Was a prototype for Resident Evil 4

okay who would win in a fight fiona belly or ashley graham and keep in mind they're both equipped with ballistics so this is fiona belly from capcom's game haunting ground yeah capcom's classic the one and only also known as demento beloved cult classic certainly yeah also known as Demento. Yeah. And then Ashley Graham from the little known game, like kind of a, you might call it cult classic Resident Evil 4. The opposite of a cult classic, just a normal classic. Well, we only have confirmation, at least like spoken confirmation that Ashley alone has ballistics from Luis Serra. Since I'm not entirely sure what Luis is even saying, I think he's really the only anyone who can judge who has and doesn't have ballistics because I don't know what his criteria is. Whoa. Well, all right. Fair enough. But obviously Fiona wins. Like as scared as she acts, she can take out like people way bigger than her. Like her pumped up kicks are surprisingly

powerful. They're really powerful. She can kick through stone walls. She can kick machines back working she can kick doors down for anyone who hasn't played haunting ground the only thing that is aggressive that the main character fiona can do is a small kick like she's not a taekwondo expert it's just a tiny little like you're kicking a tiny like soccer ball in front she can also she can also do like she can push yeah um but yeah for her just kind of barely even winding up and just going and kicking they do a lot of damage i mean you're forgetting one major aggressive capacity that she has, which is her dog, Huey. Right. Well, do they have their partners? Because then Ashley has Leon. They each have their dog partners. Ashley doesn't have a dog. Yeah, she does. Leon found him. Come on. No, only Leon. Ashley never meets that dog. So? I mean, it's a dog from their games. That is one of the theories we'll be covering today. Yes. Huey is in both

games. Huey the dog. So if you don't know anything about Haunting Ground, it's a game where a young woman named fiona teams up with a dog to get away from these terrible monsters that are chasing her down the dog is a white german shepherd named huey and that dog is also seen in resident evil 4 it's the same model whether or not it's the same dog is up for debate i believe it is because they reused so many character models between those games oh not just character models also like i'm pretty sure castle models environment and lots of stuff they reused between games so yes possibly The Huey is in both games. Huey the dog. I always thought the dog in Resident Evil looks a little different, but I can buy it. If someone tells me it's the same, I'd believe it. It's the same character model, I believe, but I do think it has different textures. Yeah, different textures. It's not quite as white.

Yeah, exactly. But I've got another little mini theory here. I have heard, and I think it's pretty credible, that Haunting Ground was basically an early prototype for Resident Evil 4 that got scrapped and thrown away. And they said, this is not how Resident Evil 4 should be. But then they were like, but it is a game, so let's sell it anyway. Right. And that is the first theory that we are going to talk about. It's not even so much a theory because it's essentially confirmed. But along with that theory, there is the mini theory aspect that Ashley Graham is Fiona Belli, that they're the exact same character model that they reused Fiona and just made her into Ashley. Well, there are definitely different character models, but they did reuse Fiona's character model, but not for Ashley. But first, hello and welcome to The Popcorn Isn't Real. I'm like Eric, I'm here with my brother Torvald. That's me.

And today we have a slightly different episode. We're not talking about a film. We're talking about a video game. The cult classic 2005 video game, Haunting Ground. Yay. Also known as Demento, which I gotta say. Demento in Japan. Haunting Ground is an absolutely horrible name for this game. But so is Demento. No, they're both bad. I guess it was just cursed to have a bad name. They should have called it a girl and her dog. I think Haunting Ground, to me, sounds a little catchier and more memorable. Demento sounds like something you don't even want to say. Okay, what's the haunting in this game? There is none. I'm just saying. Ground is self-explanatory. I can remember it. There is no haunting in this game. It has nothing to do with ghosts. It would have made more sense if it was called Haunting Ground because they're trying to hunt her down, maybe? Yeah, there you go. That would have actually made some sense.

But then, I don't know, people would have thought it's a hunting game. No, yeah, exactly. I can see why they did it. Probably they thought of hunting ground first. They're like, no, it's not a hunting game. They're like, hunting ground. It's a horror game. It implies what we need the audience to know. It's a horror game. It's scary. You'll be covering some ground. But then it completely lost all the reason for calling it hunting ground. So they could have just changed it completely. This is just what happens when you workshop ideas. Yeah. oh group think at its finest i mean they could have like called it like alchemy ground or azoth ground and it would have still been better i don't know so we're going to be covering several theories regarding this game let's just give a brief overview of the game torval what would you say is the plot of this game if it was dude don't ask me that what is the plot of this game

oh my gosh this game has the world's most convoluted insane off-the-wall plot like what is even going on like um okay i'll try and sum it up for you so a girl goes out for a ride with her parents they crash her dad is murdered by a clone of her dad she finds out that her dad is also a clone of another clone yes she wakes up and she is being tormented by a gigantic disfigured man a dog comes to her defense she takes him down but then is being tormented by possibly a homunculus or a artificial human yeah we don't know what what danielle is yeah she's she's the maid and she doesn't like fiona so she's tormenting her now fiona gets away from her and then she's being tormented by a clone of her dad and she gets away from him and then she's being tormented by another guy who looks just like her dad but is really old and then she gets away and that's it and then she's being tormented by that same guy but younger and then that same guy but on fire

every single one of these people has different reasons for wanting to torment her uh which i guess is the plot of this game um debilitous the disfigured guy who's tormenting her i think is doing it because he thinks she's his dolly and he wants to play with her yeah that seems to be the case daniela is tormenting her because she is jealous of fiona um she seems to think that fiona is a privileged little princess who is also a slut but i don't really see any evidence she does wear kind of revealing clothes but that's not her fault it was provided by daniela so i think daniela's a little off very off ricardo the clone of her dad with like a broken face he is chasing her around because i think he wants to get her pregnant i i don't know for sure though that is what he implies and then the final boss lorenzo i think is his name he is chasing her because he needs what's inside of her so he can be immortal yes did i get all that right yeah yeah okay good

