Silent Hill: Ascension
Year: 2023
Developer: Genvid Entertainment
Publisher: Konami
Platform: Web
PEGI: 16
Published: 19/02/24
Developer: Genvid Entertainment
Publisher: Konami
Platform: Web
PEGI: 16
Published: 19/02/24
The Silent Hill franchise has effectively lain dormant since 2012 following a horrendous series of blunders from publisher Konami. Following the underwhelming reception to Silent Hill Downpour, and the overwhelmingly negative response to Silent Hill HD collection, Silent Hill: Book of Memories, and the Silent Hill: Revelation film it was all quiet from Konami until the release of P.T in 2014, with the promise of a new Silent Hill title from Metal Gear Solid mastermind Hideo Kojima. This quickly fell through though following the Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain debacle, Silent Hills was cancelled and the franchise was forgotten. That was until October 2022 when Konami announced the return of the franchise in a big way, announcing multiple new games and a third Hollywood film. Just over a year later and the first game, Silent Hill: Ascension arrived to an overwhelmingly negative reception from critics and players alike. I dabbled a bit myself at launch, but decided to give it a couple of months and go back once there was more content to give it a slightly fairer assessment. My verdict, burn it to the ground.
When two communities in Pennsylvania and Norway are shaken by mysterious deaths, people close to the deceased begin to be plagued by visions of a nightmarish otherworld, filled with dangerous monsters.
To cut a long review short, Ascension is as terrible as you’ve heard. So, you’re probably not going to hear anything new from me, but unlike many of the other critics I did give it significantly more of a chance to try and right itself. But that moment never came in the roughly three hours I watched for.
When two communities in Pennsylvania and Norway are shaken by mysterious deaths, people close to the deceased begin to be plagued by visions of a nightmarish otherworld, filled with dangerous monsters.
To cut a long review short, Ascension is as terrible as you’ve heard. So, you’re probably not going to hear anything new from me, but unlike many of the other critics I did give it significantly more of a chance to try and right itself. But that moment never came in the roughly three hours I watched for.
So, is Ascension a game or a TV show? It absolutely leans more to TV show, but Konami and developer Genvid have ensured that there’s plenty of interactivity in there. Ascension functions by releasing a few minutes of new video content each day that if watched live can be voted on by those watching using ‘Influence Points’. These votes can change the course of the story, and as a result the community is shaping the narrative that’s being told…at least that’s the way Konami sell it. The reality is that the choices themselves are extremely superficial, we’re not talking Until Dawn or Heavy Rain levels of freedom, it’s often limited to slight dialogue deviations that might change the way characters interact for a brief time but nothing that actually impacts the story.
The story itself is pretty dire. Critics and audiences lamented the first week’s content because it featured next to nothing that resembled Silent Hill, with only one brief monster encounter that didn’t actually pose any threat to the character in that scene. It never tried to introduce the characters properly, and it generally gave you very little reason to care or point you in a direction that the story was heading in.
Having given the game a wide berth for a while I went back to watch a few weeks’ worth of content and I only managed to get just shy of three hours in before I threw in the towel for good. Why? Because it still wasn’t doing anything with the story, and there had only been another two or three brief monster encounters that felt extremely out of place and nonsensical. I didn’t know anything about any of the characters, and the whole thing was just so painful to watch.
The experience is made slightly more bearable by watching the scenes back later because you’re not bombarded by all the extra crap the game’s throwing at you. No choices taking up most of the screen, and most importantly, no open chat between every person viewing the episode spamming all kids of nonsense that really takes you out of the experience. It’s not like Ascension has much in the way of atmosphere anyway, so having people in the chat spam about how much they want to get down and dirty with Pyramid Head, or the now iconic ‘It’s Trauma’ meme.
The story itself is pretty dire. Critics and audiences lamented the first week’s content because it featured next to nothing that resembled Silent Hill, with only one brief monster encounter that didn’t actually pose any threat to the character in that scene. It never tried to introduce the characters properly, and it generally gave you very little reason to care or point you in a direction that the story was heading in.
Having given the game a wide berth for a while I went back to watch a few weeks’ worth of content and I only managed to get just shy of three hours in before I threw in the towel for good. Why? Because it still wasn’t doing anything with the story, and there had only been another two or three brief monster encounters that felt extremely out of place and nonsensical. I didn’t know anything about any of the characters, and the whole thing was just so painful to watch.
The experience is made slightly more bearable by watching the scenes back later because you’re not bombarded by all the extra crap the game’s throwing at you. No choices taking up most of the screen, and most importantly, no open chat between every person viewing the episode spamming all kids of nonsense that really takes you out of the experience. It’s not like Ascension has much in the way of atmosphere anyway, so having people in the chat spam about how much they want to get down and dirty with Pyramid Head, or the now iconic ‘It’s Trauma’ meme.
