The fourth and last installment (as of now) in the Clock Tower series, which was co-developed by Capcom and Sunsoft and released in 2002 for PlayStation 2.
You play as Alyssa Hamilton, who, after receiving a foreboding letter from her mother, returns home to find her missing. Her investigations on the matter start sending her into different time periods where she has to confront a variety of evil entities, and possibly her ultimate fate.
Unlike past games, Clock Tower 3 plays more like a classic Resident Evil game rather than a point-and-click adventure and changes the series' tone from supernatural gothic horror to Cosmic Horror with fantasy elements.
The game was not developed by Human Entertainment due to its dissolution in the year 2000, instead it was developed by Sunsoft and published by Capcom.
This game has examples of:
- Abandoned Hospital: You first confront the Scissor Twins in one.
- Age-Restricted Ability: Only teenage girls can manifest Rooder powers to combat supernatural serial killers called Subordinates and their dark master, the Entity.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: The unlockable outfits, including a pretty revealing cowgirl one.
- Artifact Title: The plot does not revolve around a clock tower in this installment, with only one magically appearing in the final battle.
- Artistic License – History
- British man William Norton joins the army and goes to fight against the Germans in World War II in 1942 in the Champagne region of France. British troops had been evacuated from continental Europe in June 1940 and would not return to fight in France until 1944, after D-Day. Alyssa also stumbles into London during a German bombing raid in December 1942. Strategic bombing of England was for the most part halted in June 1941 to shift focus of the use of air force on the invasion of the Soviet Union. The dates simply don't match up.
- The second Subordinate, Corroder, is said to be John Haigh, a real serial killer from the 1940s. This does not match up with the stage taking place in 1962, when the real-life killer died in 1949. Also, while the real John Haigh simply killed his victims normally (typically bludgeoning or shooting), used acid to dispose of the bodies (thinking that with no body, there was no evidence and thus he couldn't be convicted), only killed about six people (although he claimed nine) across five years and was tried and executed for his crimes, Corroder became a full-on comic book villain who sprays acid on his victims or dunks them alive into vats of the stuff, terrorized the countryside killing over 30 people in the span of one year, and died himself by falling into a vat of acid.
- BFS: The final boss has a Final Fantasy-esque broadsword.
- Bittersweet Ending: Alyssa manages to defeat Lord Burroughs by fully awakening her Rooder powers. However, her mother was killed by her corrupted grandfather, and she's now one of the last Rooders alive.
- Black Comedy: There's something very satisfying about throwing open an oven door and causing Scissorwoman to fall right into it face-first.
- No Cutscene Inventory Inertia: Completing the game once unlocks several alternate costumes... but Alyssa will always be wearing the default schoolgirl outfit in cutscenes, whether they're in-game or FMV.
- Dangerous 16th Birthday: More specifically, the Rooders have dangerous 15th birthdays.
- Ephebophile: It's strongly implied that the Big Bad is motivated by a rather unwholesome, obsessive interest in the teenage main character. For extra creepy, he turns out to be the main character's grandfather.
- Evil Gloating: Done by every villain. Sometimes for ten seconds, sometimes for five minutes.
- Fake Difficulty: The game has this at times, with Panic Mode being the biggest offender. Interestingly, the rest of the series doesn't have any major moments of this, besides enemies sometimes appearing without warning. The list includes:
- Panic Mode in general. Besides the expected, which entails being unable to control Alyssa as she runs from whichever pursuer she's currently menaced by, the meter itself fills up far too fast, thanks in part to the numerous things that can cause it to go up in the first place, to the point where you're almost guaranteed to have control wrenched from you the moment any Subordinate hits you with a scripted Jump Scare. All of this becomes even worse on Clear Mode, where Alyssa's panic increases even more. This also leads into...
- ...Collectible items (sans arrows) becoming even more scarce than in the prior two games. But this isn't because of design. Rather, because of how often you can go into Panic Mode and how often you'll be chased, the most useful items in the game, lavender water (which lowers your panic meter) and holy water (which stuns enemies for a good amount of time) are often used rapidly. It gets to the point where they'll be used seconds after finding them.