that's the plot of the game there you go like how did they even come up with this i can't imagine being like in a room with other game developers and being like we want to make a game where the main mechanic is that you're a helpless young person you you just can't do anything it's a horror game and you're you're unable to defend yourself and bigger stronger people are chasing you that makes perfect sense like that is it that was just basis for a horror game originally going to be clock tower 4 well it was originally going to be resident evil 4 if you go by the theory right well it's originally going to be a couple different things but yeah but i just can't imagine making the jump from that really solid basis for a horror game to like alchemy like let's make this about like cloned dads and immortality and like a man with liquefied organs who's been alive for a thousand years and he wants to get her pregnant or also absorb her womb to live forever it seems

like capcom as they often do if you've ever played any other games felt like the plot needed to be more complex than it should have been dude that's that's the beauty of capcom though yeah capcom's great i love them i mean it's because like the original clock tower game is a pretty simple horror thriller about a little girl trapped in a house where people want to kill her and she's just trying to get away i i have to be honest here i've only ever played clock tower three that's where i was going next so then capcom makes clock tower three and what is the plot of clock tower three well it's kind of like clock tower one sort of teens who can't stop twitching um like just kind of yelling at each other the animation in clock tower three is kind of crazy i don't know yeah people what drug their animators were on oh man what a game anyway no but the plot of that game is insane it's it's like she's a rooter and her job is to go back in time to

different time periods to kill ancient evil spirits using a bow but she doesn't have that bow and she can't do anything to pretty like she's helpless against these creatures until she like gets them to a certain point then all of a sudden she gets her bow and then she can say this is the last one and shoot them with a bow which doesn't hurt them a bow which when it hits you creates It's golden chains that chain to environmental objects. And she needs to chain them to like three objects or something before she can actually seal them away. They went crazy with Clock Tower 3, then they were going crazy again with Clock Tower 4, and then went really crazy and were like, let's call it Temento or Haunting Ground. Here are the theories we are going to cover. Oh yeah, that's what we were talking about. We weren't talking about Clock Tower at all. This is the first theory. Haunting Ground and Resident Evil 4

started as the same game. Here is the next theory. Daniela, who is the crazy maid who lives in this castle where Fiona, the main character, is trapped. Daniela cooked Ayla, Fiona's mother, and fed her to Fiona. Dinner is served, miss. Also, Fiona may seem a little bit pathetic to many people who play this game and are expecting, like, I don't know, Leon Scott Kennedy. Yeah. There's a theory about why that is. Fiona has many physical disabilities due to being the offspring of a clone. This is why she can't run far. She runs out of breath. Just from backstepping, she has poor coordination and always falls down and clutches her chest like she's having a heart attack, those kinds of things. This is an interesting theory to me because I always got the impression while playing this game that Fiona's dad was an alchemist, which he was, just like his clone Ricardo and his creator Lorenzo. I thought that he was an alchemist who created Fiona through alchemy.

Well, in a way, he did. Wow, wet alchemy. Through the wet method, which is just normal sex. Wow. Yeah, get down to the wet method if you want. There's no, we're not dead in yellow. As long as everyone's consenting. You're heading down the pathway to the wet method, Fiona. What did he mean by that? I don't know. He didn't even want that. He just wanted immortality until that. like lorenzo what's going on sorry i was quoting lorenzo from the game just in case anyone wants to take that out of context so uh another theory that we won't get into much ricardo was growing a clone of fiona for unknown purposes okay also uh last thing i don't even know if this is theory azoth which it's not quite explained what it is azoth is a fluid that gives life and is contained in all creatures, but is highly concentrated in Fiona's uterus. Yeah. As you might expect from the title and from the descriptions we've given,

this game does get a little demented. It could be worse. That's the thing. It never gets overtly sexual. There's never... I don't know. It does, though. I mean, the unlockables are like... We don't talk about the unlockables. So the Daniela theory, I thought that a part of that theory was also that Daniela is not a homunculus, she's not an artificial human, but she is a real boy, sorry, she is a real woman. So that is the final theory which we'll go over is what is Daniela, and according to the Haunting Ground wiki, there are a lot of different theories on what she is. She might be a homunculus, she might be some sort of automated doll creature that is slightly human, or she might just be a human. Who's crazy? What do you think? I always thought she was a homunculus. Has your opinion changed at all? No, I think the best explanation is still that she's just a homunculus. Yeah, me too. Like I was going to say, you're never going to convince me that she's a real human.

Like she is an artificial human. I don't see any other explanation for it. It's stupid to say otherwise, but whatever, we'll get into it. I have to ask you, is there HP? Like, is there health points? Because I literally never was sure. And having beat it again, I still don't know. Does Fiona have hit points? Right. She can refresh herself at water. Like anytime she finds a sink, she can refresh herself. But does that give her hit points? Am I losing hit points? I just don't know. I tried to test it by letting Daniela beat the crap out of me and let me just like go insane over and over, but still escaping from her. And I never died unless I got hit while I was already down. I honestly think Capcom, actually, this was a good design quality on their part, was that they decided to have no HUD, right? There's no heads up display. You don't know how much hit points you have. You don't know necessarily what Fiona's abilities are.

