Haunting Ground is unsettling and scary and will make you feel uncomfortable. If you are in its target audience that will make you smile, because you are happiest when you are blind with fear. If you are not in its target audience you should just forget all about it and stop reading this review and go make yourself a pot of soup instead. There is nothing here for you.

The action begins in a cage, where a pretty young woman wakes up from a horrible dream. She has no clothes, and no idea where she is, and no idea how she got here. She's frightened, obviously, but the way out is clearly not in the cage, so she breathes deeply, wraps herself in a sheet and begins exploring. As this point we take control.

The woman's name is Fiona. We walk her out the door and into a great stone hallway. We try a few doors without success. The hallways go on and on in every direction. Apparently we are in some kind of castle. We are even more lost than we'd thought. In time we find a pleasantly furnished guestroom, where a suit of clothing that fits us perfectly has been set out on the bed. We meet an unsmiling woman whose demeanour is a curious mix of gracious hospitality and chilling blankness. We wander some more, curious whose castle this is. On a terrace, one of the pillars has been splashed with blood. That rattles us.

When we get rattled, the game makes sure we know it. The picture degrades into harsh and grainy monochrome. The frame rate drops and jitters. The controls get sticky. We try to open up the little menu where we check our inventory and read the instructions, but the button no longer works.

After a moment or two we calm down a little and keep walking. Some doors open for us, and we find a few keys and a few medallions, and we begin to form a plan and a rudimentary mental map of the place. Then we meet Debilitas.

Debilitas is aptly named, with a face like Quasimodo's and a body like Bruce Banner's angry one. He carries a dirty little rag doll with him wherever he goes. He has the lusts of a teenager and the self-control and judgment of a two-year-old. He wants us. So we run.

We run in ever-greater panic, and the walls of the castle dissolve into vague smears. We try closing doors behind us. We try doubling back to shake him off our trail. We kick and flail pathetically as he wraps his arms around us and lowers us to the stone floor.

Either that, or we manage to hide under a bed until he gets distracted and goes away. This is the essence of Haunting Ground, really: We wander in search of clues and a way out of the castle, and all the while we understand that we are never more than a few panicky moments away from a brutal sexual assault. So pay attention: This is not a game for kids. Neither is it a game for most grownups. At one point a man shows us a wooden statue of a pregnant woman and tells us we're going to wind up like that too. We don't know what that means. We don't want to know.

Very early on we meet a dog named Hewie, who seems to be a German Shepherd or an Alsatian or something wolfy like that. We earn his trust, and because he has sharp teeth, he becomes our protector. We can send him into narrow spaces to retrieve objects we can't reach on our own. He is a dog, though, and is therefore not all that smart, but with him by our side we at least have a chance of making our escape.

There are horrible bloody traps all over the castle, which will kill us instantly. Hewie barks to warn us away. Sometimes it doesn't work.