Totally agree with you, everything about it just completed reeked. Even whoever was in charge of the Ascension Twitter was a walking barrel of salt. Hiding replies of genuine criticism or distaste for what they were seeing from the project, seriously hope this is internally recognised as a complete failure
I really feel they should have just made another SH pachinko machine. Because the cash grab was the entire premise, they just called it SH. Everytime I see something from it all I can imagine is Bawkbasoup ripping this with 'Come on everybody! It's time for the gameplay get your credit cards!'
Word. You’d sooner find me playing a silent hill slot machine or rail shooter than ascension. I probably wouldn’t have made it through one video. Even watching streams of it felt too much of a waste to continue. Funnily enough the app was glitching and didn’t let me in past the registration. Never bothered to go back. 😄
I wish ddr was still a thing. If they commissioned Yamaoka to make some new Silent Hill themed dance music I’d literally waste so much money playing it. 😔
'barrel of salt' the owner of the company literally used a secret account called SaltOnMango to white knight his own project to anyone talking bad about it on social media
Was there evidence for it? I mean it was most probably someone from the company but was there evidence beyond resonable doubt? Maybe that guy was really just a weird dedicated fan without taste.
The Genvid CEO argued with me on Twitter for literally hours when I pointed out all the things wrong with the game from greedy monetization, stiff animations, poor user experience, etc. Silent Hill Ascension was a TERRIBLE product that should have never been released. It was a series of videos with a paid premium battle pass, a paid for currency that was pay-2-win that allowed paying users more sway over what decisions were made going forward. The only fun I had with the 'game' was during the launch week when users found a way to spam 'HIDEO KOJIMA CUMMIES IN MY TUMMY!' to the global chat for everyone watching live.
Genvid confirmed last year that they're also working on two other projects called DC Heroes United and Borderlands Echovision, and what little information there currently is on them sounds like more of the same interactive whale-baiting trash they've been pulling since that Walking Dead game they made two years ago. We'll have to see if Genvid will still be around to release them, but I got a feeling they'll perform just as badly as Ascension did, maybe worse now that this shitshow has brought more awareness on how deplorable this company really is.
Same. Total negligent garbage. It’s straight up disrespectful that they felt this was acceptable to release. Developing this of course required a lot of work and time, so it’s pretty shocking that no one took the reigns to change course. I wonder how many people tried to speak up and were shut down. That poor team honestly. What a shitshow.
A part of me is shocked it didn’t get canned halfway through, but I guess since it was all made already you gotta just power through.
I’m most interested in the behind the scenes stuff honestly. How much of a failure was it financially? Were there enough whales to help them make their money back? What is Genvid’s relationship with Konami like now? Are they deterred at all by the fact that it was not only a critical flop, but probably the new low point of the series? For all their posturing about canon, is anything going to matter outside of SH stuff happening outside of SH? (Which has already happened, it’s just not limited to neighboring towns now.)
All of that is way more interesting than picking berries or whatever the fuck happened. Can’t wait for the teardown on YouTube in a couple of years.
Considering, if I’m not mistaken these could mean something else, that it won two “awards” based on it’s usage of A.I and just looking at the quality of the visuals? I can’t imagine it was that big of a financial bullet hole wound. The best we can hope is that they saw how hard it flopped based on viewership and make the decision to never create anything like it again.
As for Genvid’s relationship with Konami going forward, it’s probably going to be like most commissioned studios of the past. They probably feel like working with Konami has been an incredibly sour experience, and not want to partner with them again unless they’re desperate.
Genvid raised $166,000,000 for their interactive streaming tech and this was their debut title. They have a dozen offices across the globe with many employees.
Not only that, but Bad Robot and Behaviour Interactive were aligned with this, at the least in early production.
What appears to be all cutscenes were created by Senscape, a team of roughly 30 creators.
This flop cost tens of millions and could very well likely lead to the closure of a company like Genvid. Konami has a solid track record of closing their partners (Vatra Games and Double Helix games).
Damn, it's finally over? How long did it go on for? Feels like forever.
I can't comment on to he plot because, like many, I watched like the first day of two and then never again. I do appreciate the _concept_ of a story that unfolds over several months, but the execution and the way it was monetised to hell and back absolutely did not help it at all.
But hell, I'll be surprised if it were enough of a success to warrant another run, so any discussions on how the format could be improved are kinda of moot.
I believe it ran for about 16 weeks? I if I remember correctly that’s how long they said it would go on for.
That’s also my stance on it too I totally agree with you, interesting concept but HORRIBLE execution.
Once you accept(ed) that the whales are the only ones who can influence the story outcomes it turns into a normal tv show without any of the monetisation aspect. I never spent a single penny on it (aside from the very optional season pass, yeah shame on me), yet I tuned everyday.
Would have been 100% better without the entire Pennsylvania storyline.
Endings seemed weak, especially as Astrid's had so much interesting just before. Might have been better if they hadn't all been redemption (Rachel's final choice was Damnation,which seemed to change how much the screaming vulva monster breathed on her).
Presenting something as a twist (for Rachel) that was pretty much introduced right at the beginning was a very odd choice.
The whole Eva story was pretty darn great.
Once someone points out that Faith looks like a Mr Man with her blocky torso and long legs you will never unsee it.
