The Cutprice Guignol

As we close in on the release of the Silent Hill 2 remake, I’ve been taking a look at Silent Hill stories of years (and months) past. And, while we’ve certainly encountered some rough ones so far, I don’t think any come close to Silent Hill: Ascension.

Ascension, at first, posited itself as a kind of interactive horror gaming experience – clearly intended to build off the success of interactive horror games such as Until Dawn and The Walking Dead, it allowed users to frequently vote on storylines and character choices that would influence how the story moved forward. Released between October 2023 and April 2024, users were given twenty-four hours to vote on the various potential outcomes of each decision, after which the user-generated choice would be considered canon, and the story would move forward based on whatever outcome had been chosen.

And, off the bat, I actually really liked this idea. Silent Hill is a series with a seriously passionate core fanbase, and providing an interactive storytelling framework with which they could actually get involved in the story made a lot of sense to me. I think for a lot of people – including myself – one of the aspects of the series that I find consistently compelling is the character work, and to invite viewers to get properly invested in these characters by directly influencing the direction of their arcs and the stories sounded really good, and an interesting addition to the new slate of Silent Hill projects that were announced around this time.

But, and trust me when I say that given all the Silent Hill stuff I have been consuming this week, this really means something – Silent Hill: Ascension might be the single worst piece of Silent Hill media ever released. It’s almost hard to wrap your head around the sheer scope of the failure that this turned out to be – an appalling piece both as it released as an interactive experience, and as a full story after the fact. So let’s break this down as best we can, and get into just how Silent Hill: Ascension turned in to such a disaster.

Firstly, and probably most importantly, we have to consider the execution of this ambitious premise. From day one, it was clear that producers Genvid didn’t really have a handle on how to steer a live-stream player-driven event like this one, with the chat soon inundated with spam, slurs, and declarations of Hideo Kojima’s, well, I shan’t say it. Ascension had initially been sold as a community-driven experience – however, users with in-game currency known as influence points (IP) were given a larger sway over the voting decisions, and, yes, IP could be purchased using real-world money. Though Genvid initially assured users that this would not allow for big spenders to influence the storyline, that soon, evidently, proved untrue. While it wasn’t by definition pay-to-win, as nobody was really winning here, it allowed users willing to spend money a significant amount of influence on the direction the story took, an instant frustration.

And then there came the decisions themselves, which were labelled with a useful emoji indicating whether they will lead to redemption, suffering, or damnation. It’s a downright childish approach to this mechanic, stripping away the uncertainty and doubt that makes these decisions so interesting in games that utilize similar approaches – when you decide to shoot the bird or not at the start of Until Dawn, it’s the mystery in how it will impact your character and story that makes it such a tough choice. When you’ve got the game literally explaining the endgame of each choice, it gives the whole thing a handholding feel that strips the tension from whatever choice you’ve made. So much of Silent Hill’s best storytelling comes in the form of moral ambiguity, so to cheerfully lay it out like this feels utterly antithetical to the franchise’s most iconic arcs. The community near-constantly voted for the “redemption” options, rendering most of the characters dully predictable – but we’ll get to the story and characters later.

And, beyond that, the nuts-and-bolts function of Ascension just wasn’t very good. The app was consistently pretty glitchy, the community quick-time events were poorly-implemented, there were inexplicable loading screens between certain scenes, the community chat always appeared on-screen in a distracting overlay that totally wrecked the immersion of the story, as did the choppy daily small segments that were released in its initial run – it felt like nothing had been thought through in terms of actual execution.

But all of this, I think, would have faded into our collective memory if the story we ended up with had been good. While the interactive elements were clearly a flop, the final release of the Ascension series, if it was compelling and true to the tone and look of Silent Hill, might have made it out of the fog.

But what we ended up with, after it was all said and done and the interactive aspect of the series finished back in April, is truly one of the most bafflingly awful pieces of horror storytelling I’ve ever seen from a franchise as big as Silent Hill.

While there are undoubtedly issues with things like the voice acting (dreadful, tortured) and the graphics (a throwback to 2014 nobody asked for, aside from some decent monster design) or the character animation (comically stiff), the biggest issue with Ascension is the writing and continuity. The game follows two major storylines, one in Norway, one in America, and fails to string together those two plots in a way that feels even vaguely complimentary, especially in the first half of the story’s run.

Characters contradict themselves literally from scene to scene – accusing their father of murder at one moment, and leaving their son alone with him the next – and in general act in nonsensical ways in order to fit the story around the decisions made by the audience (like, love, if someone brandishing a knife demands that you give them your wrist, just…don’t. Obviously). The characters lack a distinct voice – not in the acting, but in the writing, where they seem to have been boiled down to a single adjective like “prickly” or “stern”, often distilled into the most comically extreme version of that to boot. People wander in and out of the otherworld like it’s not big deal, reacting to the rust realm with marginally less surprise than I do when I see that one of the cats has knocked over my water bottle again.

And there are, of course, a few storytelling decisions that seemed to be thrown in there just for the sake of getting people talking. I mean, shall we talk about the orgy? I think we should. The orgy sequence (where everyone keeps their shoes and socks on, like any good gangbang) It’s emblematic of just how strange and off this feels as part of the Silent Hill franchise – though it’s got the surface-level parallels to Silent Hill, in terms of the cults, dead wives, monsters, this has never really been the franchise where someone gets ritually gangbanged, you know what I mean?

It’s at a level of dreadful that I genuinely I had to really consider how it could have gone this badly wrong: did the developers only consider one possible throughline, and hadn’t taken into account the different choices that might be made and how they might contradict each other? I saw a lot of talk speculating that the game may have been written by AI, and, while I often find those kind of accusations erroneous, it really wouldn’t surprise me to find out that it was true here. There’s a lack of continuity to the writing and characters that’s hard to believe could have come from a human writer, no matter how inexperienced or unskilled – contradictions within the same scene, this bizarre lack of convincing character work, even on the most basic level. I can’t make sense of how these mistakes could have been made on such a blatant level in a production with this budget and weight behind it – I’ve seen low-effort productions before, but this is almost high-effort, just in entirely the wrong direction. It’s genuinely odd, and watching the series now is a clunky, messy, almost surreal slog.

And, of course, it would not be a review of Silent Hill: Ascension without talking about It’s Trauma!. Perhaps the single most iconic thing to come out of the series is an emote that came with the purchase of the Founder’s Pack – a metallic rainbow sticker that cheerfully announces “It’s Trauma!”. When I first saw it, I assumed it was a slightly hackneyed joke at the expense of the Silent Hill series, but, somehow, it’s real – and it might be the most succinct explanation of what’s wrong with Ascension. Yeah, a lot of the Silent Hill series is about trauma – for me, it’s got some of the most impactful and powerful depictions of trauma in any horror media – and to boil that down to some flippant, nudge-nudge meta emote designed to pull in a little more cash underlines the fact that the people behind this game truly don’t get what makes it so compelling. Just pointing at one of the major themes of the series isn’t enough to really get under the skin of what makes it so good – but Ascension, with its painfully surface-level approach, can do nothing with it but turn it into a rainbow emote to earn a few more dollars.

It’s hard to imagine that the Silent Hill series could ever go lower than Ascension. It’s such a unique blend of badness across so many aspects – in the execution, the design, the writing, the storytelling, the cynical microtransactions in-game. Silent Hill is a franchise of great highs and awful lows, but Ascension – ironically – might be the lowest it’s ever sunk to.

I would love to hear your opinions on Ascension, and how it ranks up against other stories in the Silent Hill-verse – what do you think went wrong here (if anything at all)? Let me know in the comments!

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(header image via Mensis Scholar on X)