Clock Tower Rewind Review

Clock Tower Rewind

Developed by: Wayforward/LRG

Published by: Wayforward/Sunsoft/Capcom

Date of Release: October 29, 2024

Price: $19.99

Oh how I was excited for this remaster, and OH how heartbroken I am with the results. Clock Tower Rewind is a remaster of the classic Super Famicom survival horror game, and it's first official release in the western world, but boy is it terrifying in all the ways it shouldn't have been. Wayforward worked with LRG games to remaster the game on the Carbon Engine, and despite having over a year for development, it's clear it needed MUCH more time in the oven.

All the promised quality of life updates are present and accounted for, with some lovely cinematics, the motion comic, and other goodies. However the game is pretty much unplayable with rampant input lag, an EXTREMELY unintuitive control scheme, and to top it all off the game engine just randomly slows down to a crawl, and crashes frequently resulting in corrupted saves. I've completely given up on trying to get through this title, it's fought me at every step. Therefore my suggestion is to play a fan translated version of the original, and wait and see if the devs manage to fix this broken mess.

Killing Time Resurrected Review

Killing Time Resurrected

Developed By: NightDive Studios, 3DO

Published By: Nightdive Studios, Ziggurat

Date of Release: October 17, 2024

Price: $24.99 

Well it would seem that NightDive is on an absolute roll with 3DO remasters these days. Hot off the heels of the wonderfully bizarre PO'ed Definitive Edition, NightDive has seen fit to resurrect the 3DO cult classic Killing Time! Its an amazing story set at an island manor trapped in time during the prohibition, and the story you uncover is told by ghostly exchoes of conversations the inhabitants had while still alive. You'll have to fight off zombie gangsters, hunters, maids and even creepy clowns as you explore the massive island and try to solve the mysteries of what exactly happened there. 

With NightDive's remaster of Killing Time all the expanded areas from the PC version's metroidvania style open world map are here, with redrawn textures and vastly improved lighting to boot. For the textures NightDive went back to the original source materials and re-created everything from scratch, resulting in a much richer and colorful look to the environments. As for the enemy sprites, they took the source materials from the 3DO version and reimported them at 4x the original size of the originals, making them incredibly detailed compared to the originals. For the enemies left that didn't have a 3DO counterpart, they created new 3D models to match the style of the game and made replacement sprites for those.

So what you get in the end with Killing Time Resurrected is a glorious first person shooter that falls halfway between Metroid Prime and Bioshock on the gameplay spectrum. The acting and writing for the FMV sequences are top notch, and the soundtrack is an amazing assortment of ambiance, jazz, ragtime and the like. The colorful art deco environments are still amazing to look at, especially with the fresh coat of paint the remaster ads. But if all that gets to be too much you can turn it all off and go back to the original PC graphics. The gunplay is great and the enemies are often times hilariously varied. The game does end up featuring a lot of key hunting and backtracking, but the automap helps a lot.

I guess the only thing I can complain about with Killing Time Resurrected is that there is no dedicated button you can use to toggle the enhanced graphics on and off in realtime, instead requiring you to go through the menus to toggle the 3DO actors and High- Res textures respectively. It would have also been nice to be able to go through the original 3DO maps, but this is really just nitpicking as the PC environment is much nicer. It took me around 8 hours to play through the game and get the good ending, which is a pretty satisfying chunk of gameplay IMO. I wholeheartedly recommend Killing Time Resurrected for anyone who loves a good boomer shooter, and also for anyone who loves FMV games as well.