight Pages and its sequel, Slender: The Arrival, both star a villain who can teleport at random, and whose attack patterns change as the game progresses. The developers behind the 2014 game Alien: Isolation, which features a similarly unpredictable antagonist, cite Clock Tower as one of their main inspirations. The more that Jennifer tries to escape, the more trapped and vulnerable she becomes.Ĭlock Tower taps into the same kind of tension-something that other games are only starting to explore. A potential savior tries to drug Jennifer, then locks her in the house with the killer. Her father’s agent won’t give her the money she needs to return home. In Phenomena, Jennifer’s teachers want to lock her up in an asylum. Sure, Phenomena is gory, but its horror doesn’t rely on jump scares or shock value. That gives Clock Tower a sense of both entrapment and relentless pursuit, which are Argento’s trademarks. Read More: A Brief History of Retro Horror Gaming The only way to calm Jennifer’s nerves is to find a quiet and safe place and rest-which leaves her open to unexpected attacks. While panicked, Jennifer is more likely to fail at future attempts to protect herself, and tends to trip and fall while running away from her attacker. Worse, after a close encounter, Jennifer panics. ![]() If Bobby (or one of the Clock Tower’s other assailants) gets too close, players can defend themselves by mashing the B button, but that only grants a temporary reprieve. As mentioned before, Jennifer can’t fight. Clock Tower never gets quite as weird as Phenomena -in the film, Jennifer teams up with an entomologist and a chimp and has a psychic link with insects-but in terms of overall plot and tone, they’re very, very similar.Īs Jennifer, Clock Tower players must explore the labyrinthine “Clock Tower” mansion in order to rescue Jennifer’s friends and escape before a murderous little tyke (technically named Bobby, but more commonly known as Scissorman) kills them all. In Phenomena, Jennifer is hunted by a deformed, blade-wielding child, whose diligent mother covers up his crimes. ![]() Clock Tower unfolds in a sprawling Norwegian mansion. ![]() Most of Phenomena takes place in a Swiss boarding school. Clock Tower‘s main character, an orphan named Jennifer Simpson, looks and dresses exactly like Phenomena‘s hero, Jennifer Corvino (played by a very, very young Jennifer Connelly). In order to survive, she has to hide until the danger passes.Ĭlock Tower derives most of its tension from that kind of vulnerability. While Resident Evil gives characters Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine a full arsenal and features a robust combat engine, Clock Tower‘s hero can’t fight at all. Players control the main character using a cursor, even though Clock Tower was built specifically for the gamepad-equipped Super Famicom (Nintendo released a mouse peripheral for the Super Famicom, but Clock Tower doesn’t use it). Clock Tower is, quite literally, a point-and-click adventure game. Meanwhile, Clock Tower, which came out a year before Resident Evil, takes Alone in the Dark‘s gameplay back to its adventure game roots. Silent Hill, which hit the PlayStation a few years later, uses fully 3D environments and focuses more on Lynchian surrealism than jump scares and gore, but follows the same basic model. Resident Evil, which debuted in 1996, follows Alone in the Dark‘s template almost exactly, even adapting the same B-movie tropes as its predecessor. Read More: Silent Hill, BioShock, and the Art of Scary Games And yet, in the past half-decade or so, more and more games are playing with the ideas that Clock Tower first explored over twenty years ago. Silent Hill is all but dead following the collapse of Guillermo Del Toro and Hideo Kojima’s reboot, Silent Hills. Recent Resident Evil games turned into schlocky action titles, not horror games, before Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil 2 reverted the franchise back to its roots. In hindsight, Clock Tower is also uncannily prophetic about survival horror’s future. Ĭlock Tower may not be a massive franchise like Resident Evil or Silent Hill, but it’s just as terrifying as either of those games. It’s also the inspiration for Scissorman, one of the most memorable villains in video game history and the star of 1995’s unsettling survival horror point-and-click adventure Clock Tower. It’s a brutal and strange beginning to an even stranger movie, and it’s a perfect jumping off point for one of Argento’s best films. A serial killer stabs the teenager repeatedly with a pair of scissors, then shoves her through a second-story window. She finds a house and enters, looking for help. In the opening moments of Dario Argento‘s Phenomena, a young traveler stumbles through the woods, abandoned by her tour bus. ![]()
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