Series Clock Tower was never among the best and most popular games, but deservedly managed to become one of the most important game series that created an entire genre survival-horror. A thrilling symbiosis of fear and a sense of adventure, the ability to survive and at the same time admire the beautiful design and unique atmosphere, inspired by classic horror films, including the work of the great director Dario Argente.
The first games in this series, in my humble opinion, are still one of the benchmarks in the genre. A tense, mysterious and gloomy atmosphere, a feeling of constant persecution, a detective-mystical story, as well as first-class jump scares and frightening moments.
Gameplay based mainly on the game of hide and seek and running away from the monster. Gameplay that was more interesting and varied than many modern analogues.
Alas, the unfriendliness towards the casual player, inconvenient controls, the modest technological component of the games in the series and the small amount of action did not give the series the opportunity to become well-selling and very popular. And the last part of the franchise completely killed everything good that the fans loved about it. The series died around 2003.
But we live in a time when everything cult and once forgotten is being brought back to life in one way or another. Back in January 2015, Hifumi Kono, one of the main creators Clock Tower and director of the first two games in the series, announced the start of development of its spiritual successor and launched a kickstater campaign. A game that originally had a simple name Project Scissors, eventually released in March 2016 under the name NightCry.
Many eminent and worthy people from the video game and film industry took part in the development of the game. Just take a look at this powerful list:
• Kiyoshi Arai – art director for Tenchu 2, Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy XIV.
• Masahiro Ito – Silent Hill monster designer. Known as the creator of Pyramid Head and Bubble Head Nurse.
• Takashi Shimizu – director of the horror film series “The Grudge” (Ju-On: The Grudge).
• Nobuko Toda – composer of the Metal Gear Solid series, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and Halo 4.
• Kensuke Matsui – sound designer for the Metal Gear Solid and Dragon’s Dogma series.
• Akira Uchiyama – https://casinomfortune.uk/ animation director for The Evil Within, Bayonetta and Vanquish.
• Shinji Aramaki – director of the animated films Appleseed and Space Pirate Captain Harlock, as well as director of CG videos for Sonic Unleashed, Steel Batallion 2 and Tekken 7.
At the same time, many other well-known Japanese developers, including Shinji Mikami, Koji Igorashi and others, supported the creators of NightCry with their kind words, which, of course, was a kind of advertising for the project, which already had many talented people. The project also had sufficient support in the press.
As a result, having collected 314.000 dollars, they made and released, after less than a year and a half of development, a game so bad and ridiculous that its release remained almost unnoticed by most – apparently everyone was ashamed of this game. And even now I still have a hard time believing in her half-dead existence. There are so many famous and seemingly high-quality creators, but NightCry turned out to be poor in almost every aspect.
Let’s begin to study the product itself in order, and let’s call the case that way –
CREATIVE SUICIDE OF THE GREAT JAPANESE MASTERS.
Basic concept NightCry she got it from Clock Tower – we play as three characters (one of which, naturally, is a stupid busty blonde) and run away from a scary invincible monster chasing the player with huge scissors at the ready. The action mainly takes place on a cruise ship, and therefore we expect mostly confined spaces and small rooms.
Playing as different characters, we basically run around the cabins and rooms of the ship, trying not only to escape from the monster and various mystical killing game, but also figuring out what is happening here, where all this mysticism came from, and what to do with it.
The gameplay is extremely simple, and, apparently, the authors did not want to improve or add anything to the concept created back in the mid-90s. Basically, we either wander around lifeless locations in search of the right path and solutions to simple riddles in order to progress further in the plot, or we run away from a monster with huge scissors, from which there are two ways to escape – hide in some closet or under the bed, or use some object to distract. Sooner or later the monster finds you again and the running continues.
Already in the first minutes of the game we notice several disturbing, interesting and frightening situations and moments. And here, of course, there will be well-staged scripted moments, such as a receptionist itching until he bleeds or an unpleasant old woman whispering in our ear, and the appearance of the main villain is sometimes amusing and frightening at the same time. But all this falls to pieces as soon as we begin to observe the work of the animators and game designers.
First of all, I would like to praise Akira Uchiyama. Well, just look at these magnificent animations of the characters’ movements and conversations. Starting from the movement of the main character and the levitation of the monster, ending with awkward death scenes.
Hifumi Kono invited Uchiyama to his project also because in his games he prefers to make female characters the protagonists, which means that the person who was responsible for the beautiful and smooth movements of the graceful Bayoneta would be ideal for animating the movements of the two main characters in NightCry. However, the master’s hand is not particularly noticeable here. Sometimes it gets to the point where the animation of some actions seems to skip several important frames. For example, one moment the heroine is running, and the next she is lying on the ground. It is also noticeable that camera angles during cutscenes are chosen in such a way as to hide the lack of animation in general.
