Let’s Play Clock Tower! I honestly didn’t think that games could be creepy or legitimately scary on the early consoles, but Clock Tower proved me wrong.
Let’s Play Clock Tower:
It definitely didn’t help that I played this game at night in an empty house while house sitting for a friend. I have a tendency to get a bit jumpy when I see my virtual fictional friends being disemboweled right in front of my eyes.
Seriously though, this game was pretty twisted; I got to hand it to the developers for making an SNES game skin crawling.
You play as Jennifer, an orphan who thinks her life is about to get so much better after being adopted into a seemingly well to do household, a mansion more specifically, with a few of her best friends from the orphanage.
Little does she know not only her true but sad birthright, but that her and her friends have only been adopted to be the victims of their newly adoptive parents’ psychotic murderous children.
The game isn’t just jump scares, sure there’s a number of those as it’s kind of impossible unfortunately to make a horror game without them it seems, or better said it seems like it’s too difficult for most developers and writers to make something scary without them, but there’s just a great deal of anxiety and dread which is produced from the anticipation of the jump scares and what fucked up things you’ll stumble upon next.
I don’t want to give anything away, but there are at least a couple of twists which I really wasn’t expecting or ready for.
It also has a cool feature where there are not only a number of different endings, but the game randomizes which events will happen to you when you begin the game, so not only does this add to the incentive to replay the game to get a different ending or experience, but it adds to that anxiety of not knowing exactly what’s going to happen to you when, even when it’s your third or fourth time playing it.
To its credit, this game stuck with me for a while and is much clearer in my memory than most of the games I played for the first time on this channel and didn’t grow up with.