Just three more days until I find out my degree classification. Must do anything to keep my mind occupied until then.

I just got to the end (one ending, anyway) of the SNES game Clock Tower. I believe all of its sequels have been released in English, but the original is only available as a fan translation. It's one of the earliest survival horror titles, released before Resident Evil (by half a year) but after Sweet Home and several Alone in the Dark games.

This game is full of brilliant ideas, and on the surface it does a lot that appeals to me. You play a girl trapped in a mansion and being chased by a little boy with a massive pair of scissors. Your only defenses against the boy when he's chasing you are to run away, hide in various places in the scenery where he might still find you, and (if desperate) to try and fend off his scissor attack in the hope of temporarily knocking him over. These chase scenes are few and far between, but they're surprisingly tense; the variety and detail of the rooms helps to really sell the feeling of running through a house desperately trying to find somewhere to hide. This was released late in the SNES's life and clearly had excellent production values. The rest of the game is a simplistic point and click adventure, where your character must check the scenery to find items and then use them in certain places to progress.

This game has several major flaws. One, your walking speed is insanely slow, and the amount of walking you need to do is immense. (You can run, but the game punishes you for running, so the feature might as well not be there.) I literally spent half the game holding down the fast forward button on my emulator, otherwise it would have been too boring to bother playing. Two, the amount of area you can explore feels huge considering how few interactive elements and items there are. There's just too much wandering and backtracking involved, and the overly simplistic interface for using items makes for a frustrating experience.

The biggest problem is just how little there is to it. They focused on making a lot of different endings (there are nine) to increase replay value, but there are so few items to pick up and use that if everything was less spread out and the interface was less clunky, a single playthrough would be over in about twenty minutes.

The multiple ending system is clever in some ways, but mostly it's just painfully arbitrary. The game world seems to change around you based on player actions, in ways that grind causality into a fine pulp. For example, certain characters will be dead only if you interact with the right scenery to reveal their corpses; if you never find the corpses they will still be alive later on. Even more bizarrely, the entire contents of one room (a corpse and some notes that reveal plot details) will be completely missing if you go to a certain other room first, and this will lead to a different ending. It's like Resident Evil 3's "enter by door A for one ending, enter by door B for the other ending" but multiplied by nine.

I'd actually quite like to replay it and see more of the endings (the game even keeps track of which ones you've achieved), as well as figure out more of the hiding places. Unfortunately it feels like too much of a chore, and I'd never have worked out the mechanics for the different endings without checking a guide anyway, which in turn has spoiled me on all on them. Ah well, it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours, and a start on broadening my experience of the survival horror genre beyond Resident Evil. Hopefully at some point I'll come across a game with the same tense atmosphere and basic mechanics as Clock Tower, but longer and without all the frustration. (If only the PS1 sequel wasn't so expensive to buy used...)