Free superchats on sign up means you can blast "wearing my james sunderland c o c k ring" on screen and change the canon of Silent Hill.
Spending real money to vote on what cutscenes you want to watch already sounds like a terrible premise for a 'game,' but adding a battle pass to a Silent Hill product with fun stickers that say things like "IT'S TRAUMA!" and khaki's for your loser Silent Hill OC are proof positive that Konami hasn't changed and nobody with any direct influence over the IP knows what the hell to do with it. At least Jacob Navok, CEO of developer Genvid, shows up at the end of each episode to die a little more in front of the cameras. Everyone keeps voting for the options Jacob doesn't want, and it's all the result of some cabal of bad actors that apparently nobody could've accounted for or put functional moderation in place to curb. Watch as a flawed man withers away, night after night, trapped in a nightmare and punished for his deeds.
Jacob would like you to believe that the monetization is intended for you to save time, and is useful more to bypass puzzles than rock the vote. I guess that's a fair point, I mean these puzzles have to be designed bad on purpose, that's how you monetize them! Eurogamer's article about Ascension's economy is a great read, just let all these numbers and stats wash over you and remind yourself it's all for a Silent Hill game.
Oh well, at least we have a Bloober Team remake of Silent Hill 2 to look forward to...
Spending real money to vote on what cutscenes you want to watch already sounds like a terrible premise for a 'game,' but adding a battle pass to a Silent Hill product with fun stickers that say things like "IT'S TRAUMA!" and khaki's for your loser Silent Hill OC are proof positive that Konami hasn't changed and nobody with any direct influence over the IP knows what the hell to do with it. At least Jacob Navok, CEO of developer Genvid, shows up at the end of each episode to die a little more in front of the cameras. Everyone keeps voting for the options Jacob doesn't want, and it's all the result of some cabal of bad actors that apparently nobody could've accounted for or put functional moderation in place to curb. Watch as a flawed man withers away, night after night, trapped in a nightmare and punished for his deeds.
Jacob would like you to believe that the monetization is intended for you to save time, and is useful more to bypass puzzles than rock the vote. I guess that's a fair point, I mean these puzzles have to be designed bad on purpose, that's how you monetize them! Eurogamer's article about Ascension's economy is a great read, just let all these numbers and stats wash over you and remind yourself it's all for a Silent Hill game.
Oh well, at least we have a Bloober Team remake of Silent Hill 2 to look forward to...
hideo kojima cu*mmy in my tummy
Quando vc pensa que a konami não consegue piorar, eles vão lá e lançam um dos piores jogos/séries/troço interativo pay to win com passe de temporada
Unreal Engine MetaHuman's reciting the script to a prestige tv show that only exists in your mother's brain. "ebin deprebbion memen"-ass. Haven't even actually watched this shit yet because i signed up and learnt that they locked the fucking chat and of course the only people pouring the hundreds of dollars on IP points are the most self serious mf's on the planet so all the most upvoted choices are the correct one. Truly don't know what you get out of this if you aren't treating it like a months long david cage QTE fail compilation. Like this would be so much better if it was just a quantic dream styled thing (like it would go from a 1/10 to a 4/10!) Where you could explore those alternate paths instead of the most boring option being the one you get to see. It already looks like it could run in real time on a ps5 anyway so idk why they did it like this.
No more silent hill please. Just take what you like about silent hill and make your own cool thing with it. That's basically what the first 4 games did anyway considering how wildly different they are from each other. I'm excited for silent hill f cus that's basically what it's doing, taking some basic elements and making something new from them instead of trying to make bad video game silent hill 2 again.
No more silent hill please. Just take what you like about silent hill and make your own cool thing with it. That's basically what the first 4 games did anyway considering how wildly different they are from each other. I'm excited for silent hill f cus that's basically what it's doing, taking some basic elements and making something new from them instead of trying to make bad video game silent hill 2 again.
Dead dove, do not eat.
I’d like to believe that I’ve been living in my own personal Silent Hill the last few years. It would explain a lot, really. Konami has done a wonderful job of threading puppet strings through the arteries of Silent Hill and making the corpse dance, turning it into all manner of pachislot machines and skateboard decks, but they seem like they’re really trying to bring the franchise back this time. No more minor entries. We’re handing out the license and making some real goddamned Games this time. We’ve got a Ryukishi07 Silent Hill on the way, something we don't know much about called Townfall, and Bloober Team are even sticking their dirty, dirty fingers in the pie with a Silent Hill 2 remake. Silent Hill is finally back. But those are all coming later. We’re getting the first taste of the revitalized Silent Hill now, and it’s here in the form of Silent Hill: Ascension. Get hyped. This is the first marker being driven into fresh, virginal earth. This is Silent Hill from here on out.
This is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
Genuinely, I mean that. I want to be funnier about it, but I can’t. It’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played. I wish I could say that I’ve played anything worse than this, but I haven’t. It is the worst fucking thing I have ever played in my stupid goddamned life. Sorry. Every time I try typing something else, my brain just shuts itself off and my fingers move on the keyboard of their own volition to produce the phrase “this is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life”. This is the first cognitohazard ever put to market.
