Remember the time when the Silent Hill franchise was regarded as the king of the genre? Well, apparently Konami doesn't, as it delivers yet another disappointing entry that does nothing except further tarnish the already dead franchise.

Silent Hill: Ascension ditches the survival horror aspect of the franchise and turns it into an interactive game akin to Until Dawn and Detroit. Unlike those two games, though, Ascension literally has nothing much of significance in its every single department.

As a game, well, it's a game without any gameplay. If you don't tune in live, all you can pretty much do with the app is watch the game's story unfold with no single interaction. There are minigames to partake in, but they are so straightforward, uninteresting, and disconnected from the story that there is pretty much no point in doing them. But the most offensive aspect of it all is that the developers somehow have the audacity to include a battle pass in a game without any gameplay features. This is pretty much just a glorified interactive series.

Now, this idea of an interactive series doesn't sound so bad, but even with it being the sole focus, Ascension still manages to fail in this regard. The story is incredibly boring, with literally nothing going in it. The "scares" aren't even there; each and every encounter with the monsters are literally just teases that lasts no longer than 10 seconds. Most episodes last about 50 minutes, yet nothing important or scary ever happens.

The third episode frustrated the hell out of me with the way it ended its story. It literally ended in the middle of a scene, making me shout at just how dumb they had to abruptly end the already boring episode. Funnily enough, before the developers took a long break in making the episodes, each of the episodes released just kept getting shorter and shorter, probably because even the developers were getting sick of the game already.

Dialogue also feels incredibly forced. The choices that we are supposed to make are blatantly incorporated into the dialogue, which makes for some very off-putting and unconvincing scenes. This is also done so frequently, sometimes even multiple times in a single episode, making the already atrocious script even more frustrating. It's not like the voice acting is good either, in fact, they are so freaking bad. There's this one scene where a character accidentally killed someone, but they didn't even react to it, and they just continue delivering their lines in such a monotone fashion. Basically, all the characters in the story are incredibly dense and stupid, acted with such boredom.

The animation quality also gets uglier and uglier as the episodes go on, which makes for such an eye sore.

If there's one thing Ascension does right, it's the enemy designs, which look quite creepy. They look like they might just fit in as one of the background creatures in a real Silent Hill game. However, aside from the creepy looking monsters, Ascension doesn't resemble any of the games one bit. Nothing about it ever really screams Silent Hill.

I have never seen a more disastrous game than Silent Hill: Ascension. It's a game that was supposed to be the big revival of the classic survival horror franchise but instead only seemed to murder the already dying IP.

What if we made Silent Hill: Until Dawn, except it's not Silent Hill or Until Dawn and actually just a way to wring money out of stupid people?

The business practices are obviously bad, but I gave it a try because maybe somebody wrote a decent story that was kneecapped by the decisions.

No, it just sucks.
The "second season" or whatever they're calling also sucks.
There isn't any reason for this to exist other than to get money out of idiots.
I'd say they should be ashamed of themselves but this is KONAMI.

Animations, story, voice acting, graphics, writing, dialogue, mechanics, "horror sequences", "action sequences", choices, all of it is absolutely terrible. Slapping the SH name on it just ensured people would hate it instead of just mocking it.

It's become a popular talking point in the video game community lately that we should never hold developers responsible; that the 'publishers' and the 'executives' and the 'suits' and other intangible forces are to blame, and that the poor developers are just mining for blood diamonds in Sierra Leone. If they had been given more time or money, if the evil corporations had just coddled them more, we would have gotten something really wonderful, because it can't be that sometimes a developer just sucks.

I invite people who hold the above belief to check out Genvid Entertainment's Twitter page. These folks had too much time, too much money, they're Konami's sugar baby, they had five other companies assisting them, J. J. Abrams of Cloverfield fame was involved, and they still birthed an abortion. The pinned tweet is an explanation for why they're streaming a minute of footage for Silent Hill: Ascension from Monday to Friday, instead of every day of the week as originally planned (a nation mourns). "This doesn’t mean less content! In fact... this means more. The amount of video content is staying the same but the number of weeks it will run is increasing."

These people think you're fucking stupid. Stretching out the schedule does not result in 'more content,' it's an insidious ploy by Genvid to max out their window for cannibalizing Silent Hill's rotting corpse. Despite the fact that this isn't a video game - it simply isn't - they've left no gacha slop stone unturned, from selling $20 season passes (which give you some dumb fucking stickers to use in chat), to implementing daily chores, to charging $30 for the power to not impact the barely-existent storyline. You can also pay for a lottery to get your NPC, from the bare-bones character creator, featured in a scene. This results in a bloated, meaningless revolving door cast of supporting characters who look ridiculously out of place.

This is a puppet show animated in Unreal Engine 3. It's so lifeless that you can never tell if a particular scene is bad because the voice acting doesn't fit the animations, or the animations (all two of them) don't fit the voice acting. Characters are hard to tell apart because everyone has the same three hairstyles - Genvid can't program hair physics. The writing is so painfully derivative that fans suspected it was generated by AI. No, friends and neighbours, it's just some millennial who never read a book.

I wish I could tell you more about the story. But despite having spent a few hours with these characters, I have no clue who the fuck they are. At a certain point I actually burst out laughing at how often this show introduces new characters and hastily forges a backstory about how they had a fight with another character 'years ago...', all to avoid having an actual narrative. It's a bunch of Family Guy cutaway gags without the cutaways.

Don't worry, Genvid do continue to cheapen Silent Hill 2 and 3, as every Western-developed Silent Hill game has done, by beating the psychological elements of the former and the 'They look like monsters to you?' scene from the latter into the fucking ground. This series has been dead for 20 years now, holy shit, and whoever Konami whores this IP out to for the weekend still thinks they're the first to come up with the idea of psychological horror. Whoever told Konami we actually liked SH2 committed an original sin as grave as Adam biting the apple.

Even on the level of a functional app this fails. The app bar turns a bright white even if your phone has Dark Mode on, and refuses to go away, like they wanted to ruin your immersion. The terrible minigames are bugged to softlock even in their tutorial. And the decisions you vote on will take your currency, but may or may not register your choice.

Konami handed over their IP to a bunch of idiots, sure, it's something they've had plenty of practice doing. But Silent Hill: Ascension is Genvid's failure. It amazes me that a company like them has managed to snag deals from Konami and DC. They have no respect for the viewers at all. They won't even pretend they want to create something that lasts. They want consumers - not fans - to finance their project, their content, their product through FOMO participation. They want to get their money and get the fuck out. They have dug and dug and dug and found something below even pachinko machines for this long-suffering franchise.