Memories of Clock Tower: The First Fear for the SNES echo within this game, where a psychotic child who delighted in killing her friends was chasing a young girl around a large mansion. One of the first few survival horrors to be made, it packed quite a few thrills, considering it wasn’t a game where you could physically attack your enemies. Instead, the game focused on running away and hiding, making it almost a true survival horror.
Haunting Ground, originally planned as a part of the Clock Tower series, is very much the same. The protagonist is a young woman named Fiona Belli, who finds herself trapped inside of Castle Belli with only her wits, feet, and a pet to help her escape. Along the way, she finds herself pursued by various members of the castle’s inhabitants for reasons unknown to her, with little choice but to try and hide from her chasers. Like many survival horror games, Fiona is required to use her wits to solve puzzles and evade the castle staff in an attempt to escape. Like many other survival horrors, items in the game have taken on the “Hey, is that something shiny?” effect, letting us know that something is there without the developers actually adding it in to the scenery.
At first glance, the game is quite simplistic. Fiona can kick, run, hide and climb through various rooms of the castle in an attempt to find a way out. She lacks a health bar, which can be frightening on its own because you’re unsure if she is terribly injured or perfectly fine. Instead, she has a Panic Mode, which occurs if she becomes fearful for too long. Like any stereotypical damsel, Fiona becomes agitated and nervous around anything unnatural, seen by a bloody pillar she examines within the first ten minutes of the game, to being chased down the hall by Debilitas, the gardener, for too long. As she gets more and more scared, the rumble in the controller pulses with her heartbeat, the screen turns more colourless and blurry, and controlling her becomes harder. If she becomes too scared, she begins to run around on her own in different directions. Fiona also becomes extremely vulnerable, and is prone to falling to the ground and crawling away from her current stalker in an attempt to escape. This is a blessing in this game, since it adds to the realism, tension and overall atmosphere and fear the player feels (hey, not all protagonists in survival horrors can be seasoned take-no-crap characters like Jill Valentine).
Of course, hiding may not be as good a tactic as it may seem to be. Places like under the bed, behind a door, inside a closet or behind a shower curtain can be used repeatedly, but hide in the same place too often and your attackers will catch on. Also, even though they’ve left the room, it doesn’t mean they won’t come right back in if they think they hear something. The shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho comes to mind in this sense. So in order to compensate for Fiona’s paranoia, she meets a brave German Shepard named Hewie early on in the game, who tags along with her and helps solve puzzles and defeat enemies.
This is where the realism of the game hits the frustrating point. Like most dogs, Hewie seems to have that selective hearing thing going on, and often doesn’t obey all of Fiona’s commands. You have to try to keep your pet happy, similar to real life, by praising him when he’s good, scolding him when he’s bad, shaking his paw, tossing a ball around and feeding him treats, all while being pursued by a deranged gardener who looks like the hunchback of Notre Dame but has the mental capacity of a five-year-old. You want to stay on good terms with Hewie, because his relationship with you will determine how far you progress in the game, as well as the game’s ending. One thing you really don’t want to do is kick your dog (just like real life), since Hewie takes damage as well. In harder modes, he can even die.
But on the plus side, Hewie can be very helpful. Fiona can command him to search for and fetch items, attack pursuers, work as a decoy while she finds a place to hide, and more, all the while telling him he’s a good boy and giving him a couple pats on the head. He also has the ability to spot traps that would work as an instant kill for Fiona (one being an Indiana Jones-esque room with arrows that shoot out the wall when she steps on a pressure panel), which he growls to warn her of. To this effect, Fiona is the brain and Hewie is the brawn in this game, though sometimes, Hewie can be the more attention-deficit brain than Fiona. Good boy!
Adding to the atmosphere of the game is the ambience. Creaks, groans, sudden bangs (that frighten Fiona and cause her heart to race for a moment) and the like make this game both frightening and fun to play in the dark, becoming all the more terrifying when a pursuer appears at random to pull a “Heeeere’s Johnny!” and terrorize Fiona. A dissonant tune plays while she is being chased, growing louder as she becomes more desperate until it seems to take up everything that can be heard, apart from her screaming at Hewie to do something.
Depending on your frustration over trying to train Hewie, you may or may not want to play this game over to see the different endings. There is no New Game Plus at all, merely different levels of difficulty. Playing the game through once will open up another ending, but that’s about the extent of extra features. So if you like being chased around and being scared, the game is good for playing again. Like Clock Tower, there’s something exciting in the prospect of not being able to defend yourself and trying desperately to find a place to hide where you won’t be found, making the game quite endearing and a change from what the survival horror genre has become. Though it’s not as frightening (in my opinion) as the original Clock Tower, the first Silent Hill or Fatal Frame, it’s still a good game to try if you like the genre.
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