IGDB was trying to protect me from writing about this any further. I appreciate them doing that, now. When I first made a page for Silent Hill: Ascension, they rejected it on the grounds of this “not being a game”. Naturally, I kicked my feet and made a fuss about it in the email appeals — we’ve got RPG Maker and Polybius and Spell Checker and Calculator on here, and I know those definitely fucking aren’t games — and the admin staff eventually relented. But they were only trying to help, I think. I should have just accepted their ruling and let this slip into the ether. Now we’ve got a Backloggd page for it, which means that now I have to think about this again, and it’s still the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
This is the kind of bad that’s hard to explain without experiencing it yourself. It’s like childbirth, or the smell of rotting meat. You don’t want anyone else to have to deal with it, but how could they know what it’s like without going through it? You can show them the season pass being sold for $22.99, you can show them the “It’s Trauma!” sticker, you can show them the wholly unmoderated chat bar where you can’t say “Playboy Carti” but you can say the n-word, but none of that is the same as experiencing it. They’re visible symptoms of the disease running through Silent Hill: Ascension’s blood, but the pain of another doesn’t exist unless you feel it yourself. It’s ethereal. I’ve got a sore on my lip right now, but you don’t feel it, do you? You understand that it hurts, and you can empathize with that, but it doesn’t actually exist to you. If I stopped talking about it, you’d assume I was fine, and nothing would change for you. Meanwhile, I’m still over here suffering through this shit, and it’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
The game is streamed live every night at 9 PM EST, and you can show up to vote on what’s going to happen to the characters. The choices themselves are very clearly labelled with the outcomes; you’ve got Salvation, Suffering, and Damnation choices, helpfully color-coded as blue, white, and red respectively, just so you can still know which one is the “good” choice and which one is “bad” in the event that you forgot how to read. Mass Effect's Paragon, Neutral, and Renegade system lives on, strong and proud. This, of course, means that every single fucking choice made thus far has been heavily in favor of Salvation, because it’s clearly the good option. If you don’t like that, you can vote for something else. In an especially impressive bit of social commentary, however, the only votes that matter come from those rich and stupid enough to buy them.
To vote, you need to wager a set amount of Influence Points, or IP. I haven’t found a way to cast a vote for anything less than 200 IP, so either that’s the minimum spend needed to vote, or the UI is just so badly designed that I can’t fucking find the free vote option. You can buy IP in one of three differently-priced bundles, each one more expensive than the last; one of the IP packs is about twenty-five bucks for 26,400 IP, and the second decision of the game is currently for "Salvation" by roughly twenty-five million points. If you really want a choice to go a certain way, then you had better get to spending. By my math, you’ll be out a little over $23,650 if you decide that you’re going to stick it to those Salvation voters. Of course, with the audience shrinking every night after they see how fucking stupid this whole thing is, it’ll only get easier and easier to sway the vote with less money invested. If you’re as much of a moron as I am and you decide to stick around past your first watch just to see where this goes, then you’ll have a decent opportunity to roleplay as a real government lobbyist soon enough.
But buying IP for real money isn’t the only way to get it. Lucky enough for the impoverished, filthy masses, you can earn IP at a massively reduced rate simply by playing minigames. You don’t get much — maybe a thousand or two per day, resetting every twenty-four hours — but it’s enough to cast a couple votes. Doing your daily and weekly quests certainly helps to boost your IP gains, and if you just felt something cold run down your back after you read the phrase “daily and weekly quests” in a Silent Hill game, don’t worry. That just means you’re still alive. Unfortunately, though, the minigames are on a set rotation; you get one puzzle and one “mindfulness” game per day, each awarding a small pittance of IP if you manage to successfully complete them.
By the way, I’m glad you’re curious about what the minigames actually are. I’m really excited to talk about them, so knowing that you’re enthusiastic to hear more really encourages me to do my best in explaining them to you. They’re the worst fucking things I’ve ever played in my stupid fucking life. Most egregious of the lot is the rhythm minigame, which doesn't require you to have any rhythm nor timing whatsoever. There's no penalty for hitting wrong notes (the game even encourages you to "just jam along" should you feel like it), every note needs to be individually clicked, and every click produces a sound from what I think is a literal Garageband guitar VST. Since there's no warning for when the notes are going to show up or leave, you have to click them all as fast as possible, resulting in a complete cacophony of instruments playing over each other if you want to guarantee a good score. Worst of all is the fact that the selection of songs is exclusively limited to Akira Yamaoka's more famous works, meaning you get to listen to some of the greatest video game music ever composed get completely butchered in one of the worst minigames you've ever played, in service of gaining points to vote on what happens next in the dumbest narrative ever written. I think if you're a killer or kidnapper or whatever in life, this is what you have to do forever after you die as punishment.
Here's a video of me getting the highest rank possible on the theme of Silent Hill. I want to stress that this is optimal play.
