In Japan, this game is known as Clock Tower: Ghost Head, for clarification.
A lot of people didn’t like this game because of the fact that it is a point-and-click survival horror game, but it was one of my first introductions to the survival horror genre as a child, and I managed to play it all the way through to the A ending (which is the best ending that you can get in the game, meaning that you played it all the way through). The one thing that stood out to me, and made the entire game worth it, was managing to get that far and realizing that you were actually playing the role of the antagonist without becoming aware until the very end. Without ever becoming aware until events at the end of the game forced her to become aware, Alyssa Hale was one of two “cursed babies” born to the Maxwell line, and she and her sibling were initially buried with the intent to kill them and stop the curse until who for all intents and purposes became her father, Allen, digs the children up and realizes that one of them is still alive. He raises Alyssa as his daughter. Alyssa, having the split personality of Mr. Bates — who could have been the soul of the baby who didn’t make it transplanted into her body, or just a side effect of the “Maxwell curse”, even though this is never explained — is the antagonist of the game, and although she is one of very few survivors at the end since her “father figure” shoots her biological father and demands that she escape the building that they are in before it explodes, she still manages to survive in spite of everything that happened.
One of the other redeeming things is the stellar soundtrack, especially what rolls if you get the A ending.
If you’re willing to put up with an old game that has some peculiar… semantics about it, especially the whole point-and-click bit, the fact that it strayed so far from the usual survival horror narrative actually does make it a good game. You just have to be willing to put up with the fact that for today’s graphics, it is an old game.