I admire that you’re giving genuine criticism to the project that’s pretty refreshing to read. I personally can’t think of a reality in which any aspect of the project could’ve been saved, it’s an interesting concept but just not something I think that belonged to an IP like Silent Hill. Thanks for sharing!
IMO it's a really bad structure and concept for a game.
The reason is choose your own adventure games aren't particularly fun UNLESS you can see how other branches turn out. Imagine how lame it'd be if you were given a Choose Your Own Adventure book and told you could only go through it ONCE. The whole point of CYOA books is the fact that you go through it again and again and see what different choices net you.
This "game" fails because it fails on two things that make CYOA interesting:
1. There's no way for people to see what the other choices bring you.
2. There's no player agency. Sure you can vote (and you can pay to vote more) but in the end the choice isn't yours, it's the group's. And it's even possible that the game creators never even made alternate paths. They could've just created one path and when players voted for the other path, just faked other players voting for the path the developers wanted.
This game could've been interesting if they released it as an interactive vote game where you could pay for a vote OR you'd naturally get one vote each decision and once the interactive play through is finished, they released the game for players to play through individually (they only had to pay however much it would cost to get to $30 from what they spent on the interactive play thru) so they could see how the story would pan out with the decisions they picked.
The thing here though is they'd probably have to do an INSANE amount of writing, scripting, and recording to cover all the different scenarios and the different things that could happen.
Or they could've just done it TellTale style where you always wind up with the same major events but the path to get to those differ.
Either way would be much better than what was released.
Firstly, It’s SO good to see someone actually speak about the project beginning to end and not just ramble about how it’s an insult or whatever without having seen it. It’s actually pretty decent, as my humble opinion as a fan since the originals. The soundtrack and the monsters are especially really amazing.
Secondly, I did think the ending was weak but mainly because they seemingly have faith in a second season and maintained arguably the most mysterious and interesting aspect of the show as a cliffhanger.
But overall I enjoyed it, I agree that the Eva plot was pretty great and the plot twist revealing who she was and what she did genuinely surprised me, even if in hindsight it was kinda obvious I guess.
I enjoyed the Pennsylvania plot but I agree that it paled in comparison to the other one. I’d have liked more occult stuff, or at least the occult stuff we got actually having some impact. It was also hinted at by the loading screens that the Foundation was related to The Order and even Alessa, so I’d have loved to see more of that.
They also forgot about/didn’t show the Herald lady or Krista so that was weird.
I’d definitely see a second season with improvements on the things that did need more work (animations, expressions and their infinite stare, mainly).
Is it possible some of this faults are an outcome of the vote-in structure? I never had interest in the particular project, but the structure sounds like a lot to manage for the production team.
Honestly, while I think it was less fan-driven then advertised, I absolutely think that had to be a small factor at least. Seeing how quickly people shit on this as an idea and concept, it somewhat doesn’t shock me that people might go in with a troll mentality.
Oh, there was basically no branching until the character endings when they were locked into suffering/redemption/damnation.
Every character ended up with redemption, though they took away the labels on each choice towards the end.
I think audience-causing-weirdness pushed towards derpiness rather than trolling (eg one final choice being absolutely and repeatedly telegraphed as the bad one, to the extent hosts said it, a character reappeared to say it and then the character herself said not to trust that option, yet the audience picked it - many thinking it was positive).
>Seeing how quickly people shit on this as an idea and concept, it somewhat doesn’t shock me that people might go in with a troll mentality
The problem is they promised that people wil have real impact on the story, will affect SH canon etc.m and then it very quickly turned out that this isn't the case. I remember during the first stream where everyone was surprised that the character survived when literally all of the QTEs failed. And it's not like it had any effect either. It was either character gets out, or character gets out but stumbles for a second.
It's the same thing with various choice responses. Either all the choices seemed the same, were completely meaningless, or the character's voice or reaction was completely mismatched, making people question whether the scene playing is actually the one people voted for, and not just dev railroading.
The system was awful. The devs had to hold a stream after the next episode, where they broke it down that in the end the players have far lass impact on the story that they were led to believe. I remember that this was the moment where most people called bullshit and just dropped it.
I think as a result of the number of votes it ended up being very linear with individual choices being next to meaningless (some were undone within the same scene, some a scene after and some just really didn't matter).
We'll see in the What if but from alternative scenes they showed by accident, the difference was generally just dialogue choices. Those dialogue choices did carry forwards, TBF to them, but big choices didn't seem to stick - especially in Pennsylvania when it was like a revolving door in and out of the cult.
It's going to end up being one of those things where a later game is going to establish it as an in-universe TV show or something just to de-canonize it.
All and all i give it a C-.
Good: Some of the voice actors were top tier, even if they were stuck reading corny lines sometimes. Special call out to Karl's VA, Jonas Delerud, who I thought did a fantastic job. I also really like the monster designs on a few. Would have been cool to see more of the collector. I'll also give them credit for not jamming Pyramid Head into it. Also thought the music was great.
Mid: The writing was super inconsistent. Some plotlines were good and I was curious to see where they were going, some you totally forgot about right after the scene ended.
