Whatever your opinion is of Capcom now, there’s no denying how significant their influence on the horror genre has been. Our favorite genre would be unrecognizable without their games, including the Dino Crisis, Resident Evil and Dead Rising franchises. I can’t think of another publisher that has had as monumental an impact on this genre as the mansion Resident Evil built.
But this isn’t about their hits. We’re here to honor a game that went unnoticed by most folks. Ten years ago today, between the releases of Resident Evil Outbreak File #2 and Dead Rising, Haunting Ground made its debut. It was a survival horror game about a woman named Fiona, and her dog, Hewie. This game dropped players in an unfamiliar castle for a game of cat and mouse, in which the player was essentially unarmed. This is long before the trend would become popular.
Haunting Ground didn’t have a lasting impact, it wasn’t critically acclaimed or even commercially successful. What the game did do was take a page or two from the book I’m pretty sure Silent Hill wrote. This game wasn’t afraid to dump some seriously disturbing content on players, because back then, psychological horror had two definitions: one being the meaning we all attribute to it, and another that basically meant psychological warfare, against the player.
It’s unfortunate how safe this genre has become. Taboo subjects are often left untouched, even by series like Silent Hill, which fearlessly tackled everything from rape to incest, infanticide, suicide, the occult and a host of other topics that usually get neglected by developers only a few years prior. Haunting Ground released not long after Silent Hill 4, around the time when that series was beginning to lose its edge, in the twilight years of the “golden age” of survival horror, but none of that influenced its approach to what many would label “objectionable content.”
I only got around to playing the game a few years ago after I had written about it enough times to make me feel weird for not having played it. I wish I could say it changed me, or at the very least, that it left a lasting impression. I remember it, but suffice to say it didn’t resonate with me as deeply as I wanted it to.
All of the above is just my long-winded way of paying tribute to a survival horror classic, because you don’t need to love a game to admire what it achieved, whether that entails the creation of a brand new genre, or simply telling a story that needs to be told.
Oh, and before we disperse, I’d like to leave you with this creepy cinematic, in which a man with a broken face does bad things to a sleeping Fiona. Don’t say I never gave you anything.