And that kind of makes it a little scarier because you're always like, I don't know how much I can take, how much I can survive. But she seems to have two main stats that we don't ever see, but they are stamina and fear when she is around bad guys her fear will go up it goes up more if they attack her or do things like laugh at her or roar at her if it goes up enough she goes into panic mode where she just runs and you kind of try to point which direction she's running but she might trip she might hit a wall and if she gets hit while in panic mode she dies gotcha she also has stamina that just makes it so you can't run fast right but if you get hit it does take away stamina like she'll walk slower she'll grab her side if she's hurt and i don't know if getting to zero stamina can kill you but it can certainly slow you down i definitely got to zero stamina as huey in the mini game you unlock after beating the game and uh i just never

got stamina back ever again and it became the most horrible experience ever and huey can die ability to walk he just like slowly like slugs around oh yeah no it's impossible and for me the stamina did eventually come back but it took a long time but also like uh ricardo can kill you in one hit even if he's got a gun yeah it makes sense it's realistic pistol i love that part of the game actually because every other bad guy it's like oh no they're gonna push me oh no they're gonna slap me uh-oh he has a gun he's got a gun he just whips it out so haunting ground and resident evil started as the same game you can look this up you can read different accounts of this that are from the various developers and directors of the game the reason that this theory is at least somewhat plausible is because we know it is confirmed that resident evil 4 underwent an extremely protracted development period in which they tried like five

different prototypes of the game yeah four prototypes there's the castle version there's The fog version, the crazy version. Yeah, the one where he's going crazy and then the final version. And there's, well, there's a zombie version too that you never saw. No, no, no one ever saw it, but yeah. The thing is every single one of these versions is documented. They have been talked about. Most of them have screenshots and video footage. There's an amazing footage of the castle one and the fog one. Like, oh, I would love to play those things. I so want to play the one where he's going crazy with the hook man. Oh, that one's so good. Well, like, it's the perfect marriage of, like, set camera angles and over-the-shoulder stuff, because, like, they have set camera angles for a lot of it, but then when it goes into combat mode, it's always over-the-shoulder for the most part. Which is great, because-

And so, like, you don't have that problem where you're like, oh, I'm going one direction, now I'm going the other direction. But the camera keeps changing, then I'm running the opposite direction. You're just going in circles. My point here is that we know that Resident Evil has many semi-complete prototypes that never really saw the light of day. So it is possible that one of those prototypes was or became Haunting Ground. But I'd love to hear what evidence you have to say that Haunting Ground was, in fact, a version of Resident Evil 4. Well, there's Huey. Are you right, dude? The thing that people point to the most is just Huey, and specifically, if Leon helps the dog, Huey, who in that game is just called That Dog, then he shows up to help you fight El Gigante, who looks a lot like Debilitus. He's kind of a weird big hunchback. Debilitus obviously isn't that huge, and he has a different face.

A little bit. In the castle version, so the earliest prototype of the game, you were going to be switching between two characters. Leon, when you play as him, you're trying to break into this castle, which is a facility for Umbrella. And then you would switch and play as Fiona, who wakes up in this facility and teams up with a Cerberus, a B-O-W, a dog, probably like a Cerberus. That helps her. That sounds like a cool game, actually. But then, yeah, Resident Evil 4 got workshopped a whole bunch and changed a bunch of times. And of course, we all love what we got. Like the most amazing game ever created. Yeah, just a historical game. They got split and we got two games. They were probably taking assets and ideas from that original game and they were going to turn it into what they thought was going to be Clock Tower 4. And then it became Demento.

The presence of Ashley in Resident Evil 4, as well as Huey, kind of helps confirm it, because Ashley is a lot like Fiona, and clearly Leon was going to be protecting this young woman whenever they meet up. It's similar. Another possible, possible Easter egg, it's possibly pointing at someone at Capcom remembering Haunting Ground and the connection thereof, is that in the new Resident Evil movie on Netflix, not the live action one, but Resident Evil Infinite Darkness. Oh, I wish they wouldn't confuse us with so many live action, non-live action movies. Which is a strange movie. I guess we shouldn't get into it, but a very strange movie that's not about Leon, really, and not really about anything except the president, this fictional president, having to make a big decision regarding war. Like, it's very political. It's kind of strange. But at one point, you do see a photo that the president has of him and Ashley Graham

posing in front of the White House. And they have a dog. And it's not a German Shepherd. But there's the fact that Ashley has a dog. She has a dog. Maybe that's sort of a nod toward she used to kind of be Fiona sort of thing. I don't know. Well, I mean, that's not the greatest evidence. But I think besides that, there's enough circumstantial evidence there to paint a picture. I can buy it, you know. So the game starts out and she's in a cage. And I just have to say, Capcom has this amazing habit of just like going like disgustingly cinematic. Like when she wakes up, they show three different shots of her waking up at three different angles for no reason. There's no reason. And then when she finally gets out of her cage and walks away, it slows down and plays like super intense music as she walks down the hall. She's just walking, dude. Now, they actually had a different company make the rendered cutscene.