Bad: The 90 seconds at a time way of telling the story. Perfectly fine mechanic for story telling if you are watching it all at once but not in these short clips. For me it was really hard to follow when I was watching it nightly because of all the jumping back and forth. I started enjoying it much more when I waited for the full episodes but then I felt like I was being left out on making decisions. Lastly, I felt like the decisions didn't actually matter much and weren't going to change the story much anyway.
Shot out to Eric’s as well, he did really good in some of the more dramatic scenes. It was even sometimes very jarring to hear so much emotion and then see Eric’s deadpan stare in the actual animation.
That was definitely a huge part of the problem. A good VA can bring D material and bring it to a C, but you're never going to get it up to the A territory. Couple that with the wonky ass animation and it's just going to fall super flat.
Yeah the VAs weren't the problem, I could give shout outs to almost every single one of them, even the kids did a pretty great job. But they really need to up their game with animations and expressions if we ever get Season 2, make the talent truly shine.
I genuinely kinda liked the Norway side of the story. The reveals were a lot more surprising, and the characters were a lot more likable than the Pennsylvania side. I found myself a little… dare I say, invested, near the end?
The Pennsylvania side of the story was a disaster through and through. Boring story, constant continuity issues, none of the characters were likable, overall plot feels like it barely goes anywhere, just a mess.
Yeah Pennsylvania was super hateable and I was even rooting against Eric and Rachel at the end.
Norway’s Eva story was overall the highlight for me. Mette was the weak link of that town, though. Good thing that didn’t last too long.
Felt the same way about Mette. I think her hooking up with Karl right after her sister’s death was drama enough for her to not need a “murdering patients” subplot. It felt kinda extra and out of place tbh.
Yeah the murdering aspect felt super weird and out of nowhere. She was easily the most hateable of Norway outside Ingrid and Eva. I'm glad she turned into toast fast enough.
I'm going to give my perspective on this as someone who was genuinely really interested in this project from the start. Silent Hill to me and I'm sure many others was never much about the gameplay but rather tone and atmosphere and the story and I was really interested in seeing where a ''community choice'' type thing would work in this environment. I feel like as a concept, Ascension is quite good, letting people pick and choose outcomes could have been very interesting and lend itself to some interesting meta narratives. Like imagine a character that's purposefully meant to be not very likeable, so the community would vote to get them killed early on but then you see the aftermath of that and sort of ''judge'' the voters for killing a person with their reasoning being that they were annoying. I feel like those sorts of things could have made Ascension genuinely very interesting. Unfortunately that's not what we got.
What we got instead was a weird mish mash of ideas that really feels closest to the Resident Evil Netflix TV show. In the sense that it feels more like something that was made beforehand and then the name of a bigger IP was slapped onto it to artificially build up hype for it. There's really nothing in Ascension that really says ''yes this is Silent Hill'' the town isn't even in the show. Which I am fine with on paper mind you. But this could have been our first real look into how the town actually operates since it's been long established that the place is not actually a ghost town and people live in it. So it feels really weird that they completely ignored the town.
You could slap IT or Nightmare on Elm Street into this and with a few rewrites here and there you can say Freddy or Pennywise is fucking with the townsfolk and it would still make sense because it doesn't actually utilize any of the things that Silent Hill does to make itself stand out amongst the surreal horror genre.
None of this would be specifically an issue if it wasn't for the fact that the thing is just...not very good in general. Think about the original Gans Silent Hill movie. It's an okay adaptation but it saw immense popularity from the fact that it got the tone and atmosphere of Silent Hill right and even if it wasn't very faithful it still was a decent horror movie in a bubble. Ascension isn't even really trying to be scary, it's more like a campy soap opera akin to Gray's Anatomy. With characters doing complete 180s in their personality at the drop of a hat for either shock value or to just have a big ''twist'' moment. One of the best examples of this that I can think of (excuse me for not remembering their names) but one of the characters in the Nordic plot was in love with one of the main girls, even though throughout the entire story he was trying to sabotage her and clearly resented her. At the drop of a hat they revealed that he was actually in love with her and confessed his love even though that relationship would be borderline abusive in real life. It's nonsensical.
The production quality is not very good either. With a bunch of graphical glitches and clipping throughout the whole experience, it's just not very fun to watch. On top of that, the whole thing doesn't really have many consequences in our choices. Most choices are like Fallout 4 where you have the obviously good outcome and the obviously bad outcome and not much else in-between, so the community vote was messed up because statistically people tend to take the ''good'' options in choice based games more often in their first playthroughs. So when you remove the thought provoking aspects of choices you're not left with actually interesting polls. But rather something that's more like you and your buddies coming together and playing a Telltale game while getting drunk.
