Haunting Ground is a 2005 survival horror video game developed and published by Capcom for the PlayStation 2. The story follows Fiona Belli, a young woman who wakes up in the dungeon of a castle after being involved in a car accident. The player controls Fiona as she befriends a White Shepherd, Hewie, and explores the castle with his aid to seek a means of escape and unravel the mysteries of it and its inhabitants. The game shares many similarities with Capcom's earlier survival horror title Clock Tower 3, and has been described as a spiritual successor to the Clock Tower series.
Haunting Ground was released April 2005 and received mixed reviews. The graphics, presentation, and themes of sexuality and vulnerability were praised, although critics found the gameplay somewhat repetitive, predictable, and derivative of previous horror titles.
Gameplay
thumb|left|Fiona escapes from Debilitas after ordering Hewie to attack him.
Haunting Ground is a survival horror game with similar gameplay elements to Clock Tower 3 (2002). The player controls Fiona Belli directly and gives commands to her canine companion, Hewie.
Commanding Hewie is an integral part of Haunting Grounds gameplay. The cinematics were directed by actor and director, Naoto Takenaka. He directly supervised the motion capture performances used for all the characters, placing emphasis on dramatic performance. He took inspiration from Universal Monsters such as Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi's Dracula. Takenaka played the motion capture role for Riccardo, and Japanese actors Yasue Sato and Jiro Sato played Fiona and Debilitas respectively. Rather than streaming audio files, the music for Haunting Ground was generated by using the PS2's built-in sounds. This way, the composers could easily change the tempo of the music during gameplay.
Capcom debuted Haunting Ground under its Japanese title Demento at the Tokyo Game Show in September 2004. The game was released in Japan on April 21, 2005, and later in PAL territories on April 29, and in North America on May 10.
In July 2012, Haunting Ground appeared to be slated for a PlayStation 3 re-release as a "PS2 Classic", having been rated by the ESRB with Sony Computer Entertainment named as the publisher. It was re-released for the PlayStation 3 via the PlayStation Store exclusively in Japan in April 2015.
Reception
Haunting Ground received "mixed or average" reviews according to review aggregator Metacritic. Despite these highlights, critics ultimately felt that Haunting Ground was too predictable and relied heavily on clichés previously established in the horror genre. For this reason, Reed said it "becomes stifled by its own eventual lack of ambition to break away from the norms instilled by two generations of Japanese horror adventures". Jeremy Dunham of IGN stated that "Haunting Grounds success comes from making the player feel like a desired and endangered object". He found the plot was kept interesting due to the disturbing suggestive behaviors of Fiona's pursuers.
Fiona appeared as a character card in SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters DS (2006), and as a costume for Cammy in Street Fighter V (2016). Fiona, Hewie and Debilitas were also seen in a cutscene in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars.