October 2022.
It had been 10 years since the last Silent Hill game proper, and although the series has grown in popularity due to influencer praise, nostalgia and the infamous P.T. debacle on PlayStation 4, there was still no word from Konami on the future of the series. Until there was.
The Silent Hill Transmission was the first official announcement platform the series has ever received and the first time the fanbase had any hope that our beloved series would finally come back after a deafening silence. Within the 48 minute airtime, many promising and intriguing details of Silent Hill products were discussed; Silent Hill Townfall produced by Annapurna, Silent Hill F written by Ryukishi07, the official Silent Hill 2 remake by Bloober Team and even a new movie called Return To Silent Hill. Amongst these semi-coherent and varying degree of cool announcements, however, stood an anomaly… Silent Hill: Ascension.
Teased as a fully interactive “Choose Your Own Adventure”, Silent Hill: Ascension was to be a live-stream event where the outcomes were all to be decided on and voted by the viewing audience. The project was a collaboration between Genvid Entertainment, dj2 Entertainment, Bad Robot Games (yes, THAT Bad Robot), and Behaviour Interactive (Dead By Daylight).
I’m not too proud to admit that in the fever-pitch of new properties being thrown around, the idea of an interactive game that aired every night until it finished was one I latched onto. Nothing like that has ever been done before and, even if it was going to be a car-wreck at least it would be interesting.
Or so I thought.
Here we are, a year later and a month into it’s runtime and I can undoubtedly say that Silent Hill: Ascension has been detrimental to the possible health of the Silent Hill franchise in a way we’ve never seen before.
The first thing that happens when you log into Silent Hill: Ascension is you’re introduced to how the system works; you earn an in-game currency called Influence Points (IP) and that IP can be used to vote on important decisions for the characters and buy Cameo Tickets to get your avatar a change to participate in the next days’ scenes. Due to the nature of most of the decisions you can make, IP is crucial to help put
Luckily, you can earn IP by playing a bunch of crappy puzzles or logging in everyday to do your daily goals (which I have) but, of course the best way is to straight up buy it in packs of $7, $13 and $28 to really ensure you get there. Still have more money to spend? Well, as you’re reminded multiple times, you can buy the season pass where you can unlock tons of useless emotes for the live chat (that bans any mention of being scammed, by the way).
What the real death knell for Silent Hill: Ascension, aside from the gross predatory nature of trying to get money out of people every single day, is the fact that it just isn’t well done. The voice acting is awful and stilted, the animations are beyond amateurish (in fact, many think it’s AI-created), the writing is awful and, perhaps worst of all, NOTHING HAPPENS. Everyday we get 2-3 single minute “episodes” where the main characters complain about whatever another character is doing and sometimes a monster appears for no reason.
The ramifications for the series have already started; multiple people I’ve seen on social media say this is the first Silent Hill-type thing they decided to try and they don’t get the hype around the series. Of course, this is ridiculous but there is a non-zero chance that saturating the market with less-than-acceptable releases sets a bad precedent for Silent Hill that I just don’t think Konami can (or cares to) come back from.
While the idea of what Ascension is trying to do is somewhat engaging and I would love to see it realized with a new property, I can’t help but feel disgust and sadness to see how it is tainting one of my favorite series of all time.