It was not their normal animators. They used completely different Fiona models that look terrible. Like the in-game Fiona models and the in-game cutscenes look way better than the pre-rendered stuff. But luckily they only have like two of those. So I have a few thoughts that I have to say about Fiona and just what kind of person she is. So I love this game. I've always loved this game. and I always felt an affinity with Fiona. I just always really identified with this character. Before you go too far, I just want to point out to you and our listeners, there are many people who do not love this game, who do not feel fondly towards this game. One of them may be even a host of this podcast. I love this game for what it is, but I gotta say it can be an insanely frustrating game to play. And I would even suggest a purposefully frustrating game. I wouldn't recommend that just anyone go out and find their nearest copy of Haunting Ground and

pull out your old PS2 and ha ha ha ha ha dude it can be an infuriating game to play but if you go into it knowing what to expect you can find a really fun time because Fiona is a fun character and the crazy story is insane like it's quite the experience you gotta take the good with the bad with this game yeah as you generally did with the old survival horse yeah i just think with fiona like i feel like sometimes she gets a little criticized because she can't do much and it's it is frustrating and like you said it may even be intentionally frustrating but i also feel like it's kind of realistic like everything about this game feels like at least her reactions to the situation she's in there are the reactions i might have like she's just running she can't do anything she's scared she hides everything is out to get her i mean isn't this how life feels sometimes this actual towering giant man like he's as wide as two people and as tall as one and a half people

comes charging at you what are you going to do like you can really only run like depilatus is a superhuman like what if you you walk into a room and there's like an old man in a wheelchair and he falls out of his wheelchair what are you gonna do you're going to run because that's scary old man on the ground crawling towards me to be fair with the old man you do not have to run and he is extremely easy to defeat you can just kick the crap out of lorenzo he's full of items you can just grab him he's the funnest uh they're called stalkers in the manual anyway though he's the funnest stalker in the game so a few notes on just fiona one criticism of this game is that she is over sexualized and i would agree with that very much so yes and i think that is a totally legit criticism of this game it just overly objectifies fiona all the time constantly and all the characters in the game objectify her but like despite all that she is a fully fleshed out

realized interesting and complex character who i think deserves to be looked at more than just like the lady getting chased around in a castle game. Yeah. I think that the plot and even themes of this game needed some extra work, but I like the character. I like Fiona. And honestly, Debilitas and Daniela are both really good characters as well. I don't like them as much as Debilitas and Daniela, but Ricardo and Lorenzo are also, you know, they're interesting in their own right. I also have to say there are times where this game does sexualize Fiona just for the sake of it which i don't particularly appreciate no because like it is one thing for the game to be like she was forced in this situation they forced her to wear these clothes she's just trying to get away but then you could say it's the writers who are doing those things to her and the biggest criticism this game faced in this regard was the jiggle physics the completely

unnecessary unrealistic yeah oh it's ridiculous absolutely ridiculous like as much as i already love it this game would be improved so much if you could just turn off those physics dude no turn them up yeah i want them like physics glitching around the room when i enter no no i never got to why she's such a good character so here's just a few fun little notes that you learn about her what's great is that like it's up to you to discover the character fiona like you actually have to do some work like it doesn't necessarily put it right in your face so she really loves animals she frees huey she gets mad about the dead bird in a cage that she finds at some point in the game she identifies with the tiger rug in the hunting trophy room she sympathizes with how it gets stepped on every day i just think that's an interesting note about her character and she hates that trophy room you go into this trophy room that's full of trophy animals like i didn't even

notice that the first time i played but she's just appalled by it there's a pool table in there and that's the first thing i noticed and she's like this is such a terrible place to put a pool table and i'm like yeah yeah i noticed that too and i was like why why is she so mad about like what's wrong with this room but then yeah and then i noticed all the trophy animals and she loves animals yeah but she does not love bugs she hates bugs especially moths she can get killed by moths she has a reason to hate them she is both scared and angered by the existence of moths like they ruin clothes and they leave their wings everywhere it's one of her her thoughts and that's actually one of the cool parts of this game that you don't even really notice is you can go into the menu and just see her thoughts on all the things that has happened and it's like interesting to just read what she thinks about all this stuff fiona also loves music she seems to want to play

the piano when you find it in the music room she also wants to take the music books with her she's like, I wonder if they would mind, which is just a funny thing to think when people are chasing her down. She owns it. That is true. She owns this castle. These little journal, like these thoughts and things in the journal, I think really helped flesh her out. And I always thought it was one of the best parts of the game. So Debilitus, what are your thoughts on Debilitus? I don't really have anything to say about Debilitus, except that he's a fun bad guy because he's not really a bad guy. Like you kind of make friends with him halfway through the game and then he kind of helps you after that if you go to his hut after having beaten the game once he'll give you the key to just beat the game early just leave it's pretty cool which is also my favorite ending of the game i love it when fiona just like walks out the door halfway through the game and lawrence is

like wait what we had a whole game plan this is by far the best ending yeah once you beat the game if you play it again you can just skip the whole game and go straight to the ending having never even met ricardo really i never faced daniella in fact you've never ever met lorenzo at that point you're like who's that old man screaming at me i'm just gonna leave it seems like this was all a plot by lorenzo to get her ass off to get eternal life however ricardo was the one who crashed the car and apparently took fiona hostage no this is a plot by no one this is no one has a good plot here these are four just like virtually unconnected people doing their own thing and neither one of them had a good plan for keeping fiona alive for their purposes well no one has a plan for anything lorenzo is the only one who seems to have the castle and happens to want to play with fiona daniela is just unbelievably jealous and wants to kill fiona like it's just

random people that are very aggressive lorenzo is the one who has the most plan he needs to get ricardo crash her dad's car it's ricardo who crashed her dad's car killed her dad and he's definitely not working with lorenzo like they all live together but they all hate each other and then also ricardo knows that debilitas is chasing fiona around he goes he does yeah debilitas you know like he tells debilitas to leave but he doesn't say like leave her alone forever stop him like he like if you want to use fiona for your own purposes ricardo you went to a lot of trouble to get her here come on man to his credit he did go to a lot of trouble to create a wooden carving of her pregnant which he keeps on the couch yeah i don't know why he later keeps her on that couch if you get the right ending like i was always confused by that wooden thing like and so is fiona was he gonna bring it to life like as a golem no no this it is his goal

