Well, I'm not sure it really does. There's definitely a strong atmosphere set up, right from the start of the play, which gives a pervasive sense of what Shakespeare wants you to imagine. Here's the atmosphere in a series of quotes from Act 1, Scene 1, usually set up high on the castle battlements:
FRANCISCO
....'tis bitter cold.HORATIO
So frown'd he once when, in an angry parle,
He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.
...'tis strange.MARCELLUS
...tell me, he that knows,
Why this same strict and most observant watch
So nightly toils the subject of the land,
And why such daily cast of brazen cannon,
And foreign mart for implements of war,
Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task
Does not divide the Sunday from the week.
What might be toward, that this sweaty haste
Doth make the night joint-labourer with the day?
It's cold, vast, spooky, impressive - and the noise of preparations for war fills the air day and night. It's a very horror movie sort of atmosphere, I think - very gothic. It certainly affects Hamlet's state of mind: he thinks that Denmark's "a prison", and longs to return to the (much cooler, and much more Protestant) Wittenberg, where he is at university.
But it wouldn't have been seen in the Globe Theatre when it was performed: there would have been no set or setting - no props, flats, lights, and so on. Just an empty space: that "setting" would have been conjured up using words alone. So I'm not sure you could really make an argument that the castle is central to the atmosphere of the play as performed: though it certainly is present within the language of the play.
Hope this helps!
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