I hate horror games. Well, that’s not entirely true. I love them, but only in the daylight, and when there’s someone else in the house, and when I’m not going to need to go down the creepy basement steps to do laundry. I’m kind of a wuss, is what I’m admitting to.
And yet, I still play them, probably more often that someone whose level of bravery in the face of the supernatural rests somewhere between Scooby-Doo and Courage the Cowardly Dog. And what I’ve found is that the tense atmosphere set up by horror games also opens the door for some of the most hilarious moments in gaming—especially when that humor is unintentional.
I’m not talking about glitches or bad AI, like the kind we got in 2013’s Alien: Colonial Marines, which would have a xenomorph clearly aware of your location, and rather than tearing you to shreds or depositing its offspring into you abdominal cavity, gave it’s best friendly, Midwestern “Ope, let me just squeeze right past ya, there,” and carried on its merry way.
“All right, one quick hug, but then I gotta scoot.”
I’m also not going to bring indie games into the mix, as Steam has an absolute minefield of wonderful and terrible horror games. There’s one still fresh in my mind that seems to have disappeared from my library, called Don’t Look At Them, which had me playing as a little boy looking around his house at night, forcing me to investigate everything, and had me gobbled up by a monster in a fraction of a second whenever I chose the wrong thing to look at, with absolutely no guidance. Closet monster, window monster, toilet monster—it was so hilariously sudden and senseless that I abandoned the concept of trying not to die and instead just turned the whole investigation adventure into a monster-feeding sim.
And don’t even mention the Silent Hill 2 Dog Ending, because the developers knew exactly what they were doing, and it was absurdly brilliant.
I am The Great and Powerful Dog!
No, the game I’m talking about is legit scary. Like, I played this game on the original PlayStation console, and it still haunts me in my waking hours kind of scary. That game is called Clock Tower.
In Clock Tower, you play as a helpless young woman named Jennifer who’s being stalked by a terrifying serial killer known as Scissorman. If that doesn’t sound like the most intimidating name for a villain ever, be aware that he carries around a massive set of curved shears that he will use to gut or decapitate anyone who isn’t smart enough to run away.
Oh, and running away is about half the game, with the other half being hiding. In my piece on Nemesis from Resident Evil 3, I mentioned how the latter games in that series just didn’t feel the same once they shifted to a first-person or over-the-shoulder view, effectively turning them into zombie-hunting FPS headshot-fests. I prefer the feeling of helplessness that the original three Resident Evil games gave you, with the fixed cameras and scare ammo making it intentionally hard to fight back against the hordes of the undead.
But Clock Tower and its direct sequel (but not the third game; definitely not the third game) didn’t even give you that. Maybe you could stun Scissorman’s slow, stalking approach by tossing ammonia in his eyes, spraying him down with a fire extinguisher, or hucking a chair in his general direction, but the best-case scenario is that he runs off for a few minutes and the worst-case involves two pokey metal things advancing at Jennifer’s eyeballs.
More often than not, you’ll survive encounters with Scissorman by hiding rather than fighting, and the games give you plenty of options that hopefully won’t turn you into a scissor-kebob. Lockers, desks, and beds are found in abundance, and you can even hop into a big ol’ cardboard box if you wanna moonlight as Snake from Metal Gear.
But the one that made me bust a gut involved a bed. There are numerous bunkbeds you’ll find throughout the game, and you don’t really get the option of how you’ll interact with them. I’d already seen animations for hiding close to the ground under the bottom bunk and curling into a ball up on top, hoping my pursuer wouldn’t break his non-ergonomic posture that keeps his eyes around belt buckle level at all times. Both worked! But on a third attempt, I instead leaned over the bottom bunk, grabbed the plain white bedsheet, stood tall, spread my arms wide, and held the sheet aloft.
I was terrified. How could the game betray me like this? Sure, Jennifer isn’t the most apt final girl in horror history, and it sounds like she’s got the coconut horseshoe guy from Monty Python following her around whenever she runs (slowly, of course), but surely she couldn’t expect to win a game of peek-a-boo with a serial killer. And then she did this:
BAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I cannot believe that worked. If you’ve seen one of my favorite comedy movies, Kung Pow: Enter The Fist, it’s kind of like the tiny net scene, but it’s played completely straight. There’s no break in the haunting, heart-pumping music, just a nearly invulnerable monster man flailing around like you’ve found the one weakness to his massive shears-centric offense: a thin piece of white linen. I may not be the best homemaker in the world, but I seem to remember using scissors in home ec class to cut fabric back in the day.
I’m sure there are other hidden gems out there that laugh in the face of unspeakable terror, but that one will always be mine. I’ll try to keep that light-hearted moment in my mind for later. I’ll need it.
It’s laundry night.