- The Subordinates, especially compared to Scissorman in the older games. Stalkers warping around the game area is nothing new in Clock Tower, to the point where it even has reason in-story. However, encounters were spaced out so as to build tension and let the player explore. In this game, the Subordinates warp constantly (not counting scripted jump scares), to the point where you could leave an area with a Subordinate by heading into a new one, only for the exact same entity to enter that new area from a door on the opposite side of the room. Essentially, this means that you are being chased by Subordinates almost constantly, replacing genuine tension with frustration. Add in the two above points, and you can understand why people tend to see this game in a negative light. Chopper in particular is the worst offender, as he tends to spawn in any area you're in (barring those rare few the game won't allow him to enter) a good 10 seconds after you enter it, and on top of that, has a ranged attack that can be launched when he's offscreen.
- The camera is known to either situate itself at strange angles or zoom in too much, to the point where sometimes the hardest thing in the game is navigating while being chased.
- The boss battle mechanics are all particularly awkward, as they involve having to stay in a stationary position to launch arrows that lock Subordinates in place while doing damage despite their chasing you. The good news? The system is easy to use once you get used to it, making the boss fights trivial after some trial and error. The bad news? You still have to learn it, and even when you do, the game throws you a Wake-Up Call Boss in the second battle with Chopper. How? By making you shoot his axes back at him to stun him. In midair. While they curve at you. While you have to remain stationary to hit them. Sure, the Scissor Twins are a trivial boss fight afterwards, but the Final Boss, on the other hand, makes Chopper look like an absolute joke.
- Interestingly, while they're overall a much easier fight than Chopper, Scissorwoman herself has an almost perfect instance of this trope used to artificially inflate the difficulty of fighting her: unlike every other boss in the game, you don't automatically lock on to her when charging an arrow. You have to aim them yourself and hope she runs in front of you once you're charged up. She can and will, of course, but still.
- Fetch Quest: The game has enough of these with such frequency, designed with such clear malevolence towards the player, as to render the game almost unplayably aggravating.
- Guide Dang It!: When Alyssa goes into Panic Mode, she'll sometimes stop running, paralyzed by fear, for a few seconds. What the game doesn't even remotely imply is that by spinning the right analog stick, the amount of time she's paralyzed for is greatly lowered.
- Historical Domain Character: The Subordinates all have real identities which Alyssa learns by reading files over the course of their respective stages. In the case of Corroder, the stage 2 boss, his is John Haigh
, although the timeline doesn't match up,note and he's turned from someone who simply used acid to dispose of half a dozen bodies he killed through more traditional means to an outright supervillain who killed upwards of 30 people by spraying them with or dunking them alive in acid. - Hoist by His Own Petard:
- According to one of the notes you can find during the second stage, Corroder's killing spree came to an end when he got caught trying to steal sulfuric acid and, in the ensuing struggle, fell into a vat full of it, which the note directly points out is the same fate he gave to many of his victims.
- Scissorman ends up being impaled by the giant pendulum trap he almost used on Dennis earlier.
- Hyperspace Arsenal: Played straight except for a single fetch quest, where only one of three emblems can be picked up at any one time, making what could have been a two-minute diversion into an eight-minute reason to play a different game.
- I'll Kill You!: Scissorwoman exclaims as much at you.
- Improbable Weapon User: Corroder has a sulfuric acid-firing... device (possibly a showerhead).
- Invisible Bowstring: Alyssa uses a bow without a string. Justified in that she is shooting energy arrows from an Energy Bow that sprouts from a vial of holy water.
- Keet: Dennis. In his first scene, he climbs through Alyssa's window and rolls around on her bed, for starters.
- Kill the Cutie: Poor May Norton has her skull bashed in by Sledgehammer. He and the other Subordinates are also all trying to kill Alyssa.
