One of the things I’ve learned pretty well over this generation, as developers have been bringing old classics back to experience once again, is that it can be tough to go back to earlier days. While I never played it back when it came out, I’d always heard of Clock Tower, which people had to import at the time, being an early-days horror classic. Now it has been brought back on the Switch, with the developer going the extra mile to get it translated to English, add a great animated opening, throw in some comic-style cutscenes, as well as additional assets to enjoy from a more preservationist angle.

The story is relatively simple to start, with you controlling Jennifer, an orphan who has been brought to the creepy Barrows family manor with the promise of a better life. Of course, things pretty quickly go bad, and you’ll spend the rest of the game trying to explore the house in an old-school point-and-click adventure sort of style. Your challenge will be to avoid the murderous Scissorman as you go, who has a very large and lethal set of shears that he’d love to cut you to bits with.

You’ll have the option to play the game as it was originally released, or the updated Rewind version, which does have some of the enhancements mentioned above. The thing is, even enhanced, you’ll really need to lower your likely expectations for how the game will play. Even having played quite a number of oddly-implemented titles over the years, Clock Tower may be one of the most unusual. You’ll need to use your joystick to move a cursor around the areas you’ll walk through in order to find elements you can inspect or act on, but the use of the trigger buttons to move right and left, and then your action button are a bit odd. 

If you’re patient you’ll be able to ride things out, though you’ll likely meet your demise with some regularity given how incapable you typically feel when things get hairy. Multiple endings await if you persist, so in that sense there’s some replayability here, but you really will need to dial back your expectations to get some enjoyment out of it. For the people who played it back in the days of its original release, I have no doubt there’ll be a nostalgic pull to check it out once again, and previously familiarity would likely help some of the game’s choices seem less odd, but for more modern gamers I’d say this one is worth checking out some videos and opinions for first, since its style is undoubtedly tough to get used to.