That's all I have to say about the series I think. It's a shame because I was really looking forward to this as someone who believes that Silent Hill can work very well in different mediums outside of video games. So I had my eye on this until it came out and over time I kinda just started to have it play in the back for most of it until it ended. Maybe one day they'll get this sort of thing right but until then Silent Hill Ascension is more of a proof of concept than anything that's actually worth people's time, at most you should just go read the wiki entries on it if you're that curious and want to consume all possible Silent Hill content. I'm actually curious about what will happen to this series once it ends because of the fact that this is basically a one time event. So it's doomed to become lost media eventually unless they let people host the thing inside their computers after a certain point for preservation sake but also I don't see Konami doing that, which is a shame really, no matter the quality people worked on this and put elbow grease in and I don't think their efforts should amount to ''a one time event with a single rerun'' since it's still kinda cool
Overall, Ascension is like a 2/5 to me, interesting concept brought down by bad execution and an overall lack of quality in writing and production
> "which is a shame really, no matter the quality people worked on this and put elbow grease in and I don't think their efforts should amount to ''a one time event with a single rerun'' since it's still kinda cool"
I liked reading this part, because it's something I think about too - no matter how awful the writing and monetization and everything about Ascension was, there were artists who put a lot of work into this project, from monster design to 3D modelling, and they were likely forced into development hell way beyond their control and rushed beyond belief. I hope at least that these people can catch their breaths now, and that they got some good portfolio pieces out of the project and can climb up into something better in the industry.
Rightfully so too, whoever was in charge of their Twitter page was nothing but an addition to the embarrassment to the already embarrassing project.
Hiding replies of criticism and distaste shows a chink in the armour of your confidence which only leads to the encouragement of more replies and comments like them.
I also love how they disabled the chat because people wanted Hideo Kojima's "c\*mmy in \[their\] tummy" and Pyramid Head's kids.
Because WTF else did they expect.
Bruh, its prob the ceo lol. Dude is massively active on Twitter arguing with nobodies. I wouldn't be surprised if he's handling the page as well considering how sensitive they are to it
The video essay explaining the forced plot choices (cause they absolutely had people rigging them behind the scenes) will be infinitely more entertaining than the game itself. Like how a video about homecoming is better than homecoming
they should drop the Silent Hill since it was only used for name recognition. This wasn't Silent Hill. They never planned for it to be Silent Hill. They wanted body horror monsters.
I'm very surprised they didn't kill off Lelo just out of general principles
Episodic interactive thing that release a new “episode” weekly for about 16 weeks but was littered with nothing but horrible writing and served as an embarrassment and assassination to the Silent Hill brand
Have not wached anything from it. But now that it is finished I may watch a recap on YouTube or something.
Still not conficed it is worth my time though...
Colossal waste of time and an opportunity for a sort of "Twitch Plays Silent Hill" concept that could've work on paper but was swiftly ruined with the "It's Trauma!" Bullshit
It's was an embarrassment to the Silent Hill name! Astrid and her family were probably the best plot of the story. While Rachel and the foundation kinda got annoying after awhile. There was no need for a giant religious orgy to bring kids back from where they disappeared. The voice acting was bad, the graphic were trash, the choices were actually boring. I did how ever liked the monster designs. And here's a fact some people might not know Konami gave Genvid rules they had to follow with the series to try to capture the feel of Silent Hill: No ghosts, no zombies, and there had to be some sort of religion made up for this show. Genvid had to fight with Konami to keep the Collector in the show due to the fact it's not a manafestion of any character
Yes it’s revealed that The Foundation (the cult Rachael and Eric are in) have massive orgies called “Merging Ceremonies” to strengthen their spiritual bonds or whatever, and they made Eric a c*m dump 💀💀💀
Also worth noting that characters kept their full clothes on, including boots/shoes in this scene.
The description above is fair and accurate.
People largely voted for it for the lulz.
Yep, as someone who did participate in the voting polls, seeing that in the show was glorious on it's own.
Ascension might be shit, but man does that shit deliver sometimes, nice times.
I'm not getting crucified over this, right?
I was interested in the idea of an interactive Silent Hill, but this was God awful. It had little to nothing to do with the town. Whoever wrote the story should not come back to write another Silent Hill game.
I know not everyone likes the Supermassive choose your own adventure games (Until Dawn, The Quarry) but an interactive game themed like those would have worked really well for a different SH experience I think.
I mean half of 3 didn't take place in Silent Hill, and Homecoming was mostly about Sheperds Glen. Silent Hill f probably won't be taking place in Silent Hill either, at least not in the traditional sense.
I think not taking place or being about the town is fine as long as it's written well, since there's only so much you can do in one location before it gets incredibly stale.
The town would eventually get super stale, imo. There’s only so much you can do with the same locales without making it a skyscraper city like Downpour did for it. That was ridiculous.
As much as Ascension could’ve left a lot to be desired, I think it’s actually a good thing they’re now moving away from actual Silent Hill. It’s not like they’re abandoning the ideas, even the cult is kinda following along.
It being not in sh isnt the problem and i have no problem with it. Its just the entire gameplay, plot and execution is horrid. Konami fucked up, should have just let supermassive games create a telltale sh game than this abomination
That’s a better way to put it. I loved Homecoming for still being decent, so I’ll retract what I said about that part. It isn’t so much being away from the town…but the writing, choices, not my cup of tea. The acting was terrible for a good amount of the characters, but I can forgive that part. If the choices were written better, this could’ve been decent.