this is his way of setting goals is not writing them on a piece of paper it's whittling them in giant life-size statues he's like this is what i want to accomplish because if you get the ending where he wins that's what he accomplishes it's literally fiona sitting right there pregnant Just like the statue he made. So, just to note, Debilitus works for Ricardo. Daniela actually works for Lorenzo, not Ricardo. But both of them don't really do anything other than take care of the castle and prepare food. Lorenzo is helping Fiona. He needs her to get through the castle to the mansion, which, crazy that these grounds contain a castle, a mansion, a lake, a tower. like yeah it's pretty crazy um but at the same time ricardo seems to be protecting her from lorenzo to some extent so they're both like protecting her from each other everyone's doing a very very terrible job of maybe slightly protecting fiona every once in a while but

also trying to kill her trying to kill her so fiona happened to walk into the kitchen at one point in the game and found daniela cooking a cut scene plays which shows fiona just being shocked out of her mind but then the cut scene ends and you can just walk up to daniela and fiona's like oh i shouldn't bother her while she's cooking what's going on here so when you find danny cooking fiona just stares as watered down blood drips from the ladle so that's what she's staring at yeah maybe it's like a red wine sauce i don't know yeah but it's supposed to look like blood and clearly this is supposed to be creepy when you look into the pot fiona comments that it looks something like angel hair pasta oh she is not eating pasta later she's eating soup but ayla had fine blonde hair which might look kind of like angel hair pasta ayla being fiona's mother especially if your mind is blocking out the reality it's pasta it's just pasta and then

when she looks at it again later she says this pot is filled with what looks like tendrils wait a second this looks like dot dot dot human hair so like clearly the angel hair pasta was human hair she's now seeing the human hair fiona walked in on daniela cooking her mom started to freak out And then her brain saved her by blocking it out. She's not cooking, my mom. Oh, she's just cooking. So from cryptic hints that she gets from Lorenzo, Fiona goes on a huge fetch quest just to get a key and has to beat Debilitas to do it. She does all of this, goes to unlock the door. And what stops her? Dinner is served, miss. Yes, it's time for dinner. this is another thing that i have i just love fiona's personality i think she's relatable as a protagonist like she's not super powered leon kennedy she's scared him she's bad at everything and she's only able to survive because of her semi-reliable friend huey who's sometimes not even very reliable he's usually not even there

in my experience i played literally over half the game just without huey because i could never find him but she's just like ridiculously passive and helpless and i think that's what makes her unique like she's going she's trying to get out of here but the maid says dinner is served and she's just like oh well i can't deny her the chance to serve dinner she worked so hard at it she goes with danielle to have dinner takes one bite and then says thanks for dinner and then leaves very polite of her for someone who knows she's in a castle where people like this is after she's beaten debilitous she knows she's in a castle where people are trying to kill her also interesting Daniela made Fiona 10 bowls of soup in the dinner scene for her to take one bite and get sick like after that I can kind of see why Daniela was pissed at Fiona because she went to a lot of work for her dinner and Fiona one bite

come on Fiona didn't even have to eat any I know she should have said no yeah it was very polite of Fiona yeah The theory is that they killed both Ayla and her father, Ugo, in this car crash. And they had to have disposed of the bodies, presumably. They at least brought Fiona here. It's possible they also brought the bodies here. And Daniela is just getting rid of the evidence. And she cooked Ayla into a soup. And because Fiona knows this, but her mind is kind of blocking it out, that's why she gets sick. The only other explanation is that Daniela poisoned her here. But I don't think that she did because it feels like she hadn't decided to kill her yet. Why would she? She certainly does decide to kill her right after this. She does, but she doesn't do anything to Fiona while she is passed out. Besides, she air gropes her. That's it. And it applies that Daniela had some sort of premeditated plan.

She had no plan. Which she clearly does not. She wouldn't be using just like a jagged piece of glass to do it. Yeah. i want to talk a little bit about daniela's character i really like her character she's my favorite character in the game by far you can look through a keyhole partway through the game and you see ricardo just slapping the absolute life out of daniela and she is just sitting there basically falling asleep with boredom as he does it and i don't know if that makes her less menacing because she's basically just a fixture of the castle or much, much more menacing because she doesn't care. She looks straight through the keyhole and smiles at Fiona. Yes, she knows what's going on is there. Love that scene. So good. She clearly has superhuman abilities. And that's our next theory is what is Daniela? So the wiki contradicts itself several times saying first she's a homunculus, possibly she's a doll or robot brought to life like a golem.

And then it even claims that she was an orphan from a neighboring village who's just barren. Because one of the things Daniela says is that she can't have children. And she's mad about that, I guess. If you look at the concept art, in some of the concept art, Daniela's character actually looks a lot like an evil version of Fiona. Like she's blonde. We do later see a clone of Fiona that Ricardo has in a tank somewhere. I think there's good evidence in-game to say that she's a homunculus. Very much so, yes. Daniela says that she cannot feel pain, which Ricardo presumably knows. So why is he smacking her? I don't know. Just for his own pleasure, I guess. I think that possibly Daniela, maybe all those things are true. Daniela is a homunculus created by Lorenzo, who works for Lorenzo. But for whatever reason, Ricardo thinks that she's an orphan who does feel pain, who is barren, who was taken to this castle.

On the wiki, the information about her being possibly an orphan, an actual human and not a homunculus, comes from a website called fftranslations.atspace.co.uk slash hgindex.html. So these translations are referenced all over the Haunting Ground wiki, But the actual source of these translations is gone. Like, if you trace them back to whatever this person translated, this person who goes by Belgium Tuesday, that source is now gone. I reached out to Belgium Tuesday and asked what the source was, and they were able to confirm that they're from a section of the old Japanese Demento website, which went offline not long after this person managed to grab all the stuff from it. Gotcha. This person's translations are just from the bios on that website, and they do say that Daniela was an orphan who was kidnapped and who was barren and drugged into thinking that she's a homunculus who can't feel pain.

