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Rating

4.0

Players

209

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Haunting Ground

2005-04-21

Developer: Capcom Production Studio 1Publisher: Capcom

PS3, PS2

Adventure

Horror

Survival

The story follows Fiona Belli, a young girl who the player must guide through Belli Castle and its immediate environments in an effort to escape. Along the way, players must solve puzzles, unlock doors and evade, hide or attempt to fight against the castle's inhabitants. Fiona is accompanied by Hewie, a White Shepherd and the two must work as a team to solve certain puzzles and outwit their pursuers.

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RetroPerspective_Reviewed a game3 weeks ago

Haunting Ground

Soundtrack

Visuals

Gameplay

Story

Haunting Ground started well but became infuriating. The beginning of the game is constructed very well. Similar to Galerians, this game started to fall apart in the second half. Many objectives became forced and arbitrary, especially in the tower. You learned less about the plot and spent more time fumbling with a game that drifted further away from its premise, and spent little time explaining its story. The narrative isn't terribly clear about what the Azoth is, or what it is supposed to do. I might have missed a few documents that added more to the experience, and the intense closeups of stomachs were a strong indication of the game talking about birth. There are five chapters, each with a different person chasing you in a unique area. You are meant to run away and hide from them when they find you. Many hiding spots exist in the first area, with almost none existing beyond the first chapter. Boss fights are functional, but fluctuate between clumsy nonsense and intuitive. The first boss is pretty nebulous, even though they give you a hint. I was close to an object at the same time that I was struck by the boss. The strike went through my character to simultaneously break the object, and kill the boss. This is not what I would call intelligent design. The second boss required you to push some blocks while using the dog to attack and distract. This wasn't a bother, but it seemed like they were stretching for ideas to make you fight your pursuers. The final boss was equally strange because you were expected to trick him into walking through fire a few times. The first area of the game has a lot of hiding spots, and you get used to investigating each room for items or anything else interesting. A bedroom has a clever jump-scare with a CRT. The second area has three hiding spots I can remember, and you're better off not using them. In most instances the second pursuer will find you and kill you anyway. I hid for a while under a couch and waited for the music to change, only to have the pursuer run back into the room after I came out of hiding. The tower has no hiding spots, and the pursuer can decide at any moment to chase you or not. I was chased up the tower, so I started running back down. After transitioning to a new screen the pursuer stopped for no reason, and I was finally left alone to finish the puzzle. This is where the immersion in the experience began to fail. You can be chased for up to ten or fifteen minutes at a time, get two minutes of safety, then be chased again. I would have been less put off by this if it wasn't so constant, and if hiding from your pursuers worked. This is diminished further by moments like when one of your pursuers appears inside a locked room immediately after you evade them. You're given a map that does nothing but show you save points. No objective or indication of anything is marked on the map. I imagine this, alongside the pursuers constantly interrupting you, was intentional for the kind of experience the developers had in mind. They wanted the player to be as anxious and scared as possible, but I found it to be more annoying than anything else. You're given traps and weapons to fight with, but I hardly used them because they didn't do anything. I threw a stun item at a pursuer, but it lasted long enough for me to take two steps before I was being chased again. I placed an explosive at the bottom of a ladder, but there was no effect when the pursuer stepped off the ladder and activated the item. He kept running after me anyway. Thankfully each area of the game isn't so large that you necessarily need the map, especially your environments get smaller as you progress. You don't need much time to memorize each area. Puzzles were largely intuitive, but you could also have some of them reset on you if your pursuer found you while you were trying to figure them out. Training Hewie takes some time, and it can hold back progression if you haven't let him get used to your commands. There's a dog training area in the beginning, but you still have to contend with your pursuer finding you in there. Make sure you praise him a lot over small commands, and give him treats. You don't need to use them often, and I managed to avoid scolding him very much. I'm not sure why running was mapped to X instead of something like R1. Giving Hewie commands or using items would have been easier if I didn't have to let go of the run button, or bend my pointer finger down to touch the joystick for Hewie's commands. I wish I could have liked Haunting Ground more, but it didn't work for me. I like what it does, but not how the ideas were implemented. The immersion is diminished by some of the design choices. I'm not under the impression the team was given the amount of time they needed to refine this, and it is a great evolution of what Clock Tower tried to do. It is not an objectively bad game, but the experience was exhausting and had some notable flaws.

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ClessidReviewed a game1 month ago

Haunting Ground

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¡¡¡Si les preocupa su salud mental, NO jueguen esta bosta!!!

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ToraReviewed a game5 months ago

Haunting Ground

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PetrichorLIVEReviewed a game6 months ago

Haunting Ground

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TROP MÉCONNU !

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