Anyway, this is all in service of giving you votes for the completely fucking incomprehensible story. It's hard to call it a narrative. There's some old lady who sucks, and then she dies, and her family kind of cares about it, but not really. There's a girl who gets initiated into some cult called The Foundation that seems to worship the Otherworld monsters, and she dies, and a couple people seem a little bothered by it. There's some drunk guy who really hates that the girl is dead and she's also haunting him and calling him a fuckup. The grandson of the old lady who sucked and died speaks entirely in the spooky child language that only exists in bad horror movies where he talks about how he plays pretend with "the man in the fog". I've long said that stories should strive to be more than events happening in sequence. This is more like events. They're not really happening in any given order, they're just kind of shown to the player and then quietly shuffled off so another event can happen.
At the end of the show proper is a canned animation of a character getting lost in the Otherworld, and the live viewers do QTEs that don't actually do anything. If they collectively fail, you get the message that the character "failed to endure" and they lose hope, but I don't know what losing hope actually entails. If you collectively pass, which happened for the first time during tonight's November 2nd show, the game bugs out and assumes that you failed anyway. The CEO of the company has gone out of his way to specify that the QTE sequences are for live viewers only and, as such, don't actually do anything because it wouldn't be fair to people who watch the VODs. Imagine a Jerma Dollhouse stream where the commands didn't work because it wouldn't have been fair to people who watched the whole thing on YouTube later. You're the one insisting on a livestream and you're not going to fucking use it? Why? Seriously, why? What reason does this have to be live at all?
And speaking of the CEO, Weatherby is absolutely correct that the best part of all of this is the aftershow. For whatever fucking reason, Jacob Navok feels an incredible need to come out on his shitty laptop camera (you can tell it's a laptop camera because it keeps shaking while he passionately swings his arms around) and rant about how they're definitely not scamming people. You can tell you've got a good product when the actual episode is about eight minutes long and the CEO takes half an hour in the post-show to complain about how unfair everyone is being towards one of the shittiest fucking things ever made. It's bordering on performance art.
I cannot fucking wait to watch more of this. It's the most excited I've been for a recent release in years.
I’d like to believe that I’ve been living in my own personal Silent Hill the last few years. It would explain a lot, really. Konami has done a wonderful job of threading puppet strings through the arteries of Silent Hill and making the corpse dance, turning it into all manner of pachislot machines and skateboard decks, but they seem like they’re really trying to bring the franchise back this time. No more minor entries. We’re handing out the license and making some real goddamned Games this time. We’ve got a Ryukishi07 Silent Hill on the way, something we don't know much about called Townfall, and Bloober Team are even sticking their dirty, dirty fingers in the pie with a Silent Hill 2 remake. Silent Hill is finally back. But those are all coming later. We’re getting the first taste of the revitalized Silent Hill now, and it’s here in the form of Silent Hill: Ascension. Get hyped. This is the first marker being driven into fresh, virginal earth. This is Silent Hill from here on out.
This is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
Genuinely, I mean that. I want to be funnier about it, but I can’t. It’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played. I wish I could say that I’ve played anything worse than this, but I haven’t. It is the worst fucking thing I have ever played in my stupid goddamned life. Sorry. Every time I try typing something else, my brain just shuts itself off and my fingers move on the keyboard of their own volition to produce the phrase “this is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life”. This is the first cognitohazard ever put to market.
IGDB was trying to protect me from writing about this any further. I appreciate them doing that, now. When I first made a page for Silent Hill: Ascension, they rejected it on the grounds of this “not being a game”. Naturally, I kicked my feet and made a fuss about it in the email appeals — we’ve got RPG Maker and Polybius and Spell Checker and Calculator on here, and I know those definitely fucking aren’t games — and the admin staff eventually relented. But they were only trying to help, I think. I should have just accepted their ruling and let this slip into the ether. Now we’ve got a Backloggd page for it, which means that now I have to think about this again, and it’s still the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
This is the kind of bad that’s hard to explain without experiencing it yourself. It’s like childbirth, or the smell of rotting meat. You don’t want anyone else to have to deal with it, but how could they know what it’s like without going through it? You can show them the season pass being sold for $22.99, you can show them the “It’s Trauma!” sticker, you can show them the wholly unmoderated chat bar where you can’t say “Playboy Carti” but you can say the n-word, but none of that is the same as experiencing it. They’re visible symptoms of the disease running through Silent Hill: Ascension’s blood, but the pain of another doesn’t exist unless you feel it yourself. It’s ethereal. I’ve got a sore on my lip right now, but you don’t feel it, do you? You understand that it hurts, and you can empathize with that, but it doesn’t actually exist to you. If I stopped talking about it, you’d assume I was fine, and nothing would change for you. Meanwhile, I’m still over here suffering through this shit, and it’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.
