Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within

"The Ultimate Test of Patience."

I had never played the first Clock Tower game but based on the some of the rave reviews about it, and my checking up on the FAQs of the it, I thought that this game is interesting, which in turn prompted me to buy the game-Clock Tower: The Struggle Within. Maybe, the first game is great but for this game: The Struggle Within, it is a waste of money, a test of patience and is just a scam to spin money off the Clock Tower franchise.

Story 3/10 – Alyssa, the heroine of this game has split personality, one is kind and meek, while another is cruel and bashful. She was adopted by the Tate family and one day, she returned home to find things have gone seriously wrong.

The story starts off well at first, since split personality is an interesting concept and finding some gruesome stuff when exploring around makes one want to find out what exactly happened. However, after the first part of the story in the house, the rest of the story goes down the toilet. While the story starts off like a supernatural one, it turns out at the second part of the game that the cause is a scientific one, some virus thing, you know, which is something like RE, I was expecting something more original than that. Also, the events are in a mess and most of them don’t make any sense, when you finished the game, there is no sense of achievement at all because there are many loose ends in the story and some important events are never explained. Also, many of the characters are redundant in the game, there are no background information on them and they don’t serve much purpose to the progress of the story. Seems to me like the game designers just put in the characters for the purpose of achieving their lame multiple endings but are too lazy to add more depth to them.

Oh yes, the 13 endings, while it may sounds interesting to have so many endings, but most of them are no different from each other. While I can understand the reason that there is only one good ending, two ambiguous endings while others are bad ones, is to let players aim towards the goal of getting the best ending, but the other endings just simply lack the variety and creativity to be warranted as “endings”. For goodness sake, why can’t the game designers let Alyssa die in various ways in different endings, instead of letting her just being stabbed to death in almost every ending. There is no quality death scene in this game at all, which simply reflects the designers’ lack of effort in this game. Even a B grade movie shows more imagination in the death scenes than this game.

Another thing about the story is that nothing in the story suggests that it is related to the first game in any way, none of the places, events and characters are mentioned to this game at all. This makes me wonder why this game is considered a Clock Tower game, just because the gameplay is similar does not warrant it to be a sequel. It is like trying to relate Dino Crisis to RE by giving Dino Crisis the name: Resident Evil – Dinosaurs. Well, you get the idea.

Gameplay 2/10 – This game does have some intense moments but other than that, the gameplay have hardly any merits to it. The point and click system is simple to use but was implemented poorly, the mouse moves painfully slow across the screen and that is enough to let this game get a zero for gameplay since the mouse is the bread and butter of this game. There is no way in which you can get through the game faster by running because everything, including moving about depends on that slow moving mouse. Oh yes, and you use the mouse to control your gun also by moving the mouse onto the target, which totally lacks the excitement you have when you just aim and press action to blast the evil creatures to pieces in RE and Silent Hill. Also, you have to turn into Bates to be able to use the gun, so meaning you have to painstaking find a place to place the amulet and then run several halls down to find an enemy to confront with, so as to turn into Bates and THEN, go through many rooms again to find that beloved gun. Wow, I never knew using a gun in a videogame could be that troublesome. Another thing is that once you use the gun and after you turn back to Alyssa, the gun is gone forever. The only interesting part in the action department is the use of conventional objects like chairs, pots, etc to hit your enemy BUT these items are not littered everywhere so sometimes, you will find yourself running through countless of rooms and halls just to find a pot to wrack your enemy with, that is not very fun to do so, right?

As for the health of your character, well, there are 3 levels to it: healthy, not so healthy and danger, sounds standard. HOWEVER, in order to turn to Bates, you have to confront an enemy without fighting back which also causes the health to go into not so healthy, so two more times and Bates will be history. This is where the problem comes; Bates cannot pick up health items…only Alyssa can…oh well, what more can I say about this?

Not only the action part of this game is seriously flawed; even the puzzles failed to redeem this game. The puzzles require trial and error and switching between Bates and Alyssa. There is no sense of satisfaction after solving the puzzles since only patience is required to check every thing in every room as both Alyssa and Bates. Sometimes, the puzzles can even cause extreme frustration as you can only place the amulet in some specific places, sometimes, you have to go through several halls to just find a place to put your amulet. Hmm, why can’t I just put my amulet anywhere, like that shelf over there instead of going a long way down to the kitchen sink to put the amulet? Obviously, not much logic is put into making of this game.

Controls 1/10 – Four words to describe the controls: The mouse is slow. The mouse executes all functions and since it is slow, this means that the game is slow. The inventory list is on the upper left corner, so just imagine slowly dragging the mouse right over to there, this is a waste of time. Not to mention when you are in a critical situation like when the enemy is attacking or moving towards you, and your mouse is still a long way from the destination, ouch, that is going to hurt. In addition, the gun always lock on the wrong place (the gun must lock on the critical spot to do damage on the enemy) and it is impossible to move away from that spot after lock on, so what is the point of using a gun? The controls are very unresponsive so expect to spend plenty of hours tackling the controls and trying to do the correct action at the right time.

Sounds 3/10 – The voice acting is far below standard, they sounds monotonous and cheesy. There is not much of background music to bring out the mood of the game.

Graphics 3/10 – The graphics in this game is not considered as an eyesore but it is far from decent. The colour coordination is okay but the backgrounds and characters look very bland and washed-out, lack dimension and look just plain boring. Some parts of the background do look quite eerie but that is not enough to make up for other flaws of the graphics. In fact, some characters look like a bunch of Pinocchio.

Conclusion: This game can be considered as The Ultimate Test of your Patience. Frankly speaking, there are enough things in our life that test our patience; there is no need to waste the money to further test our patience. If you are a very patient person, then you may like this game, if not, then you better stay clear of this game.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 10/03/02, Updated 10/15/02