Haunting Ground

This game is often brought up as one of those 'hidden gem' horror games from the PS2 but I really can't agree. It's really not as unknown as people make it out to be, and it's also just not as good as many other games in this niche.

There's some cool stuff, but ultimately the game is held back a LOT by the primary mechanic - befriending the dog and commanding them to do combat for you - really just doesn't work for shit even at the best of times. Half the time he'd ignore my commands and the other half the inherent latency the mechanic requires makes every fight incredibly awkward, and it really doesn't help that like all old survival horror games it can be really obtuse at times, so you often have to take a few tries at a boss fight because you have no clue what it actually wants you to do.

Oh, and before anyone suggests it, when I beat the game I got the best relationship score possible for the dog, so it's just something inherent to the game and not me fucking it up.

Story wise there's a bit more meat on the bones but it's almost exclusively carried by how surreal the whole game is since most of the characters are devoid of charisma and I didn't find the core plot elements all that interesting, which likely could be partially to blame because a lot of the lore tidbits can only be found while exploring, and you might not have time to interact with everything since you're almost always being pursued.