The game is streamed live every night at 9 PM EST, and you can show up to vote on what’s going to happen to the characters. The choices themselves are very clearly labelled with the outcomes; you’ve got Salvation, Suffering, and Damnation choices, helpfully color-coded as blue, white, and red respectively, just so you can still know which one is the “good” choice and which one is “bad” in the event that you forgot how to read. Mass Effect's Paragon, Neutral, and Renegade system lives on, strong and proud. This, of course, means that every single fucking choice made thus far has been heavily in favor of Salvation, because it’s clearly the good option. If you don’t like that, you can vote for something else. In an especially impressive bit of social commentary, however, the only votes that matter come from those rich and stupid enough to buy them.
To vote, you need to wager a set amount of Influence Points, or IP. I haven’t found a way to cast a vote for anything less than 200 IP, so either that’s the minimum spend needed to vote, or the UI is just so badly designed that I can’t fucking find the free vote option. You can buy IP in one of three differently-priced bundles, each one more expensive than the last; one of the IP packs is about twenty-five bucks for 26,400 IP, and the second decision of the game is currently for "Salvation" by roughly twenty-five million points. If you really want a choice to go a certain way, then you had better get to spending. By my math, you’ll be out a little over $23,650 if you decide that you’re going to stick it to those Salvation voters. Of course, with the audience shrinking every night after they see how fucking stupid this whole thing is, it’ll only get easier and easier to sway the vote with less money invested. If you’re as much of a moron as I am and you decide to stick around past your first watch just to see where this goes, then you’ll have a decent opportunity to roleplay as a real government lobbyist soon enough.
But buying IP for real money isn’t the only way to get it. Lucky enough for the impoverished, filthy masses, you can earn IP at a massively reduced rate simply by playing minigames. You don’t get much — maybe a thousand or two per day, resetting every twenty-four hours — but it’s enough to cast a couple votes. Doing your daily and weekly quests certainly helps to boost your IP gains, and if you just felt something cold run down your back after you read the phrase “daily and weekly quests” in a Silent Hill game, don’t worry. That just means you’re still alive. Unfortunately, though, the minigames are on a set rotation; you get one puzzle and one “mindfulness” game per day, each awarding a small pittance of IP if you manage to successfully complete them.
By the way, I’m glad you’re curious about what the minigames actually are. I’m really excited to talk about them, so knowing that you’re enthusiastic to hear more really encourages me to do my best in explaining them to you. They’re the worst fucking things I’ve ever played in my stupid fucking life. Most egregious of the lot is the rhythm minigame, which doesn't require you to have any rhythm nor timing whatsoever. There's no penalty for hitting wrong notes (the game even encourages you to "just jam along" should you feel like it), every note needs to be individually clicked, and every click produces a sound from what I think is a literal Garageband guitar VST. Since there's no warning for when the notes are going to show up or leave, you have to click them all as fast as possible, resulting in a complete cacophony of instruments playing over each other if you want to guarantee a good score. Worst of all is the fact that the selection of songs is exclusively limited to Akira Yamaoka's more famous works, meaning you get to listen to some of the greatest video game music ever composed get completely butchered in one of the worst minigames you've ever played, in service of gaining points to vote on what happens next in the dumbest narrative ever written. I think if you're a killer or kidnapper or whatever in life, this is what you have to do forever after you die as punishment.
Here's a video of me getting the highest rank possible on the theme of Silent Hill. I want to stress that this is optimal play.
Anyway, this is all in service of giving you votes for the completely fucking incomprehensible story. It's hard to call it a narrative. There's some old lady who sucks, and then she dies, and her family kind of cares about it, but not really. There's a girl who gets initiated into some cult called The Foundation that seems to worship the Otherworld monsters, and she dies, and a couple people seem a little bothered by it. There's some drunk guy who really hates that the girl is dead and she's also haunting him and calling him a fuckup. The grandson of the old lady who sucked and died speaks entirely in the spooky child language that only exists in bad horror movies where he talks about how he plays pretend with "the man in the fog". I've long said that stories should strive to be more than events happening in sequence. This is more like events. They're not really happening in any given order, they're just kind of shown to the player and then quietly shuffled off so another event can happen.
At the end of the show proper is a canned animation of a character getting lost in the Otherworld, and the live viewers do QTEs that don't actually do anything. If they collectively fail, you get the message that the character "failed to endure" and they lose hope, but I don't know what losing hope actually entails. If you collectively pass, which happened for the first time during tonight's November 2nd show, the game bugs out and assumes that you failed anyway. The CEO of the company has gone out of his way to specify that the QTE sequences are for live viewers only and, as such, don't actually do anything because it wouldn't be fair to people who watch the VODs. Imagine a Jerma Dollhouse stream where the commands didn't work because it wouldn't have been fair to people who watched the whole thing on YouTube later. You're the one insisting on a livestream and you're not going to fucking use it? Why? Seriously, why? What reason does this have to be live at all?
And speaking of the CEO, Weatherby is absolutely correct that the best part of all of this is the aftershow. For whatever fucking reason, Jacob Navok feels an incredible need to come out on his shitty laptop camera (you can tell it's a laptop camera because it keeps shaking while he passionately swings his arms around) and rant about how they're definitely not scamming people. You can tell you've got a good product when the actual episode is about eight minutes long and the CEO takes half an hour in the post-show to complain about how unfair everyone is being towards one of the shittiest fucking things ever made. It's bordering on performance art.