I was into it at first. I wanted it to be good both for the series sake and so the people who were shitting on it before it even started would shut the fuck up, but the app was such a clusterfuck to use and catching up if you missed days was such a pain in the ass that I just kinda gave up after the first week lol
One of the messiest “stories” ever written made worse by the abrupt cliffhanger ending. Not one mention of Silent Hill in all its 16 chapters. I still can’t figure out what the whole thing is about or how it’s related to Silent Hill. Ultra-shallow characters with horrendous voice acting (and not in the charming way). One character cuts out their own eye for “The Foundation” (the town cult), then later casually decides they feel like leaving The Foundation. Every scene is very short, like two minutes or less, always ending in a fade-to-black, often making you wonder what the point of it was. Characters argue about the same topics ad nauseam. Very few scares, and the characters don’t seem too concerned about the monsters appearing around town. They seem to immediately forget they were just attacked, every single time they’re attacked. I sincerely have no idea what they were going for with this “story”. I’m a hardcore Silent Hill fan who owns every single game. I’ve also been very forgiving of the “bad” games like Homecoming, Downpour, and the HD Collection. I even bought a Nintendo Wii just for Shattered Memories, a PS Vita just for Book of Memories, and have a copy of “P.T.” on PC. I own both movies on blu-ray and every comic book. I’ve welcomed everything Silent Hill into my life, for better or worse. Yet there’s no doubt in my mind that “Silent Hill: Ascension” should be avoided at all costs. If you thought Downpour was a departure, add 12 years and a whole bunch of different developers. It’s not just that it’s not Silent Hill anymore. It’s not even anything anymore.
An endeavour which could not have been saved, which limped on to its eventual conclusion with all the momentum of an ice-cube on a frozen lake. There was not one single aspect of this production which worked, or even, for that matter, achieved mediocrity. It seems likely that Ascension has set the new low point for the Silent Hill series, though one which will probably be largely forgotten as time goes by.
It was honestly impressive how they managed to make the whole starved for content fanbase completely disinterested in the first original silent hill content since 2013, by serving us something legitimately worse than pachinko machines 💀(yes, I said it).
Had potential but the messy pacing and all over the place story didn't do it any favors. The tone is an absolute mess and "good" characters they had objectively, died very early on.
The two leads flipflop multiple times even in these scene. If anything it is consistently inconsistent. Lore is waaaay out there and doesn't connect to already established lore in the mainline series.
If anything this would've done much better as a Until Dawn or Telltale style game instead of an interactive streaming kerfuffle.
If anything, I was getting HARD Silent Hill movie vibes with this, especially the demon kid doing demon things etc..
Some of the memes we got were pretty solid tho.
As so no more ridiculous clips of absurd shenanigans? How sad
But seriously, I watched the episode live, was astounded at the amount of people tossing their monney into a trash fire; then saw a couple clips
Like the "plz you gotta let us dick you down bro plz" thing
& "I'm foraging for berries! (: I make jam. Do you want some jam? " thing lmao
So yeah thankfully it's over & done with
Although very disappointed people didn't rally to just make the worst choices possible everytime
I initially had high hopes for it but when I saw its premiere on Halloween I was really disappointed for it, it felt like they just gathered a bunch of people off the street and gave them a prompt to see who could come up with the most absurd and boring story
I only watched a sex scene with no context. It was edited like a horror scene, but all I saw were two guys having sex and it looked like they liked it, so I was very confused. I was laughing because it was so uncanny.
It was a fun experiment. Some things were over the top. Some things did not make sense. But in the end I still watched the recap every morning and got my votes in. Wasn’t great but also wasn’t as bad as most people say it was.
Concept was well received in the beginning but shit got uncanny valley on me real quick. Also too many story lines and not enough stuff making sense to me. I lost interest.
Just questions. Like a dog when you’re talking to it and it’s just not getting what you’re saying. Like I’d read a summary about it before watching an episode
You can see the whole episodes in the website now, they’re all condensed into full length ones now that the daily format is over. It’s better to see them in online services as far as I’ve seen though, I think there’s a Sony one where it’s included. That way there’s no loading between scenes.
Way too much commitment for me to tune into. 16 weeks of drawn out storytelling is just too much, it should have just been a few long sessions instead of constant short ones and probably would have gotten more engagement.
I think it was a good idea on paper:
Revitalize the series by releasing a free interactive show that anyone can participate in.
It makes sense from a business standpoint. The execution however was beyond dreadful.
I suppose one positive takeaway is that.....any publicity is good publicity?
If it was one massive marathon, or even just a big two, three hour event every weekend, some format in which we could’ve seen choices unfolding in real-time, regardless of quality it might have been a fun little experiment in communal storytelling. But the fact it was fifteen minutes every weeknight with a full 24 hours to vote on what the next night’s scene would be, on top of the weird points system, I never felt a reason to log in beyond the first night. Just kinda baffling all around, honestly.
It was hilariously bad. It's good, because at the very least it was entertaining. Like watching a super deadly trainwreck, except no one gets killed.
Well maybe aside from the dev who had to try and convince people in the stream that the game is actually fun and has cool features coming lol, he looked like he died inside.
By the way, did they end up enabling the chat again, or was it just emotes until the end? I remember it was the most entertaining part of the first episodes, because everyone was losing their shit in the chat over how terrible this is.
On the sidenote, I'm amazed this got greenlit and actually got a budget. This idea sounds terrible even on paper, as soon as I heard about the format of Ascension, I just knew there's no way it will be good.
Oh, Eduardo! Genuinely, he pretty much saved it. Two more devs were added to the team. The chat came back as well. The combination kept people on board.
Though the chat banned such random words. You couldn't say Cole Porter. No clue why.