Okay. She believes, according to this, that she is a homunculus who can't feel pain and is not a complete human being. And in order to become one, she needs to steal Fiona's Azoth, which is this alchemical thing that lets you create life, I guess. But when they kidnapped her, according to this version of what she is, when they kidnapped her, they wanted her to be able to have kids. And they just randomly happened to accidentally kidnap a barren woman. So instead of using her for the intended purpose, they're like, aha, she's barren. Let's tell her she's a homunculus. I think that this goes against a lot of what we see in the game. She says, my creator said he made me the perfect woman. Yeah. Why would he say that if he kidnapped her and was disappointed in her not being the perfect woman, presumably? Because then he brainwashed her to believe she was. Also, her fingertips are always bloody and it doesn't bother her.

She can get smacked. She can break glass with her head. She can hold a hot poker. She clearly can't feel pain. And she cries blood. That's not normal. I love Daniela. She's great. Yeah. And also character design wise, I love Daniela and Debilitus. Like they are extremely memorable villains. If you play this game, you remember those two villains. Yeah. Ricardo and Lorenzo. You don't remember Ricardo and Lorenzo. Young Lorenzo. Yeah, they're not as... Flaming Lorenzo. He's a little more memorable. A load of fire. It's Lord of Fire, but the R looks like a capital A in the game's test. It does, yes. It does. Lord of Fire. According to the wiki, Debilitas is a failed experiment of Ricardo. Yeah, that's what I always thought. And in the wiki, it says, because he is part dog, he has the habit of sniffing Fiona and sometimes will drop on all fours. I didn't know that. So apparently he is a homunculus chimera of some sort that is part dog.

Well, speaking of Debilitus, I do have to recount to you my final battle with Debilitus because I thought it was hilarious. Well, is it not entirely unintuitive? You can either kill Debilitus using a dog and weak kicks or spare him, quote unquote, by dropping a chandelier on his head? By dropping an unbelievably heavy chandelier. When I replayed this, I remembered you get the best ending by not killing Debilitus. So I didn't use the chandelier. I kicked him to death. You should use the chandelier. You screwed yourself. No good ending for you. How could Fiona kill him by kicking his shins? She's got strong kicks. Dude, she can kick the crap out of him. Kick the life out of him. So I could not get him to charge the chandelier holders. Because Huey kept getting in the way. And then getting stomped until he died. And then when he would die, he would just lay there blocking Debilitus forever.

So my solution was to purposefully just get panicked and then bash my head into the chandelier holders over and over until Debilitus was like, oh, that's what all the cool kids are doing. I'll do that too and copied me. Like that was the only way. That was the only way I could do it. You can kick the chandeliers down if you kick them enough. Oh my gosh, I should have done that. I didn't know. I thought only Debilitus was strong enough to do it. That's what I thought at first too, but it was so hard to get Debilitas to break them for you, so eventually I just kicked them down. Debilitas is cool. He's a great dog man. Daniela is very cool. Why do you think she was air groping Fiona? You know, I don't know. Is she into Fiona? Does she like her? Well, okay, we could get into that. I wasn't necessarily going to get into this theory, but some fans speculate that Daniela may be a lesbian. Evidence includes the way she touches Fiona's hand.

she stares at her she gets uncomfortably close to her oh yeah dude dinner is served miss just like inches from fiona's face she says it like two to three times but not so terrified that she's gonna run away no she's gonna go eat that dinner like if someone made dinner for me it would be so rude not to just at least have one bite of those 10 bowls of soup here's the best evidence one of daniella's hiding places is coming out of the closet for fiona literally you're right she comes out of the closet she comes out of the closet confirmed i have to recount to you some more difficulties with this game that i had how was i ever supposed to figure out that i needed to print out three plates with the words salt mercury and sulfur on them oh i don't know i've never been able to figure no i don't know where i was supposed to figure out those words there are word searches but neither of them point to those words in any way and then

even if you have figured that out how would you ever even think to put them in the three dragon statues mouths the third dragon head is way out of her reach i wouldn't even think right no you literally have to tell huey to go air bud yeah how would i know that huey can be air bud like this is the most insane puzzle ever i would have looked for a ladder if i hadn't read the freaking walkthrough and been like oh huey's air bud okay so daniela teleports just so you know all of the stalkers teleport which made me so mad you have told me that you think that the stalker mechanic works better in this than it does in the resident evil 2 remake by that i heartily disagree i find it just like disgusting like it makes me want to vomit the the fact that these stalkers do not follow any rules they just appear and disappear as they please right but they do have rules mr x and the nemesis they always walk around within the map and are somewhere right which sucks at any

point daniela could just decide to not exist anymore now i've spent all this time carefully walking through the castle avoiding where i knew she was well don't do that that's not how you play this game this is the reason i can't play modern chase and hide games like resident evil 2 remake as much as i love that game the mr x parts really bug me mr x is always chasing you and also always seems to know where you are and they don't ever go away they're always somewhere in the stupid map and so that's what i actually liked about this game that worked really well as first of all you hide. And then when the music stops, they have disappeared. And you know, you have at least five to 15 minutes before they will show up again. But that's what I like about Haunting Ground's version of chasing that I just couldn't do because in Remothered and even Resident Evil 2, like so much of it is puzzle solving and exploration, which you can't do when there's