I cannot fucking wait to watch more of this. It's the most excited I've been for a recent release in years.
what the fuck is this shit
excuse me why does my silent hill game feel like I'm on an illegal betting site?
This review contains spoilers
Esto lo voy a decir en español por que realmente ando quemado y me da paja ponerlo en ingles ya que siento que me limito para lo que quiero expresar acá.
Algo que si podes decir de los SH es que cuando pensas que las cosas no se pueden poner peor, te tiran algo que es aun peor. Ya esto consiguió llegar a un nuevo fondo que luego del Homecoming o el Book Of Memories pensé que no se iba a llegar.
Ya que esto es sin dudarlo, este es el peor "juego" que tenga que ver con Silent Hill que se ha hecho, y encima estando en el primer capitulo.
Ya considerarlo lo peor que se ha hecho bajo el nombre de Silent Hill es difícil ya que existe la pelicula de "Revelations" y los comics de IDW y estos están medio a la par, pero este esta al mismo nivel de basura.
Sinceramente un desastre, por eso decidi no ponerle una puntación ya que ni siquiera se merece ni media estrella. Lamento si no soy lo suficientemente pragmático con mi opinión pero sinceramente esto no se lo merece.
Este fragmento resume mis opiniones finales: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9wU-k3jFmQ
Algo que si podes decir de los SH es que cuando pensas que las cosas no se pueden poner peor, te tiran algo que es aun peor. Ya esto consiguió llegar a un nuevo fondo que luego del Homecoming o el Book Of Memories pensé que no se iba a llegar.
Ya que esto es sin dudarlo, este es el peor "juego" que tenga que ver con Silent Hill que se ha hecho, y encima estando en el primer capitulo.
Ya considerarlo lo peor que se ha hecho bajo el nombre de Silent Hill es difícil ya que existe la pelicula de "Revelations" y los comics de IDW y estos están medio a la par, pero este esta al mismo nivel de basura.
Sinceramente un desastre, por eso decidi no ponerle una puntación ya que ni siquiera se merece ni media estrella. Lamento si no soy lo suficientemente pragmático con mi opinión pero sinceramente esto no se lo merece.
Este fragmento resume mis opiniones finales: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9wU-k3jFmQ
This “Game” is a embarrassment too the whole Silent Hill franchise
Not coming back to this when they add more, this is barely a game and more just a multiple choice livestream where your choice is gated by how much money you can dump to outspend the other people dumping money on votes. This is quiet possibly the only thing that could make the shitty SH2 remake bloober is making look good by comparison. Would give this 0 stars if that counted as a rating.
0/10
0/10
i wish we never get another silent hill game if they're going to be like this...
somehow worse than book of memories. good job genvid
Being a Silent Hill fan IS our Silent Hill.
I am still in shock that this is the first formal return of the franchise in over a decade. Even without the predatory monetization and crappy aspects of the UI, the story and pacing are a mess. If anything it will serve as an experiment on how stuff like this is an inherently bad idea. I would have preferred this game in a Telltale episodic format.
Check out my initial impressions:
https://youtu.be/gSythbFhMGs?si=LIKz1e_XjCUzLD2F
I am still in shock that this is the first formal return of the franchise in over a decade. Even without the predatory monetization and crappy aspects of the UI, the story and pacing are a mess. If anything it will serve as an experiment on how stuff like this is an inherently bad idea. I would have preferred this game in a Telltale episodic format.
Check out my initial impressions:
https://youtu.be/gSythbFhMGs?si=LIKz1e_XjCUzLD2F
The pitch for Silent Hill: Ascension represents a reasonable, albeit dubious, idea. In actuality, we received something worse than our greatest fears. That's the true horror here, the product itself, not any component of the story it tells. Predatory, cheap-appearing, dysfunctional, manipulative and tone deaf - Silent Hill Ascension is itself more evil than anything you might see in a modern horror game.
I've just completed the first full week of content for this currently ongoing, live community experience that will reportedly take place over the next 6 months.
I think we can all agree that out everything that was announced as part of Konami's revival of the Silent Hill property, Ascension was among the most intriguing. Largely because none of us really knew for certain what it was supposed to be. Some kind of online Telltale-esque adventure series? A semi-interactive streaming TV show? It was a mystery even right up till the very day it released, leading to quite a confusing and frustrating launch for many (myself included) as they tried to figure out the basics of how they were expected to use the bloody app. A process the little tutorial video that greeted everyone sadly did not help much with. Looking back, I highly doubt a single person, no matter how skeptical, expected a final product so poor that it would legitimately and without exaggeration beat out the likes of Daedelic Entertainment's Gollum and Skull Island: Rise of Kong as the worst gaming had to offer in 2023, but that's exactly what we've received.