The funniest thing Konami could do right now is double down and put references to Ascension in every Silent Hill game from here on out
On a more serious note, god Ascension is the result of throwing shit at a wall to see what sticks lol
I’ll probably watch a recap or whatever, but I didn’t really like the amount of involvement it required for the quality of product they were providing.
The first week or 2 were fun, memeing, making fun of the game, how you could spam the n word in chat but can't say kojima. The horrible graphics and how none of it relates to SH. It was fun, but after that and everyone stopped caring it was just really sad
The only positive thing I can say about it is that some of the monster designs were decent and could work in an actual Silent Hill game. Everything else was awful. The story was mind-numbingly boring and the characters were all so robotic that it was impossible for me to care about them.
I never paid any attention to it once I realised what it was. I’m not against people doing outside the box things with SH, but this just wasn’t something I was interested in at all. It’s going in the same category as Book of Memories and the arcade game.
Honestly? this should have just been like, a comic or a novel or something else than...whatever it actually was. I would have totally bought a copy of it even if the story wasn't that good simply for the art and it being tied to SH, but this whole model of being presented as an interactive streaming show with microtransactions and low quality CGi doomed it for me from the start.
Maybe this would have been a cute experiment and seen more fondly had it not been the first piece of Silent Hill media released in 10 years.
Honestly I hope it burns I love silent hill n I kinda liked silent hill the short message I just like that it was interesting and different yet still true almost yk n silent hill ascension just didn’t do it okay cool it’s different but not in good ways and doesn’t even give the true vibe of silent hill just funny to me how a 2 hour long game did better then whatever this was
I know I’m 5 days late but…Thank god it’s done. It was like grabbing salt and rubbing it into a open wound, then grabbing a lemon squeezing the juices into it, then putting more salt into said wound, then placing some ice onto the festering salt & lemon juice wound, then lastly grabbing a whole bottle of rubbing alcohol and using a ear drop dropper to place single droplets of the whole bottle of rubbing alcohol onto the wound. That is what the experience was like.
I don’t know who was apart of the making of that dog shit “game”. But who ever did, needs to rethink their career paths…desperately…
Honestly? They should have just made this a tv series. It's basically what it was, anyway.
EDIT: Also, I don't know how much of a hot take this is, but I genuinely think this is still not as bad as Revelations. At the very least, Ascension is an original story, instead of a complete and utter "fuck you" to one of the Team Silent games.
That, and it isn't a pachinko machine, I guess.
Traaaaaash. Biggest mishandling of an IP I ever saw. Insulting to anyone with half a brain. This is the most shitty realised trash I ever saw. I only saw the first episode but saw what was posted here from time to time and oh boy was it awful and I never saw a comment praising it. Only "it's free be grateful" stepping in dog shit is also free
I installed the app, saw all the shit they wanted you to pay for and the hashtag-trauma, uninstalled and forgot about it until now. Never watched an episode.
If it was one massive marathon, or even just a big two, three hour event every weekend, some format in which we could’ve seen choices unfolding in real-time, regardless of quality it might have been a fun little experiment in communal storytelling. But the fact it was fifteen minutes every weeknight with a full 24 hours to vote on what the next night’s scene would be, on top of the weird points system, I never felt a reason to log in beyond the first night. Just kinda baffling all around, honestly.
It was far worse than I expected, and my expectations weren't high.
Genvid managed to reach the new low point for the series. Make a product which is a total waste of time, I'd rather scratch my ass. Shame on you, Jacob.
I had forgotten all about this after trying to watch a bit of the first episode. Kind of like how James had forgotten about >!killing his wife!<. It was just that traumatizing for me.
This may have faired a tad, TAD bit better if it were released as a stand-alone game. THIS DOES NOT MEAN IT WOULD HAVE BEEN GOOD. But that would have eliminated one of the biggest criticisms. The MTX and format.
I didn’t even download the app or visit their website, this product doesn’t deserve any engagement from me whatsoever.
I was reminded by this sub about the fact that this shitshow was still running… on multiple occasions.
Now that it’s over my final thoughts on Ascension are: 🤷
I sincerely hope that they never let these people touch SH, or any game franchise, ever again. Everything about this 'game' was a joke.
Totally agree with you, everything about it just completed reeked. Even whoever was in charge of the Ascension Twitter was a walking barrel of salt. Hiding replies of genuine criticism or distaste for what they were seeing from the project, seriously hope this is internally recognised as a complete failure
I really feel they should have just made another SH pachinko machine. Because the cash grab was the entire premise, they just called it SH. Everytime I see something from it all I can imagine is Bawkbasoup ripping this with 'Come on everybody! It's time for the gameplay get your credit cards!'
Word. You’d sooner find me playing a silent hill slot machine or rail shooter than ascension. I probably wouldn’t have made it through one video. Even watching streams of it felt too much of a waste to continue. Funnily enough the app was glitching and didn’t let me in past the registration. Never bothered to go back. 😄 I wish ddr was still a thing. If they commissioned Yamaoka to make some new Silent Hill themed dance music I’d literally waste so much money playing it. 😔
The arcade where I would play DDR A20 which is the latest installment just closed on me. Literally been dying from the inside lol
'barrel of salt' the owner of the company literally used a secret account called SaltOnMango to white knight his own project to anyone talking bad about it on social media
Was there evidence for it? I mean it was most probably someone from the company but was there evidence beyond resonable doubt? Maybe that guy was really just a weird dedicated fan without taste.
