Turn Back The Clock Tower: NightCry Released
Running with scissors
NightCry [official site], which arrived on PC yesterday, is a spiritual sequel to the Clock Tower games, created by a team with original series creator Kono Hifumi at its head. Although it looks like a 3d survival horror game, it apparently hews closer to Clock Tower's point and click origins rather than the slightly more action-heavy Clock Tower 3 and Haunting Ground. Reviews on Steam are 'mixed' at the moment but I'd like to investigate for myself.
If I was going to be mean, I'd say that looks a bit rubbish and sounds even worse - does that one bit of voice acting say something about joining a world of no worms? - but there's a much kinder part of me that reckons all the jankiness might lend a certain VHS video nasty vibe to the game.
Polish and high-tech visuals can be the death of a good horror game, reliant as they so often are on a certain uncanny visual sensibility that can suffer from the loss of rough edges.
That said, NightCry's mobile aspirations/origins (delete as appropriate) are evident. The game hasn't actually been released on any mobile platforms yet but the Kickstarter campaign that succeeded last year was to fund this PC port of what would otherwise have been a mobile-only game.
As soon as I've managed to clear some space in my ever-busy schedule of hacking, slashing and strategising, I'll see if I can find time to run with the scissors.
NightCry is available on Playism and Steam for Windows.