Essentially, the best way to describe Ascension is as a gradually unfolding, player-driven cinematic narrative that presents frequent opportunities for the audience to influence where the tale will go in the future via decision polls featuring a trio of options the viewer can vote on. Sounds kind of cool and compelling, right? Unfortunately, there are several things wrong with developer Genvid's take on this concept that completely annihilates any sense of fulfillment one could have gotten from it. Shockingly, the critical issue you'll hear mentioned the least by the swarm of angry participants is just how bad the writing is. Dialogue is terrible, conversations are unnatural as a whole, and the plot (which newcomers can watch prior episodes of at any point in order to catch up) literally begins right in the middle of a pair of tragic events with no context as to who the people involved are, what the deal with their respective cults and families is, or why we should care in the slightest. Naturally, this creates a big problem when it comes to casting our ballet in determining the ultimate fates of the various protagonists. Each choice is clearly marked to show that if chosen will lead those affected down a path to either suffering, damnation, or redemption, which not only removes the faintest shred of moral ambiguity, but without the aforementioned reasons to be invested it's impossible to give a single, solitary crap how they'll end up, defeating the entire point of this whole mess!
The issue its detractors DO complain about though is the monetization, and yes, it's as bad as you've probably heard. You see, rather than tallying the results of the voting periods by the simple and fair method of seeing which outcome the majority of individuals picked, they are instead determined by whichever one had the most "influence points," an in-game currency you can buy with IRL cash, poured into it. I will say that Genvid has provided means for players who understandably don't want to open up their wallets to grind for this necessary "IP" in the form of repeatable minigames, alongside daily and weekly goals. Some of which, such as lockbox and codebreaker, are genuinely fun and feel right at home in the Silent Hill franchise (others are of the generic match-3 or more variety). They even updated it recently so that those of us committing to the strictly free route have access to a larger selection of these optional diversions. Unfortunately, the bulk of content on this front and their subsequent rewards are sadly locked behind the $20 season pass, and it's just easier in general to amass a greater amount of this virtual wealth through using your real-world money on the direct microtransactions. Something the devs lied in an interview about and said wouldn't be possible by the way. So people who don't pay will always be less influential in the decision-making portion of the package than those do. Not to mention they won't ever have an opportunity to get their hands on a special "Golden Moment" as they are solely reserved for the biggest spenders. An idea that vaguely, if not blatantly reeks of NFT-esque scumminess.
Buying outcomes isn't the only use for accumulated IP, however. It can also be redeemed for tickets that can win your customizable avatar, that otherwise serves no purpose, a role in an upcoming scene. This would be a more enticing prospect if the assortment of interchangeable body features and clothing weren't so meager, causing the user-created characters to appear wildly out of place next to the regular cast. You will get the occasional freebie thrown out by the randomized reward system to help fill your wardrobe, but if you truly want to flesh out your collection of outfits and hairstyles to hopefully make an OC who doesn't look too stupid onscreen then you'll have to spring for the season pass and acquire the greater variety of appealing cosmetics contained within. Yet another ploy to try and separate you from your hard-earned dollarydoos...
Four paragraphs already and I haven't even got to the technical problems. The biggest motivation for watching the streams live, outside of the amusingly desperate (yet nonetheless boring) pre- and post-shows attempts to build hype and do some damage control that bafflingly drone on for longer than the actual 5 to 10-minute episodes themselves, is the multiplayer quick-time gameplay sequences. Your inputs in these non-canon segments don't have any effect on the regularly reused animated action running in the background, but the collective success or failure of everybody involved does impact the level of hope for whatever lead is featured that night. An element you'll want to stay on top of, as apparently it will be a factor in whether or not they ultimately survive this nonsense. Therefore, it's frustrating when these moments straight-up don't function properly. My first chance getting to play one of these was marred by the fact that despite the community's reported success, ol' boy Karl's hopefulness decreased anyways. Ain't that some ish? Had another time where nothing to interact with was ever displayed onscreen. Then there's the continuous glitch where the server fails to register/save how you've invested your influence points and resets things like it never happened, and the frequent annoyance of having to usually close and reopen the app in order to get the stream to work in full-screen mode.
I must also take a second to bemoan the loss of the public chat, a sorely missed source of stupid hilarity. It got shutdown almost immediately after being flooded with utter ridiculousness and totally justifiable bashing of the experience, not even living to see the second showing if I recall correctly. I'm fully convinced that the latter of the two is the sole reason it still hasn't been brought back as of this writing. While the ability to use text may be gone possibly forever(?), that hasn't stopped trolls from spamming the feed with incessant emojis and the other similar items remaining at their disposal . Scrolling through an absolute wall of the "shady" and "no way" stickers whenever members of the development team draw the short straw and have to act as spokespeople to and attempt appeasing the disappointed masses is always funny.