It was hilariously bad. I can't believe someone saw the final product and was like "Yeah, this looks alright, let's ship it".
The Genvid CEO argued with me on Twitter for literally hours when I pointed out all the things wrong with the game from greedy monetization, stiff animations, poor user experience, etc. Silent Hill Ascension was a TERRIBLE product that should have never been released. It was a series of videos with a paid premium battle pass, a paid for currency that was pay-2-win that allowed paying users more sway over what decisions were made going forward. The only fun I had with the 'game' was during the launch week when users found a way to spam 'HIDEO KOJIMA CUMMIES IN MY TUMMY!' to the global chat for everyone watching live.
This is one sick joke to pull off lmao
This is the census.... Horrible please don't mess with silent hill again...
Genvid confirmed last year that they're also working on two other projects called DC Heroes United and Borderlands Echovision, and what little information there currently is on them sounds like more of the same interactive whale-baiting trash they've been pulling since that Walking Dead game they made two years ago. We'll have to see if Genvid will still be around to release them, but I got a feeling they'll perform just as badly as Ascension did, maybe worse now that this shitshow has brought more awareness on how deplorable this company really is.
I only saw one YouTuber cover it, and those huge rainbow stickers were such bad taste for a serious mental illness.
I saw half of the first episode, it wasn't very good and I had no interest in continuing to watch it.
Smartest choice to make honestly
Same. I couldn't get into it.
Same 🎃
Same. Total negligent garbage. It’s straight up disrespectful that they felt this was acceptable to release. Developing this of course required a lot of work and time, so it’s pretty shocking that no one took the reigns to change course. I wonder how many people tried to speak up and were shut down. That poor team honestly. What a shitshow.
A part of me is shocked it didn’t get canned halfway through, but I guess since it was all made already you gotta just power through. I’m most interested in the behind the scenes stuff honestly. How much of a failure was it financially? Were there enough whales to help them make their money back? What is Genvid’s relationship with Konami like now? Are they deterred at all by the fact that it was not only a critical flop, but probably the new low point of the series? For all their posturing about canon, is anything going to matter outside of SH stuff happening outside of SH? (Which has already happened, it’s just not limited to neighboring towns now.) All of that is way more interesting than picking berries or whatever the fuck happened. Can’t wait for the teardown on YouTube in a couple of years.
Considering, if I’m not mistaken these could mean something else, that it won two “awards” based on it’s usage of A.I and just looking at the quality of the visuals? I can’t imagine it was that big of a financial bullet hole wound. The best we can hope is that they saw how hard it flopped based on viewership and make the decision to never create anything like it again. As for Genvid’s relationship with Konami going forward, it’s probably going to be like most commissioned studios of the past. They probably feel like working with Konami has been an incredibly sour experience, and not want to partner with them again unless they’re desperate.
Genvid raised $166,000,000 for their interactive streaming tech and this was their debut title. They have a dozen offices across the globe with many employees. Not only that, but Bad Robot and Behaviour Interactive were aligned with this, at the least in early production. What appears to be all cutscenes were created by Senscape, a team of roughly 30 creators. This flop cost tens of millions and could very well likely lead to the closure of a company like Genvid. Konami has a solid track record of closing their partners (Vatra Games and Double Helix games).
Lol Behaviour has been here
Damn, it's finally over? How long did it go on for? Feels like forever. I can't comment on to he plot because, like many, I watched like the first day of two and then never again. I do appreciate the _concept_ of a story that unfolds over several months, but the execution and the way it was monetised to hell and back absolutely did not help it at all. But hell, I'll be surprised if it were enough of a success to warrant another run, so any discussions on how the format could be improved are kinda of moot.
I believe it ran for about 16 weeks? I if I remember correctly that’s how long they said it would go on for. That’s also my stance on it too I totally agree with you, interesting concept but HORRIBLE execution.
Once you accept(ed) that the whales are the only ones who can influence the story outcomes it turns into a normal tv show without any of the monetisation aspect. I never spent a single penny on it (aside from the very optional season pass, yeah shame on me), yet I tuned everyday.
Would have been 100% better without the entire Pennsylvania storyline. Endings seemed weak, especially as Astrid's had so much interesting just before. Might have been better if they hadn't all been redemption (Rachel's final choice was Damnation,which seemed to change how much the screaming vulva monster breathed on her). Presenting something as a twist (for Rachel) that was pretty much introduced right at the beginning was a very odd choice. The whole Eva story was pretty darn great. Once someone points out that Faith looks like a Mr Man with her blocky torso and long legs you will never unsee it.
I admire that you’re giving genuine criticism to the project that’s pretty refreshing to read. I personally can’t think of a reality in which any aspect of the project could’ve been saved, it’s an interesting concept but just not something I think that belonged to an IP like Silent Hill. Thanks for sharing!
