November 2nd 2023.
Silent Hill: Ascension has been the talk of the town since Konami announced the new Silent Hill game last year. Fans were hoping for a remake of Silent Hill 2, and the trailer for Silent Hill f looked promising. But now, Silent Hill: Ascension is here and it's not what anyone expected.
GameCentral takes a look at the first new Silent Hill game in over a decade, and it's not what fans have been hoping for. It's the exact opposite of what they want, and is absolutely horrible.
Silent Hill: Ascension is essentially Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures Anthology crossed with Twitch Plays Pokémon. It's like a Choose Your Adventure book but everyone that's watching votes on the outcome of various events in order to determine the outcome. It can only be played via the game's website or its smartphone app and runs every day, with a 40 minute intro and then 15 minute episodes every day after that.
The plot is split between two locations, with a woman called Rachael trying to recruit new people to a mysterious cult in Pennsylvania, while in Norway someone named Karl is trying to nurse his abusive sick mother while looking after his daughter Astrid. The all-important decisions are simple multiple choice options, like whether to hide evidence from the police or what to tell Rachael's cult leaders.
The meat of the first episode is that Rachael messes up a ceremony with an acolyte called Joy, which ends up summoning a demon. Meanwhile, Karl gets trapped in the traditional Otherworld of Silent Hill, but in such quick fashion that there's no chance for any real characterisation or tension.
The decisions are not particularly interesting quandaries and the animation is distractingly bad, with variable quality voice acting. There are QTEs but they don't matter if the majority of people watching mess up. The key issue is that it's impossible to be scared by anything when so many people are typing nonsense on a Twitch style chat window at the same time.
Technically, Ascencion is free but there’s a £20 Founder’s Pack that includes a battle pass with 100 tiers and a bunch of influence points and cosmetics. You can also buy influence points on their own, in separate bundles of up to £20 each, if you’re that desperate for your decision to be the one that’s chosen – although there’s still no guarantee it will be.
It's all very distasteful and unpleasant, more so than the Otherworld and its horrors. Silent Hill: Ascension may end up making Konami money but it's going to do nothing for either their reputation or that of Silent Hill in general. It's the exact opposite of what fans have been hoping for, and the mechanics clearly aren't going to change. To think, we could have had Hideo Kojima's Silent Hills instead of this.
[This article has been trending online recently and has been generated with AI. Your feed is customized.]
[Generative AI is experimental.]