To summarize, this is a buggy, money-grubbing disaster where the story that's supposed to serve as the driving force is so poorly told that it doesn't make sense to the degree of borderline incoherency, and the scariest thing about it is how it tries to dig around in your pockets and couch cushions for loose change. It may also confirm my biggest suspicion/fear upon seeing projects such as Silent Hill f that Konami is going to be slapping the iconic horror juggernaut's name on projects with no real connection to its established lore, as outside of a small theory I've found referenced in a few places it's unclear how this connects to the larger fiction of the series, if at all. We haven't even really seen much of the surprisingly fittingly designed monsters outside of the QTEs yet. I will admit, we are currently still very early on in the event's projected lifespan and as I plan to tough it out until the conclusion, should circumstances improve and shift my opinion for the better or there be updates worth talking about I will write a follow-up piece with a new score to reflect this. Until that happens (and it probably won't) consider this my definitive review, because as much as the fanbase loves to complain about Homecoming, Book of Memories, the pachinko machines, and Bloober Team being handed the reigns of the SH 2 remake Ascension is unequivocally the worst thing to happen to the Silent Hill franchise to date.
1/10
I think we can all agree that out everything that was announced as part of Konami's revival of the Silent Hill property, Ascension was among the most intriguing. Largely because none of us really knew for certain what it was supposed to be. Some kind of online Telltale-esque adventure series? A semi-interactive streaming TV show? It was a mystery even right up till the very day it released, leading to quite a confusing and frustrating launch for many (myself included) as they tried to figure out the basics of how they were expected to use the bloody app. A process the little tutorial video that greeted everyone sadly did not help much with. Looking back, I highly doubt a single person, no matter how skeptical, expected a final product so poor that it would legitimately and without exaggeration beat out the likes of Daedelic Entertainment's Gollum and Skull Island: Rise of Kong as the worst gaming had to offer in 2023, but that's exactly what we've received.
Essentially, the best way to describe Ascension is as a gradually unfolding, player-driven cinematic narrative that presents frequent opportunities for the audience to influence where the tale will go in the future via decision polls featuring a trio of options the viewer can vote on. Sounds kind of cool and compelling, right? Unfortunately, there are several things wrong with developer Genvid's take on this concept that completely annihilates any sense of fulfillment one could have gotten from it. Shockingly, the critical issue you'll hear mentioned the least by the swarm of angry participants is just how bad the writing is. Dialogue is terrible, conversations are unnatural as a whole, and the plot (which newcomers can watch prior episodes of at any point in order to catch up) literally begins right in the middle of a pair of tragic events with no context as to who the people involved are, what the deal with their respective cults and families is, or why we should care in the slightest. Naturally, this creates a big problem when it comes to casting our ballet in determining the ultimate fates of the various protagonists. Each choice is clearly marked to show that if chosen will lead those affected down a path to either suffering, damnation, or redemption, which not only removes the faintest shred of moral ambiguity, but without the aforementioned reasons to be invested it's impossible to give a single, solitary crap how they'll end up, defeating the entire point of this whole mess!
The issue its detractors DO complain about though is the monetization, and yes, it's as bad as you've probably heard. You see, rather than tallying the results of the voting periods by the simple and fair method of seeing which outcome the majority of individuals picked, they are instead determined by whichever one had the most "influence points," an in-game currency you can buy with IRL cash, poured into it. I will say that Genvid has provided means for players who understandably don't want to open up their wallets to grind for this necessary "IP" in the form of repeatable minigames, alongside daily and weekly goals. Some of which, such as lockbox and codebreaker, are genuinely fun and feel right at home in the Silent Hill franchise (others are of the generic match-3 or more variety). They even updated it recently so that those of us committing to the strictly free route have access to a larger selection of these optional diversions. Unfortunately, the bulk of content on this front and their subsequent rewards are sadly locked behind the $20 season pass, and it's just easier in general to amass a greater amount of this virtual wealth through using your real-world money on the direct microtransactions. Something the devs lied in an interview about and said wouldn't be possible by the way. So people who don't pay will always be less influential in the decision-making portion of the package than those do. Not to mention they won't ever have an opportunity to get their hands on a special "Golden Moment" as they are solely reserved for the biggest spenders. An idea that vaguely, if not blatantly reeks of NFT-esque scumminess.
Buying outcomes isn't the only use for accumulated IP, however. It can also be redeemed for tickets that can win your customizable avatar, that otherwise serves no purpose, a role in an upcoming scene. This would be a more enticing prospect if the assortment of interchangeable body features and clothing weren't so meager, causing the user-created characters to appear wildly out of place next to the regular cast. You will get the occasional freebie thrown out by the randomized reward system to help fill your wardrobe, but if you truly want to flesh out your collection of outfits and hairstyles to hopefully make an OC who doesn't look too stupid onscreen then you'll have to spring for the season pass and acquire the greater variety of appealing cosmetics contained within. Yet another ploy to try and separate you from your hard-earned dollarydoos...