But as a live service game, because that’s really what Ascension is, Konami and Genvid need to keep you coming back. So in between new video content you can play a series of mini-games that will give you the opportunity to earn Influence Points, choose the outcome of a cliffhanger ending, or earn you cosmetic items for your player character. These mini-games are all rip-offs of small mobile games like Candy Crush, but have zero personality. Even then, success doesn’t guarantee a reward, and so it can feel like a massive waste of time to play these games for any significant length of time.
The reason behind all of this of course is to part you from your cash, but the way in which Ascension employs micro-transactions is truly heinous. So, the only way to actually earn Influence Points in a large enough number to use for voting is to buy them. Which seems baffling to me that people pay to choose dialogue choices in this game because honestly you might as well just burn money because you’re not actually getting anything from it.
But even worse is that in order to play more than one of the mini-games you need a separate content pass. This pass also gives you access to a bunch of cosmetic items but clearly the ‘game’ part of Ascension was intentionally locked behind the season pass, which even when you’ve paid for that you still need to continue paying for Influence Points to contribute to the story. There just really is no point.
Ascension also fails on its presentation. Let’s start things off with the voice acting, because I’ve heard a lot of bad voice acting in my time, but this might take the crown. There is not a single ounce of emotion in the delivery of these lines. The script is awful anyway, but these performances are so lifeless and poorly delivered that it makes it so much worse. The Norwegian characters confuse me the most because they don’t sound Norwegian, it does genuinely sound like an American doing a bad generic Scandinavian accent.
Then there’s the graphical quality. You’d think considering this is all cutscenes, essentially an animated film, that the visual quality would be high and there would be no technical hiccups. But not only does Ascension look worse than games from over a decade ago, but the animation is also so stiff and janky that it breaks any kind of immersion into the story. Even worse, the footage encounters frequent frame rate stutters and dips in performance. This is a pre-rendered animation and it’s struggling to play without encountering technical problems. Thats an unforgivable technical issue.
There really are zero redeeming qualities to Silent Hill: Ascension, and I think this may be a new low for the franchise. That’s a big problem considering the state of projects like Silent Hill: Revelation and Silent Hill: Book of Memories. Ascension seems incapable of telling an interesting story with characters you want to care for. What little gameplay there is isn’t fun to play in the slightest; the mini-games are poor knock-off’s of mobile games, and voting along to the live video content is pretty pointless unless you’re willing to spend literally hundreds of pounds to influence the vote in one direction. Then comes the fact that even in spite of all this, the video doesn’t even work properly with numerous playback issues, awful animation, and horrendous voice acting. If this supposed to be the beginning of a new era for Silent Hill, then hopefully we can only go up from here?
The reason behind all of this of course is to part you from your cash, but the way in which Ascension employs micro-transactions is truly heinous. So, the only way to actually earn Influence Points in a large enough number to use for voting is to buy them. Which seems baffling to me that people pay to choose dialogue choices in this game because honestly you might as well just burn money because you’re not actually getting anything from it.
But even worse is that in order to play more than one of the mini-games you need a separate content pass. This pass also gives you access to a bunch of cosmetic items but clearly the ‘game’ part of Ascension was intentionally locked behind the season pass, which even when you’ve paid for that you still need to continue paying for Influence Points to contribute to the story. There just really is no point.
Ascension also fails on its presentation. Let’s start things off with the voice acting, because I’ve heard a lot of bad voice acting in my time, but this might take the crown. There is not a single ounce of emotion in the delivery of these lines. The script is awful anyway, but these performances are so lifeless and poorly delivered that it makes it so much worse. The Norwegian characters confuse me the most because they don’t sound Norwegian, it does genuinely sound like an American doing a bad generic Scandinavian accent.
Then there’s the graphical quality. You’d think considering this is all cutscenes, essentially an animated film, that the visual quality would be high and there would be no technical hiccups. But not only does Ascension look worse than games from over a decade ago, but the animation is also so stiff and janky that it breaks any kind of immersion into the story. Even worse, the footage encounters frequent frame rate stutters and dips in performance. This is a pre-rendered animation and it’s struggling to play without encountering technical problems. Thats an unforgivable technical issue.
There really are zero redeeming qualities to Silent Hill: Ascension, and I think this may be a new low for the franchise. That’s a big problem considering the state of projects like Silent Hill: Revelation and Silent Hill: Book of Memories. Ascension seems incapable of telling an interesting story with characters you want to care for. What little gameplay there is isn’t fun to play in the slightest; the mini-games are poor knock-off’s of mobile games, and voting along to the live video content is pretty pointless unless you’re willing to spend literally hundreds of pounds to influence the vote in one direction. Then comes the fact that even in spite of all this, the video doesn’t even work properly with numerous playback issues, awful animation, and horrendous voice acting. If this supposed to be the beginning of a new era for Silent Hill, then hopefully we can only go up from here?