Silent Hill: Ascension review in progress – worse than you expected

GameCentral takes a look at the first new Silent Hill game in over a decade, and it is the exact opposite of what fans have been hoping for.

Before we get into this, we want to say that we’re really looking forward to Silent Hill f. Konami announced a bewildering number of new Silent Hill games last year and while the remake of Silent Hill 2 is the headliner we’re not convinced The Medium developer Bloober Team can do justice to such an all-time classic. Silent Hill f looked great though, with an ultra creepy trailer that was completely unlike anything seen in the franchise so far but still retained a similar sense of existential terror as the early entries.

We wanted to say something positive before we start talking about Silent Hill: Ascension because, frankly, it’s absolutely horrible. That’s not going to be much of a surprise to fans that have been following the Silent Hill revival closely, as the initial reveals have been full of red flags, from the involvement of J. J. Abrams and the makers of Dead By Daylight to the fact that it’s described as a ‘massively interactive live event’ instead of, you know, a video game.

It’s essentially Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures Anthology crossed with Twitch Plays Pokémon. It was probably also inspired by the Bandersnatch episode of Black Mirror; in that it works like a Choose Your Adventure book but where everyone that’s watching votes on the outcome of various events in order to determine the outcome.

Ascension 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. As we understand, it’s meant to last for six months of story but whether that’s the same plot and characters all the way through we’re not sure.

Rather than voting on your decisions at the same time as everyone else you have up to 24 hours to decide. The catch is that in order to vote you need to spend influence points, which are extremely difficult to earn without paying for microtransactions. The more points you spend the more influence you have, so that immediately turns the whole thing into a pointless pay to win (or rather pay to decide) experience.

So far, 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.

It’s all rather confusingly presented, and feels like it needed a more substantial introduction, but 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. Not only are you left confused as to who anyone is, or what their motivations are, but it quickly becomes clear that the game is only interested in cheap horror movie style shlock and not the slow build-up and disturbing atmosphere of the actual Silent Hill games.

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, but so far none of them have been particularly interesting quandaries.

We’re also not sure why Ascencion isn’t just filmed with real actors, because it’s not interactive in the traditional sense and the animation is distractingly bad, with variable quality voice acting. Presumably it’s cheaper to just do everything with CGI but since this isn’t, by its own admission, a video game it’s clear that’s not the best fit.

There’s also QTEs (a lot of staff at developer Genvid are ex-Telltale Games) but whether you complete them or not is irrelevant if the rest of those watching don’t, so if the majority mess up then the QTE is counted as having been failed no matter how well you do. Although the fact that Silent Hill has QTEs, with monsters running around like mindless goons in a cheap teen horror flick, is frankly insulting to the legacy of the series and exactly the opposite of what the franchise should be all about.

Even if the tone and style of horror had been the same as the Silent Hill games 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. A chat whose moderation was broken at launch, with most people seemingly more interested in abusing that than playing the game – sorry, massively interactive live event.

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.

Unless you pay for the Founder’s Pack there’s only one puzzle to play – essentially a hidden object game – which is the best way to win more points, although you also get them for logging in every day and all the other familiar tricks from free-to-play mobile games.

It’s all very distasteful and unpleasant, more so than the Otherworld and all its horrors, and yet the website has been down half the time, since it went live on Halloween, because of the unexpectedly high traffic, so from a business perspective maybe this was all a good idea after all.

That’s not how it’s going to seem if you’re a Silent Hill fan hoping to see the series returned to its roots as a highbrow psychological horror. In fact, it’s the absolute opposite of what you’ve been hoping for. Maybe the story will get better over time, but the mechanics clearly aren’t going to. Silent Hill: Ascencion may end up making Konami money but it’s going to do nothing for either their reputation or that of Silent Hill in general.

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