Four paragraphs already and I haven't even got to the technical problems. The biggest motivation for watching the streams live, outside of the amusingly desperate (yet nonetheless boring) pre- and post-shows attempts to build hype and do some damage control that bafflingly drone on for longer than the actual 5 to 10-minute episodes themselves, is the multiplayer quick-time gameplay sequences. Your inputs in these non-canon segments don't have any effect on the regularly reused animated action running in the background, but the collective success or failure of everybody involved does impact the level of hope for whatever lead is featured that night. An element you'll want to stay on top of, as apparently it will be a factor in whether or not they ultimately survive this nonsense. Therefore, it's frustrating when these moments straight-up don't function properly. My first chance getting to play one of these was marred by the fact that despite the community's reported success, ol' boy Karl's hopefulness decreased anyways. Ain't that some ish? Had another time where nothing to interact with was ever displayed onscreen. Then there's the continuous glitch where the server fails to register/save how you've invested your influence points and resets things like it never happened, and the frequent annoyance of having to usually close and reopen the app in order to get the stream to work in full-screen mode.
I must also take a second to bemoan the loss of the public chat, a sorely missed source of stupid hilarity. It got shutdown almost immediately after being flooded with utter ridiculousness and totally justifiable bashing of the experience, not even living to see the second showing if I recall correctly. I'm fully convinced that the latter of the two is the sole reason it still hasn't been brought back as of this writing. While the ability to use text may be gone possibly forever(?), that hasn't stopped trolls from spamming the feed with incessant emojis and the other similar items remaining at their disposal . Scrolling through an absolute wall of the "shady" and "no way" stickers whenever members of the development team draw the short straw and have to act as spokespeople to and attempt appeasing the disappointed masses is always funny.
To summarize, this is a buggy, money-grubbing disaster where the story that's supposed to serve as the driving force is so poorly told that it doesn't make sense to the degree of borderline incoherency, and the scariest thing about it is how it tries to dig around in your pockets and couch cushions for loose change. It may also confirm my biggest suspicion/fear upon seeing projects such as Silent Hill f that Konami is going to be slapping the iconic horror juggernaut's name on projects with no real connection to its established lore, as outside of a small theory I've found referenced in a few places it's unclear how this connects to the larger fiction of the series, if at all. We haven't even really seen much of the surprisingly fittingly designed monsters outside of the QTEs yet. I will admit, we are currently still very early on in the event's projected lifespan and as I plan to tough it out until the conclusion, should circumstances improve and shift my opinion for the better or there be updates worth talking about I will write a follow-up piece with a new score to reflect this. Until that happens (and it probably won't) consider this my definitive review, because as much as the fanbase loves to complain about Homecoming, Book of Memories, the pachinko machines, and Bloober Team being handed the reigns of the SH 2 remake Ascension is unequivocally the worst thing to happen to the Silent Hill franchise to date.
1/10
Gotta be one of the worst things I have ever seen (played?).
Breaking my rule for "not giving a game a rating if I haven't invested a lot of time into it" because I spent like an hour watching this on Halloween and it was maybe the worst thing I've ever seen? Just completely unintelligible nonsense held together by cutscenes that look like they were rendered on PS3?
Silent Hill fans: I'm so sorry Silent Hills got canned for this. May your suffering one day end.
Silent Hill fans: I'm so sorry Silent Hills got canned for this. May your suffering one day end.
Hilariously bad. I played like 30 or 40 minutes of this surrounding one of the daily streams and holy shit this is a mess lmao. The worst UI of all time, the main menu has more retail space taken up by the battle pass than the livestream, and the puzzles/minigames (the only thing you can do in the 23 hours and 50 minutes a livestream isn't running) is relegated to a tiny button in the bottom middle of the screen labeled "Arcane Library". They couldn't even make a decent version of Hashi, that's like the logic puzzle equivalent of fucking up a blackjack minigame lol. Deserves every bit of the mockery it's getting, it really is that much of a train wreck
I usually reserve 2 stars for those horrible mobile games where a girl is wearing a soiled diaper and, like, a sweat-stained body suit while her boyfriend dates some hot new red head - and this is basically that, but wearing Silent Hills skin.
I enjoyed this more in 1 session than any other silent hill game.
Game of the Decade
es distópico que esto exista, por favor destruyan a todos los empleados de cuello blanco de konami
LMAOOO
After this, I firmly believe that Konami should stop making video games and other types of media and concentrate only on making pachinko machines.
no esperaba nada de ustedes konami, aún así logran decepcionarme 😞
Oh how far we have fallen
Jesus Christ. I "played" the first four nights and just couldn't bring myself to hate-watch/play this thing anymore. Konami massacred our boy.
Utterly brilliant commentary on electoralism and the futility of voting
EDIT: James Stephanie Sterling owes me royalties
EDIT: James Stephanie Sterling owes me royalties
silent hill ascension is my own, personal hell.
i hope everyone involved with this has a terrible day for their rest of their lives. everything about this feels like someone only heard about silent hill & ran with it. it's missing the soul & everything from any other game. perhaps we were too harsh on homecoming & downpour.. if only we knew how good we had it then.
i hope everyone involved with this has a terrible day for their rest of their lives. everything about this feels like someone only heard about silent hill & ran with it. it's missing the soul & everything from any other game. perhaps we were too harsh on homecoming & downpour.. if only we knew how good we had it then.
My message got filtered from the live chat cause I used the word scam