Clock Tower Combat Knife Only (Part 2/The Lift) - Professional/No Damage

Despite being a short sequence, it's very much a painful one. I almost thought it was impossible when I first tried this several weeks ago. But revisiting it recently made me realize that it is indeed possible, but it honestly requires many things to go right. You need the enemies to cooperate and you need to get stuns/critical hits for things to go smoothly. Unfortunately, this is the kind of sequence where you have to accept whatever successful attempt you get. I surprisingly got this specific attempt early on. Too early to properly understand the sequence in full. I went on to grind this out for a few more hours and consistently failed to get another successful run. I'm inclined to keep going, but I'm willing to settle with this for now and revisit it later. I don't like how lucky I got in a few spots, but you really can't avoid that in a sequence like this. The thing I regret is that I haven't been able to come up with any real strategy.

The number one thing to keep in mind is that you really do not want to deal with more than a single enemy on the lift at a time. When multiple enemies get on, you absolutely have to get rid of them as soon as possible. The issue is that the unarmed enemies will attempt to grab you for what feels like 99% of the time. Crouching can sometimes work to avoid them, but in most cases you will have to run around to dodge them. However, running around in a space as confined as this makes that task easier said than done. Your space to run is drastically reduced not only by the enemies on the lift but also the crossbow enemies opening fire on you. To make matters worse, the axe enemies will often try to grab you when there are other enemies on board. This is just a quirk of how the enemies behave in this game. The axe enemies are extremely important too because you need to be able to parry their attacks and use melee to kill or knock off everybody on board. It's the only way to make getting no damage on this sequence for knife only possible.

I personally consider this sequence to have two phases. The first phase concerns the first 8 enemies you have to deal with as well as the two crossbow enemies. The second phase is when the lift has ascended enough for the second red zealot to spawn. The first phase is where almost all of your failures are going to be. The second phase is easier, but it still has a decent chance to go wrong. Before you even start, it's important to activate the spike ball trap and then hit the lift. Killing that first red zealot that spawns is vital for making this less of a headache. You'll have to spend some time dodging crossbow bolts before the first wave of enemies spawns. One wielding an axe should consistently attack you immediately. Parry his attack and hope that your melee either kills or knocks everybody off. A quick kill will guarantee that one of the enemies from the second wave will arbitrarily miss the lift when she attempts to jump on, leaving you to deal with one enemy. Unfortunately, this one is unarmed and he can easily grab you. You have to try to kill him quickly. The whole saving grace for this sequence is that the enemies that get on the lift seem to have less health than normal. The third and final wave of enemies in this sequence is where it's essentially in god's hands. At that point, you have two crossbow enemies on both sides that are able to hit you and you have three enemies on board at once. If you are able to quickly get a parry in and knock them all off, then you have a real chance to make it through the rest of the sequence. The second phase is much simpler. There are less enemies and the red zealot actually makes them easier to deal with. They get stunned by his chanting and you are likely to kill them before they transform. Leon also gets stunned which is horrible, but it shouldn't be a problem most of the time. It's not unrealistic to get through here without any plagas spawning. The third crossbow enemy that spawns is more or less a non-issue.

I don't consider pulling this off to necessarily be hard in theory, but it is brutal in practice. It's also annoying in that it takes a lot of time to get the sequence started. You load in at the bottom of the tower and you have to climb all the way up plus wait on the lift for a while before the first wave of enemies spawns. I timed it and it takes roughly 1 minute and 25 seconds until the first set of enemies drops. And it's the kind of thing where your attempts can end almost immediately. It's not quite the hell that Verdugo was, but it was still annoying to deal with. I'm sorry to not offer much in the way of strategy here. You can experiment with things like stalling the lift by parrying but not using the melee right away. You can also use knife executions to dodge crossbow bolts. I'll have to revisit this sequence in the full knife run in the future, so I'll try to come up with something substantial by then.