Being a fan of the other Clock Tower games, I wanted to try this game and it was nothing short of a disappointing experience. One thing I noticed right off the bat was that this game was made by capcom, not Human Interactive/ASCII like the other Clock Tower games were. When you play the game, you notice the fact that the game feels a little more like Resident Evil than Clock Tower. It just feels more like a Capcom sort of game which isn't necessarily bad but this is supposed to be Clock Tower, not some sort of kin to Resident Evil.
The "point and click" gameplay isn't present in this game and I wouldn't have a problem with that if the game were actually worth playing through. If you've played the other Clock Tower games, you'll see how stupid the story in this game has gotten. In the other games, it felt more like a slasher movie while this game feels more like a psychological thriller/horror movie.
The story of the game is basically that your main character, Alyssa, is the only one who can cleanse the souls of murderers and so forth since apparently only teenage girls can do it and yes, it actually says that in the game. So the whole time I'm playing I'm thinking,"what does this have to do with Scissorman and the massacre in Norway?" Well, pretty much nothing and you hardly ever even see Scissorman throughout the whole game. Instead you are given the worthless task of ridding evil souls with your holy magical bow. Yes, that actually happens in the game too.
You will be chased in standard Clock Tower fare throughout the game by various killers while also being able to hide as you could in the previous games. This wouldn't be so bad but with this game, it's just boring. With the other Clock Tower games, there was a genuine sense of urgency and fear but not with this game. None of the villains ever scared me at all. One carries a hammer and looks like a barbarian and others include a psycho who wears a gas mask and a nozzle that sprays poison and a freakish tattooed looking man wielding two axes who looks like he belongs in a different game. What's worse is that the axe wielding villain can throw his axes which is bad when you have such a slow moving character as Alyssa.
You go through each level the same way, getting chased by murderers, find some key items, watch some cutscenes and the worst is how you end the level. At the end of each level Alyssa is granted a magical bow that is given mysteriously from the sky and using this bow is your only means of defeating enemies. If that's the case then why didn't they give her this "holy bow" in the first damn place? What kinda crap is this? Now all this wouldn't be so bad if it were a different game but this is supposed to be a Clock Tower game and I've seen very little in relation to those games.
The game has new features like being able to use holy water on enemies for a temporary escape, which I thought was a decent feature but others feel pointless or just annoying, like the panic meter constantly being a pain in the ass. It's a stupid feature which whenever Alyssa gets scared(which is all the time), the meter will fill up and once full, Alyssa becomes hard to control and often times, she will just start standing there in fear even if an enemy is right next to her which can result in a lot of stupid deaths. You can find items which help to deplete the panic meter but without those items you'll see just how stupid and annoying it is. That and it defies logic, so if you were being chased by some crazed killer would you just suddenly stop running as if to say, "that's it, my life is over, go ahead and kill me"?
Like I said before, if this were it's own standalone game it might be passable but for a game that bears "Clock Tower" in it's name, I fail to see the resemblance of fear.