always a guy who knows where you are, who's following and chasing you. Whereas like in haunting ground i just hide they go away and i know that i can relax for a few minutes and just solve puzzles until they show up again all i can say is that i was able pretty consistently to lead mr x to one corner of the police station and then lose him go over to the bell tower for example where i wanted to solve a puzzle and just do it that takes so long in haunting ground you just find a hiding place and you just stay there until they're gone and then you just come out and you solve the puzzle i don't know i never had a problem with this i always had a problem with this i hate it i can't stand once you get the fairy earrings uh never got them oh well you gotta get the fairy earrings yeah okay by playing the insane alchemy game oh terrible alchemy game it's so bad well since we're talking about hiding we could get into the whole fiona having physical

disabilities so she gets sick really easily from that soup she runs out of breath really easily because she's the daughter of a clone that's why she has some weird disabilities that she's kind of inherited there's one journal entry in the game that says eternal life was achieved through the dry method it seems to have no side effects it also says his organs were liquefied but anyway yeah it also says there are side effects definitely but but in that entry it says seems to have no side effects implying that the wet method does have side effects and fiona was conceived by the wet method which means maybe the side effect is that she has physical disabilities but you don't think that just means that she is ugo's daughter just like straight up well she is but he's a clone but that means that she was not conceived through alchemy she was conceived through sex that's what the wet method is the wet method is creating a clone and then making it have sex

that's the wet method yes wow why not just have the sex yourself this is just sex with extra steps i don't get it i don't know the dry method through which ricardo was made into a clone and conceived does have side effects in that your skin cracks which is why ricardo's face is cracked oh he's too dry he needs some lotion yeah it doesn't seem to have physical disabilities like ricardo doesn't run out of breath and he doesn't panic his heart rate doesn't seem to go up i i somehow didn't get that so ricardo was made with the dry method yes how was ugo made i don't know it seems like It would have to be the dry method, but he seems to be a more perfect clone. Maybe he just moisturized, like he used lotion. Because he met Ayla and she taught him about lotion. Yeah, she wasn't a complete weirdo like Lorenzo. She actually taught him how the world works. So the snuff film scene, Fiona plays this film, an actual film reel that she finds.

And it seems to show security camera footage of her being brought in and also her being chased moments before by Daniela. Seconds before, yes. Now, this is recorded on actual film. Security cameras do not ever have actual film. It doesn't make any sense. Actual film can only go for like 10 minutes because that's how long a reel is. If you make it longer, the reel just starts to get huge. There have been security cameras for a long time and actual film was the only option for a long time as well. I would think that the security camera would just be set up to record in a loop so that it records for maybe a half hour and then records over itself. You can't record over film. You can't? I don't know. It would just be double exposing it. It would have two images on it and they both be really washed out. That would not work. Someone would have to be running around changing these every 10 minutes.

and we know there are at least four security cameras then someone edited together an extremely short and random bit of film by actually splicing bits and pieces of film together well not just random but pointless who edited this do they have an editor a film editor like i used to be a film editor it does take some training like on actual film how did they edit it so fast together you gotta like cut it and actually tape it together maybe like it's like it has footage of fiona walking past that random couch mummy just moments before. They edited this really quickly. Yeah. So just another praise of Fiona. First of all, her voice actor's great. I love the way her voice actor's voice kind of cracks sometimes when she's really emotional. It's a really good performance. And then her thought when she kills Daniela, she says, a shard of glass pierces her body and pins her to the ground. I can't believe things

have gotten this out of hand. I know. I was so out of hand. jeez i somehow shattered a window above her head using light and pushing blocks and wow she just got skewered first i was riding home in a car now this right there's good evidence that daniela is an artificial person in that scene as she gets just absolutely manhandled by huey and giggles about it yeah i mean he is mauling the crap out of her and she doesn't even mind no she licks glass cries blood and decides to kill fiona interesting that she cries blood but does not bleed when pierced by this gigantic piece of glass she does not have blood except in her fingers and eyes exactly to me implies that there's not blood circulating through her system at least in the way that humans have blood circulating through their system yeah when she meets ricardo like for the first time kind of they finally get introduced to each other ricardo he sure seems

to think that fiona understands a heck of a lot more about this situation than she actually does and he really holds it against her as well like wait you don't get it you mean no he's been running around being it's more like you do get it and i'm mad at you because of your decisions because i know you understand this like she doesn't even know what she's doing here it just wants to go home and he's all like but you are home miserable wench like you know you're home what are you talking like he seems to think that she's like rejecting him and the castle because she's like i just want to go home and he's like you know what you've done now like this is your home how dare you oh ricardo you're you're crazy when she gets out to the forest i love how the first time he sees the sundial she explains in detail what a sundial is it's a clock doesn't use it so i can say if you check it again she's like it's just another clock and that lets you

save yeah so yeah you get to the forest and huey gets hurt and then fiona gets kidnapped Dude, did he come save you? He didn't come save me. I don't know why. Oh no, are you kicking Huey a lot? How do you know? It was a secret. Yeah. No, it is incredibly difficult to get Huey so mad at you that he won't come and save you. You have to abuse the crap out of that. It's hard to get the bad end. It is very hard to get the bad ending. I didn't actually. I like how the quote unquote water tower that you get to, as Lorenzo calls it, It's not a water tower, but a tower in a lake. It's not a water tower at all. It's not any... Okay, if you mean a tower in the water, then yes, it's a water tower. It definitely does not hold water. But yeah, you wake up and hopefully Huey saves you. Unless you were really, really mean to him. You were able to put together the puzzle on the top of the tower, right? No.