- Large Ham: Pretty much everyone is this to a degree, but a special mention must go to the Scissor Twins (see below) and Lord Burroughs, who looks like he ought to be selling spiced rum rather than sending killers after you.
- Laughing Mad: The Scissor Twins make The Joker look like a man in a coma. And they never. Ever. Stop.
- Love Makes You Evil: Dick Hamilton/the Dark Gentleman/Lord Burroughs.
- Luke, I Am Your Father: The main villain, the Dark Gentleman, turns out to be main character Alyssa's grandfather.
- New Game Plus: "Clear Mode", which makes the game harder and allows the player to wear alternative clothes.
- Parental Incest: Attempted by the aptly-named Dick Hamilton, who was so obsessed with his daughter that he ignored his wife, brutally murdered his son-in-law, and then had his daughter brutally murdered as well by one of his sociopath Subordinates when she tried to protect her daughter (his granddaughter) from him, with the implication that she was also raped (either by him, his Subordinate or both of them). As mentioned, he later transfers his carnal obsession to his granddaughter, the heroine Alyssa, who's the very image of her mother, though she manages to defeat him.
- Pendulum of Death: To urge Alyssa to go forward, the Scissor Twins hold her friend Dennis under one. At one point, the pendulum stops swinging and drops straight on him. Fortunately, it turns out to just be a dummy, though they then flip the slab over to reveal the real Dennis on the other side.
- Plot Hole: Near the end, the game attempts a plot twist reveal that Lord Burroughs' castle, which Dick disappeared three years ago to search for, stood where the Hamilton residence now exists. There are many problems with this, and just about everything we're previously shown or told about the castle and Dick's search for it either has more questions raised than answered by, or is outright ignored for, the "twist."
- The most obvious is that there's a flashback showing Dick approaching the castle, which is obviously not possible if the castle was destroyed and his own house was built on top of it, not to mention that it's situated in an ominous canyon that in no way resembles the area surrounding the Hamilton residence.
- There's no mention of what room in the residence where Dick's possession by Lord Burroughs could have possibly happened in, much less how a room so lavishly furnished (including a giant portrait of Lord Burroughs) could have escaped everyone's notice for so long.
- Since Burroughs' deal is that he didn't complete the Ritual of Engagement and become an Entity, the whole reason he's able to come back and mastermind this plot is mention in a file that, shortly before being crushed to death by the cogs of his castle's clock tower, he vowed to plague the land so long as that clock tower remained standing. For obvious reasons, this doesn't work if the clock tower actually gets demolished.
- "Psycho" Strings: Heard in the Panic Mode music.
- Sanity Meter: The panic meter, which goes up every time something (like a ghost or one of the Subordinates) surprises Alyssa. If it fills up all the way, she panics.
- Serial Killer: The villains encountered, save for the Big Bad, consist of these.
- Shear Menace: The Scissor Twins have two blades that they hold together to emulate scissors.
- Stairway to Heaven: May and her father ascend one after being put to rest.
- Time Travel: The individual stages all take Alyssa back to around the time when the current Subordinate menacing her first became a Subordinate, such as the opening stage taking her back to December of 1942.
- Tome of Eldritch Lore: The Book of Entities.
- Twisted Christmas: Little May Norton, a piano prodigy, is brutally murdered by Sledgehammer, who smashes her skull with his respective weapon on the night of Christmas Eve 1942.
- Villainous Harlequin: The Scissor Twins. Maybe a pair of Monster Clowns if you happen to think they're scarier than most do.
- Villainous Incest:
- Dick Hamilton wants this with both his daughter Nancy and granddaughter Alyssa (who looks like her mother).
- The Scissor Twins to each other.
- When the Clock Strikes Twelve: As the clock strikes twelve, it signifies that Alyssa Hamilton is fifteen and will be ritually sacrificed so her grandfather will become a powerful Entity.
- Would Hurt a Child: The first thing Sledgehammer does onscreen? Terrorize a poor little girl before smashing her with his humongous weapon and gloating about it.
