Play Clock Tower: The First Fear Online

Summary

Clock Tower: The First Fear takes the original 1995 point‑and‑click horror and stretches it onto the PlayStation’s 32‑bit hardware. The upgrade isn’t just a visual polish; it adds a new dagger, an extra room, fresh FMV cutscenes and richer sound, giving the mansion a slightly more polished, yet still claustrophobic, feel. Even the sales numbers hint at its impact – it slipped into the top ten in Japan, moving over fifty‑four thousand copies on launch.

Playing as Jennifer Simpson feels like a tense juggling act. You move a cursor to explore, manage a dwindling stamina bar, and watch her portrait shift as fatigue sets in. Encountering the relentless Scissorman triggers a panic mode where she can stumble, slow, or die, forcing you to hide or set traps rather than fight. The game reshuffles item locations each run and offers nine different endings, making every escape attempt feel fresh.

Storyline

Clock Tower: The First Fear follows orphan Jennifer Simpson, who arrives in September 1995 with three fellow orphans—Laura, Anne and Lotte—to the sprawling Clock Tower mansion owned by the reclusive Simon Barrows. After Mary, the woman who brings them, disappears, Jennifer hears a scream, finds the lights out and the girls missing, and soon becomes the target of a murderous little boy with deformed features wielding giant scissors, Bobby Barrows, the infamous Scissorman.

Exploring the mansion, Jennifer uncovers hidden secrets: depending on player choices she may discover Simon Barrows locked in a courtyard cell (requiring a piece of ham for his food) or her father’s corpse in a concealed room, along with a death‑letter that explains Mary Barrows’ involvement with her twins Bobby and Dan. Collecting key items such as the Devil Idol grants access to the catacombs, where a cloaked Mary leads her deeper, and Lotte either rescues Jennifer from a jail cell or is found dying at an altar, revealing the tower’s switch system.

The climax pits Jennifer against the giant, gluttonous purple creature Dan Barrows, whose explosion‑triggered demise allows her to escape via an elevator. She ultimately defeats Bobby and Mary in the Clock Tower, with the surviving girl (if any) meeting a grim fate at Mary’s hands, resulting in several possible endings (A, B, or C) that the sequel treats as canonical.