Haunting Ground

Thanks to a donation from Twitch viewer VicePresidentFruitly I played through Haunting Ground on my stream.  Since I finished it last night I thought I'd take the chance to write a few words on what I thought about the game.

Haunting Ground is a game that came out in 2005 for the PS2 as a sort of spiritual successor to the Clock Tower games.  If you aren't familiar, Clock Tower is a series of games where you play as a young girl running away from a crazed killer and you have no means to defend yourself other than hiding inside or behind various things.  Obviously there's more to it than that but if you want to try and visualize it then imagine a sort of hybrid between Monkey Island and Amnesia.

In this game you play as a young woman called Fiona who gets in a car crash and winds up in some kind of castle.  After a short time she starts to get chased around by some kind of half human, half gorilla thing and to aide in her escape she joins forces with a dog called Hewie.  Together you must solve puzzles and run away from not only gorilla man but a whole host of colorful baddies who all want to do really bad things to you.

Gameplay wise, you walk around the castle solving puzzles until you run into whatever baddie is trying to kill you at which point you must drop everything you're doing to run for dear life.   You can call on Hewie to bite at the enemy to buy you some time but essentially you have to find a little hidey hole and wait there until they go away at which point you can resolve puzzle solving.  Keep doing this until you have a boss "fight" which is less of a fight and more of just a puzzle that you have to solve under high pressure of murder.

There are also some really annoying aspects to the game, chief of which is the panic system which is something that's been carried over from Clock Tower and then made 100x more irritating.  If Fiona gets punched up a bit or sees something a bit scary the screens colors will start to wash out and the controller will start rumbling.  Once you hit breaking point Fiona screams and promptly turns into a run away freight train with no breaks and taking damage in this state is likely to lead to a game over.  Since a lot of the corridors and areas in this game are so cluttered or narrow, if you're being chased and become panicked it's probably better to just put the controller down and wait for the end to come.  The other thing I dislike greatly about this game is Fiona's fussy kick.  If you press square you perform a little fussy kick.  The kick itself is fine and there are obvious things in the castle to fussy kick for items but there are some puzzles that require the fussy kick and it's so obtuse that it's easy to get stuck on something VERY easy for no reason.  For example there's one part where you need to kick a generator to get it working but the hint says "Looks like it needs a jolt" or something along those lines (I was playing in Japanese).  So I'm running around looking for cables or something to give it an electrical jolt but what it really wanted was for me to just fussy kick it three times.  The kick is so weak looking as well that you think there's no way it'll jolt a generator or break a pipe but that's exactly what it does.

Anyway, it's a pretty good game despite those gripes I had with it.  It's got some hilarious voice acting and the cast of villains alone is enough to keep a player going.  After beating one character I was genuinely excited to see what kind of weirdo was going to chase me next and the whole game has a sort of comedic vibe flowing through it that'll leave you giggling just as much as you are terrified.  It's not that easy to get hold of (I  think) but give it a go if you get the chance, it's pretty good.