She quickly befriends a White Shepherd, Hewie, and begins to explore the castle with his aid to seek a means of escape and unravel the mysteries of it and its inhabitants.

The player controls Fiona as she explores the environment, evades and hides from enemy pursuers, and occasionally fights against the castle's inhabitants.

Capcom added the dog mechanic during development thinking retailers and players alike would not enjoy a survival horror title with a lone female protagonist.

The graphics and presentation were praised, but critics found the gameplay somewhat repetitive, predictable, and derivative of previous horror titles.

They felt that by exposing Fiona as a vulnerable object of desire, the game makes her and therefore the player feel more fragile and endangered, building a more disturbing atmosphere.

During panic mode, visibility gets worse, the menu can't be opened, and she will begin running on her own, tripping and falling into walls.

While visiting her parents, Ugo and Ayla, the family is involved in a car accident, and Fiona alone awakens in a cage in the dungeon of a castle.

As Fiona begins to unravel the mystery in which she finds herself, she learns that she is the carrier of the Azoth, an alchemic element, which for unknown reasons is being sought by Riccardo, the castle's keeper.

As they fight atop a water tower, Hewie rescues Fiona by attacking Riccardo, causing him to fall from the summit.

However, she soon encounters a resurrected, youthful Lorenzo; the life energy he acquired from Riccardo's body has allowed him mastery over his own aging process.

The game features multiple endings based on decisions made by the player: if Debilitas survives, he encounters Fiona and Hewie at the castle gate and lets them leave peacefully, otherwise he does not appear.

Capcom began development knowing they wanted to make a survival horror game with a lead female character.

Believing that the female lead would not be well received by retailers and players alike, they added in a dog partner that could attack enemies.

[4][17] 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.

[22][31] The dog companion was, for some, a well-received addition to the gameplay formula, with Eurogamer's Kristan Reed comparing it positively to Ico.

[16][22][28] Kill Screen's Astrid Budgor compared Haunting Ground's "psychological landscape" to Dario Argento's film Suspiria (1977) and also highlighted its grotesque expressionism.

[4] 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".

[1][4][5][32] Jeremy Dunham of IGN stated that "Haunting Ground's success comes from making the player feel like a desired and endangered object".

[4] GameSetWatch's Leigh Alexander stated that "disparaging Haunting Ground for its copious objectification of women is a facile task...it's precisely that off-putting sexuality that makes Daniela terrifying, that makes Fiona's circumstances so explicitly repugnant, that sharpens Haunting Ground's fear factor to a knife in the gut".

She notes that "Fiona is both a sex object and a victim...a fragile little woman...both male and female players can distinctly feel the threat to her person, the disconcerting wickedness of her enemies, thanks to her overt sexualization throughout the game".

[5] Budgor found that removing the player's control at critical points highlights Fiona's subjectivity, with the sounds and images expressing ideas of "violation, transgression, and bodily autonomy".