Clock Tower 3 wasn’t exactly the greatest game in the world, but it did one thing perfectly, one thing that has kept it stuck in my mind for years — cutscenes. To many, the art of the cutscene is worth more sneering than praise, but I love a good video now and then, and the sequences in Clock Tower 3 were among the most harrowing you could find.
The series has always excelled at creating disturbing, genuinely menacing enemies to stalk and terrify the player, and the introductory scenes for each of Clock Tower 3‘s villains did an amazing job of setting them up to be very frightening customers.
Take, for example, The Corrodor. Based on real-life “acid bath murderer” John Haigh, this mask-wearing monster makes one of the most memorable entrances in videogame history. It’s shockingly brutal, even in spite of the aged visuals, and you don’t get scenes quite so darkly blunt as this anymore. There’s no real “style” to this guy. He’s not designed to look cool and sleek like so many bad guys in games. He just barges in like a genuine maniac and … well … you’ll see. I can’t help but laugh at how much this guy loves what he’s doing, yet it’s still kind of chilling at the same time.
Seriously, for all the problems with this game, it still has some horrific sequences that made for some of of the most intimidating encounters I can recall, and I figured you’d all like a reminder.
