Clock Tower

It lacks the usual framing that comes with a point-and-click adventure, ignoring a general guiding question in favor of understated wandering and seemingly tangential puzzle design. Few rooms in the Barrows Mansion direct the player towards any method of escape, but perhaps they don’t need to; main character Jennifer Simpson can hightail it out of the mansion in minutes by starting up the car in the garage, which has its keys conveniently left nearby. If you choose not to, she’s left to meander, leafing through old books and dusting off unused furniture. The mansion’s two wings, west and east, sit parallel to one another in a neat arrangement of hallways, with the camera facing the inside and its pool courtyard. The entrance to this, an inexpliably collapsed corridor between wings with a unsteady brick wall on one side, seems to face the outside of the mansion based on the position of the camera; between this incongruity, the nondescript hallways, and the rotation of rooms between playthroughs, the mansion leaves a woozy impression, never quite locking into place even over the course of a single campaign.

This plays well into the hands of Scissorman, the game’s innovative stalker character. In two of the best scenes in the game, Scissorman introduces himself from separate directions: by crashing through a stained glass ceiling and impaling Jennifer’s adopted sister Anne on his eponymous scissors, and by emerging from the water if Jennifer finds sister Laura strangled and hanging within a running shower. Jennifer’s portrait, which sits on-screen to show her current condition, zooms in on her eye in these scenes, complementing the horrific close-ups that the game switches to on each scare. Once he’s been let loose, Scissorman is relentless, snipping slowly as he drops in from ceiling tiles and creaks open doors to delay-soaked sirens and whirring bass. Hiding in any number of possible, unmarked survival spots will cause him to cut the chase and disappear. Unfortunately, the places he can appear are also pre-determined, and between my two playthroughs,¹ he only appeared twice apiece, making him a non-issue for most of the exploration side of the playthrough. While this is supposedly altered to make him more aggressive in the game’s two expanded rereleases (The First Fear and Rewind), shutting him down is too simple in this original release, especially since the game autosaves often and lets you experiment with the chase sequences to your heart’s content.

Once the player regains control after Jennifer has been frightened, they can run away or mash through an encounter with Scissorman, knocking him on his back. The same mashing is required in an extended escape sequence and boss battle within the Cradle Under The Star at the end of the game, seemingly to avoid putting too much strain on the simple point-and-click interface. [src]

The underlying structure is more clear at the end: you need perfume and a black robe to get past a sleeping dog in a cavern beneath the mansion, and you need whatever item will open a hatch into the cavern, whether it’s a scepter in the music room or a demon idol sitting in the hallway. With such minimal requirements to get some valid ending (not even counting leaving in the car, which itself is two separate endings), the game instead “scores” you based on how thoroughly you scour the mansion. Interacting with seemingly useless objects causes scripted downstream effects, making necessary items appear in otherwise empty locations or adding new interaction cues in other places. In some cases this logically tracks, such as having Jennifer try to get over a cabinet on her own before using a crate to step up, while some are inscrutable and vestigial, such as the secret padded cell being hollowed out on playthroughs where presumably getting locked in the outside hut will set up flags for the best ending. Rewarding for multiple playthroughs, certainly, but untangling the knot of internal logic has much less intrigue attached the longer the player is unbothered by Scissorman.