So all I have to say here is like, seriously? So I get all the way to the top of this stupid, gigantic tower with an invisible man chasing me the entire time only to find out that i need a wooden figure which is for no reason placed at the bottom of the tower inside of a pipe a pipe that i apparently can break by kicking it you don't know you can break those pipes i wouldn't have even known it i wouldn't have even known it existed let alone that i can break those pipes i had to if i hadn't read a guide so many times it's ridiculous that's a huge tower so uh luckily beating ricardo at at least for me, was the easiest thing on planet Earth. Well, Ricardo falls down, he dies. And when you come down, he is laying there, essentially in a very neutral, almost T-pose position, like they just placed his 3D model there. But when Fiona looks at him, she says, his limbs are twisted into unnatural positions,

saying about the man who is lying peacefully on the ground. That's an easy way to not have to animate it. If we tell the player, they'll see whatever we say. Well, we're about to meet Lorenzo. Yeah, he might be the greatest stalker in the game, actually. He's just a disabled man. He is. He is a very old man. He chases you, but you can just kick him in the face until he stops. And then the next time you meet him, he has become a slightly less old man. He's still pretty old, but he can walk around and he looks a lot more like Ricardo and your father, Ugo. What happened is that he's been slowly using up all his Azoth to stay alive. He has virtually no Azoth left. You don't know this until you play through the game a second time, but there's an extra cut scene. The second playthrough, after you kill Ricardo, he crawls up to Ricardo and sucks the Azoth out of his mouth. Whoa, okay. He gets Ricardo's Azoth, and that's why he starts to slowly de-age until first he looks

kind of like an older version of your father. And then he turns into like a sexy anime boy. This is the only game I've ever played where the big bosses of the game deescalate as you go through the game. Like the very first boss is the toughest, most imposing, most dangerous, gigantic brute. Second boss is like an incredibly dangerous glass wielding woman who seems less powerful than Debilitus. The third boss is just like a scrawny loser guy, but he does have a gun third boss is a crawling old man who can barely keep up with you like i i always thought that was fun like it's like each one is less powerful and yet fiona's just as scared of them right we know that fiona is like she's just a really scared like pushover if anybody acted even remotely not crazy she would probably just let them put her under anesthesia and extract the azoth and get it over with right like all they need to do is just like act remotely normal like

daniella when she said dinner is served like that got her to do it you know yeah the rest of this game consists of you blowing up lorenzo and then going somewhere else and then do you like blow him up again I think I remember yeah basically you end up going into the lava room so Lorenzo gets burned that does not kill him he chases Fiona down and then his arm falls off does he die here yeah I think after he falls into the lava Fiona says no one could survive falling that far and it wasn't that far of a fall it's just that it's into lava fiona fiona she's so she observes the strangest things about situations but anyway yes so uh i think he was going to die anyway it's just that he has so much power at this point that his crazed obsession was pushing him forward as the load of fire and then you reach the final boss of the game which is a statue running away from flaming Lorenzo right but that's not

the final boss the final boss is that statue yes the real final boss so a statue falls on her and you have to mash X in order to get her to push it up very slowly I honestly I don't think you mash X I think you mash square and circle mash whatever you want it's just kind of an odd thing because like if this statue is not so heavy that she can't hold it and push it up she could just move out of the way let it fall Fiona no you gotta put it back like you gotta understand how proper she is anyway so the best ending that you can get is Fiona she's really just so nervous that she can't get the key in the lock but there's a dog there Huey calms her down and then also Debilitus is happy yay and they they bow to each other there's a moment of mutual respect between her and Debilitus But, you know, I mean, as scared and pathetic as Fiona may sometimes seem, she murdered three people and got out of it alive.

Yeah, three or four hopelessly inept, completely insane people. Okay, let's sum up the theories. So, is Daniela a real human being or is she a homunculus? She's a homunculus. She's a homunculus, come on. Did Daniela cook Ayla and feed her to Fiona? She cooked someone. I mean, might as well be Ayla. What dead bodies were there around for her to cook? Ayla and Ugo. Right. So it's got to be one of them. Was this game a failed Resident Evil prototype? Yeah. I mean, Resident Evil has so many failed prototypes. Do you think that Fiona had physical disabilities just because she's pathetic or because she is the daughter of a possibly disabled clone. Yeah, no, I think that that makes the most sense in context. So I have one last question for you, just in general. What do you think of Huey? What do you think of the dog mechanic of this game? I really like it. I mean, I don't know. He's not always obedient,

but I like working with Huey to take down these big enemies. Like it can be fun after a while. I agree. And I think it's a good mechanic. and i think there should be more games like they for example fallout 4 they give you a dog i never felt like that dog was even part of the game like you can't do anything with that dog well like huey is like oh i need you yeah huey is central to the game he's your only companion right like he's the only thing there for you and he is like aggro from uh from shadow of the colossus like you're in this empty room where everything is intimidating and out to get you and the only one who wants to you as huey and i like it i think it's cool or play a game as huey dude that was the best part after you beat the game you unlock that mini game it was so fun for the few seconds where i played it before huey got worn out and never moved again no fiona i love ai fiona she's just like i'm gonna

take this guy out with you huey she never runs no she doesn't run away and i want her to like yeah i'm just like fiona i'm fighting this guy so you can go go fiona she's like no i'm with you i'm gonna take him down she's just kicking him dude and then sometimes she'll just tell you to stop stop i love it it really made me feel for the ai huey and maybe get a bit why he was so disobedient to me because i'm like this stupid fiona doesn't know what she's doing i know what she should do follow me fiona he's just gone i love hunting ground music for this episode was provided by christine follow us on twitter at popcorn isn't real get a hold of us anywhere anytime let us know if you have a theory you want us to cover uh feel free send it our way we'd love to chat with you about it maybe cover it on our show and remember the popcorn isn't real