HomeNewsSilent Hill: Ascension
Silent Hill: Ascension, live now, is a free-to-play disaster with some promising ideasRestless dreams
Restless dreams
Image credit:Konami
Image credit:Konami
Mobile-based interactive dramaSilent Hill: Ascensionis quite the thing, and is getting quite the reception. The cleanest summary I can manage is that developer Genvid and publisher Konami have launched a very bad streaming service dedicated to dunking on Silent Hill, with microtransaction-fuelled voting mechanics and a chatbox awash with 10 years of pent-up fan resentment and confusing references toJames Sunderland’s genitals.
You’ll probably need plenty of Hope yourself if you’re to make it to the end of the season. In the course of 24 hours on Google Play and the Apple store, Ascension has become a sort of gaily spinning disco ball of offensiveness, shooting agonising laser beams into the eyes of several audience demographics simultaneously.
Image credit:Konami
Perhaps it’ll pull all of that off, assuming Konami don’t shitcan the thing after readingthe reactions on Reddit. This isn’t a framework I would ever have thought of with regard to Silent Hill, the archetypal tale of abject loners losing themselves in the fog, but now that I’ve pumped all the relevant bullet points into my head, I’m quite… intrigued? The sheer contrast with the original Silent Hill games is appetising, next to the milky sort-of-reimaginings of the PS3-era unnumbered spin-offs. But any promise is being suffocated. The pushy monetisation systems (which Genvin havenow defended at length, as you can read on Eurogamer) spoil the sociability of Ascension’s chatbox and voting mechanics, and the Tom Clancified interface robs the already-bland CGI art of all charm. What I’ve seen and heard of the actual writing is nothing remarkable, but these are early days.
I should throw Genvin the additional bone that, where Silent Hill is concerned, anything short of utter brilliance won’t be enough for fans right now. Konami have spent years failing to do anything worthwhile with one of the great old survival horror settings - they have, in fact, actively removedthe game plausibly argued to be Silent Hill’s finest hourfrom sale. That mess isn’t of Ascension’s making, but Ascension is certainly adding to it. Fingers crossed thatthe other Silent Hill reboot projectscan pick up the pieces.