Of course, there are times when some twitchiness in animation, as an artistic device, can frighten. But, firstly, here this is clearly a consequence of cheap hack work, and not a stylistic author’s decision, and secondly, it rather causes disgust or a smile from Spanish shame, rather than making you scared.
With scares, the game is also very uneven, although among the huge number of screamers and jumpers there are more or less successful ones, although there are few of them. The problem is that, basically, every time the evil spirits hunting you appear, you rather feel irritated, because most of the appearances are poorly staged – like this scene, for example, when you are simply shown the face of the heroine, who simply heard the monster approaching and opened her mouth.
The running errands and hide and seek themselves are implemented almost worse than in the same Clock Tower, what else was on PS1. Many moments from there still give me not only chills, but also admiration for how atmospheric and full of creativity those scenes were. Especially the scenes when the monster appears. And even that hunchbacked dwarf with scissors had a better set of moves than the mystical "herobora" from NightCry. And I’m not the one calling you names, just in case. It’s really very difficult to figure out what the scarecrows here actually are. What material is the main monster with scissors made of?!? What is this? Is it all hair or is it some weird choice of textures for the cape??
And does this thing have a cape?? Something clearly flutters when moving, but it’s all just some kind of black and muddy mess, dressed in a hood. In addition, we will also meet cultists, the ghost of a little girl, a whispering old woman. Moreover, there is almost no connection between them. And their appearance in the plot has almost no explanation.
But I could live with this if the design of the monsters was at least somewhat interesting. But he’s no good. Not scary and not creative at all. But the monster designer here is the legendary Masahiro Ito – the one responsible for the first Silent Hill games. In particular, it was he who came up with the great pyramid-headed. No matter how brilliant an artist and designer he was before, he has now clearly lost his spark, or is simply working through immeasurably huge sleeves. Empty, unscary, unprincipled, deeply secondary and just a weak-looking craft. In general, it’s high time for Masahiro Ito to write off good game designers. For example, his last work, published after NightCry, there was a design part Metal Gear Survive. Apparently, out of old friendship with Konami, he drew them zombies for mgsabezKojima. And judging by the developer diaries, in NightCry Masahiro Ito drew only one monster for him.
By the way, Nobuko Toda And Kensuke Matsui, that they were once the composer and sound designer of the series Metal Gear Solid, also worked on NightCry. But their participation is almost invisible. There is little music here, and what there is is rather weak ambient, as if taken from free access banks. The sound effects also don’t grab stars from the sky, but rather from the bottom of the sea. And this again seems especially strange and wrong, because the sound part of the game also had a hand in Michiru Yamane, one of the series composers Castlevania, including Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and even more than that, but a series of beautiful and varied music Castlevania has always been famous.
In general, among the declared talents, the only person who actually did a good job was Kiyoshi Arai, who was responsible for the art and concepts of characters and locations. But even this work was wasted due to the unpleasant appearance of the final product.
The direction and staging of everything, and even more so the scripted scenes, looks as if they were directed by a mentally retarded sloth, but Shinji Aramaki, director Space Pirate Harlock and rollers Tekken 7 I definitely wasn’t involved in them, no matter what the kickstarter company told us NightCry.
And of course, as is usual in such projects, the main horror and main enemy of the player here is the camera and unbearably inconvenient controls.
All the dampness and carelessness of the technical component and weak gameplay could be perfectly smoothed out by the game’s story itself and interesting characters – there are many excellent examples of such situations when only the plot and its components saved the game, turning it into, at a minimum, an interesting work of art. For example, the same Deadly Premonition, for all its crookedness and external ugliness, it firmly held the screen with an intriguing and well-presented narrative. NightCry – this is not such an example. Maybe if there was more coherence and overall meaning in what was happening on the screen. But, alas, all these wonderful video game creators who were involved in the creation NightCry, It’s unlikely that they really wanted to make a good game, and therefore they openly neglected its story.
The characters are static, the dialogue is stupid and clumsy, it’s simply impossible to believe in them.
And this thesis can be applied to the entire game – it’s simply hard to believe that such eminent developers, although working independently and on small budgets, would make such a frankly bad game. And how just another survival-horror and even more so as an heiress Clock Tower.
NightCry – this is a very crude, in some places irritatingly outdated product, where everything is bad – from animation to controls, proposed solutions and character dialogues.
Almost immediately after its release, everyone forgot about the game – the developers, publishers, the fan community, and critics. Everyone turned away in shame. And this is the fact that the game, after only two years, has been forgotten even by fans of the series Clock Tower, there is the biggest advantage of worthlessness NightCry. True, it is unlikely that we will ever see a truly worthy successor to the series Clock Tower. And this whole bunch of once talented composers, animators and game designers, I hope, just cheated for quick and easy money, and did not commit natural game development suicide.