This is the return of the long dormant franchise we’ve been waiting to see more of? This is the new era of Silent Hill? God, I had my reservations about Konami’s new push into bringing back the franchise, but there was an inkling of hope they’d get it right, at least somewhat. Consider those hopes dashed now, all thanks to this poor excuse of a web-series with an iterative monetization model that takes from, of all fucking games, Fortnite. Pay up, get the founder pass, and as episodes drop you’ll get the opportunity to paste a, um… “It’s Trauma!” sticker on the post board. Thank you Konami, you never fail to impress with the new lows you’re willing to go. Having Bloober Team take the reigns was questionable enough but SH2R has got to be their Hail Mary. Everything is riding on that game and if it’s anything less than GREAT you done fucked it up. Good luck!

An upsetting start for Konami’s quantity-over-quality approach to their Silent Hill revival.

I won’t reiterate what’s already been said about the intrusive monetisation system, mind-numbing ‘puzzles’ and choppy animation. I will say the idea of a community based Telltale experience can work on other IP - The Walking Dead is kind-of all about group decisions leading to drastic consequences - but the true essence of Silent Hill is loneliness and isolation.

Granted, PT was, in some ways, community driven in its obtuse puzzles, but the experience was undoubtedly best played alone in the dark. Unlike PT, Ascension is simply not scary, at least in the way we want it to be! It is instead riddled with narrative cliches, dull characters and ineptly written dialogue. That said, even the best Silent Hill games overcome some of these aspects through animation alone. Take the limited expressions of James or Angela from SH2 for instance: so much of the emotion behind their scenes are conveyed through choice of character movement, camera angles and editing. Sure, Ascension has the daunting task of churning out 16 weeks (?!) worth of content and won’t have Kojima’s budget or tools for facial animation, but there are no excuses behind the consistently uninspired direction where most characters just stand and deliver clunky lines at a flat camera angle.

I could understand something like this going fine and maybe even unnoticed alongside the release of both the SH2 Remake and the movie, but starting the revival of a decade-dormant franchise with Silent Hill: Ascension casts a looming shadow of uncertainty over releases to come. We can only hope the worst is behind us.

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.