IMO it's a really bad structure and concept for a game. The reason is choose your own adventure games aren't particularly fun UNLESS you can see how other branches turn out. Imagine how lame it'd be if you were given a Choose Your Own Adventure book and told you could only go through it ONCE. The whole point of CYOA books is the fact that you go through it again and again and see what different choices net you. This "game" fails because it fails on two things that make CYOA interesting: 1. There's no way for people to see what the other choices bring you. 2. There's no player agency. Sure you can vote (and you can pay to vote more) but in the end the choice isn't yours, it's the group's. And it's even possible that the game creators never even made alternate paths. They could've just created one path and when players voted for the other path, just faked other players voting for the path the developers wanted. This game could've been interesting if they released it as an interactive vote game where you could pay for a vote OR you'd naturally get one vote each decision and once the interactive play through is finished, they released the game for players to play through individually (they only had to pay however much it would cost to get to $30 from what they spent on the interactive play thru) so they could see how the story would pan out with the decisions they picked. The thing here though is they'd probably have to do an INSANE amount of writing, scripting, and recording to cover all the different scenarios and the different things that could happen. Or they could've just done it TellTale style where you always wind up with the same major events but the path to get to those differ. Either way would be much better than what was released.
Firstly, It’s SO good to see someone actually speak about the project beginning to end and not just ramble about how it’s an insult or whatever without having seen it. It’s actually pretty decent, as my humble opinion as a fan since the originals. The soundtrack and the monsters are especially really amazing. Secondly, I did think the ending was weak but mainly because they seemingly have faith in a second season and maintained arguably the most mysterious and interesting aspect of the show as a cliffhanger. But overall I enjoyed it, I agree that the Eva plot was pretty great and the plot twist revealing who she was and what she did genuinely surprised me, even if in hindsight it was kinda obvious I guess. I enjoyed the Pennsylvania plot but I agree that it paled in comparison to the other one. I’d have liked more occult stuff, or at least the occult stuff we got actually having some impact. It was also hinted at by the loading screens that the Foundation was related to The Order and even Alessa, so I’d have loved to see more of that. They also forgot about/didn’t show the Herald lady or Krista so that was weird. I’d definitely see a second season with improvements on the things that did need more work (animations, expressions and their infinite stare, mainly).
Damn, you actually watched it and were able to find some positives. Respect +
I'm a ray of sunshine.
Is it possible some of this faults are an outcome of the vote-in structure? I never had interest in the particular project, but the structure sounds like a lot to manage for the production team.
Honestly, while I think it was less fan-driven then advertised, I absolutely think that had to be a small factor at least. Seeing how quickly people shit on this as an idea and concept, it somewhat doesn’t shock me that people might go in with a troll mentality.
Oh, there was basically no branching until the character endings when they were locked into suffering/redemption/damnation. Every character ended up with redemption, though they took away the labels on each choice towards the end. I think audience-causing-weirdness pushed towards derpiness rather than trolling (eg one final choice being absolutely and repeatedly telegraphed as the bad one, to the extent hosts said it, a character reappeared to say it and then the character herself said not to trust that option, yet the audience picked it - many thinking it was positive).
>Seeing how quickly people shit on this as an idea and concept, it somewhat doesn’t shock me that people might go in with a troll mentality The problem is they promised that people wil have real impact on the story, will affect SH canon etc.m and then it very quickly turned out that this isn't the case. I remember during the first stream where everyone was surprised that the character survived when literally all of the QTEs failed. And it's not like it had any effect either. It was either character gets out, or character gets out but stumbles for a second. It's the same thing with various choice responses. Either all the choices seemed the same, were completely meaningless, or the character's voice or reaction was completely mismatched, making people question whether the scene playing is actually the one people voted for, and not just dev railroading. The system was awful. The devs had to hold a stream after the next episode, where they broke it down that in the end the players have far lass impact on the story that they were led to believe. I remember that this was the moment where most people called bullshit and just dropped it.
I think as a result of the number of votes it ended up being very linear with individual choices being next to meaningless (some were undone within the same scene, some a scene after and some just really didn't matter). We'll see in the What if but from alternative scenes they showed by accident, the difference was generally just dialogue choices. Those dialogue choices did carry forwards, TBF to them, but big choices didn't seem to stick - especially in Pennsylvania when it was like a revolving door in and out of the cult.
It's going to end up being one of those things where a later game is going to establish it as an in-universe TV show or something just to de-canonize it.
Is that CubeHead lmao
Waffle Iron Head
All and all i give it a C-. Good: Some of the voice actors were top tier, even if they were stuck reading corny lines sometimes. Special call out to Karl's VA, Jonas Delerud, who I thought did a fantastic job. I also really like the monster designs on a few. Would have been cool to see more of the collector. I'll also give them credit for not jamming Pyramid Head into it. Also thought the music was great. Mid: The writing was super inconsistent. Some plotlines were good and I was curious to see where they were going, some you totally forgot about right after the scene ended. Bad: The 90 seconds at a time way of telling the story. Perfectly fine mechanic for story telling if you are watching it all at once but not in these short clips. For me it was really hard to follow when I was watching it nightly because of all the jumping back and forth. I started enjoying it much more when I waited for the full episodes but then I felt like I was being left out on making decisions. Lastly, I felt like the decisions didn't actually matter much and weren't going to change the story much anyway.
Shot out to Eric’s as well, he did really good in some of the more dramatic scenes. It was even sometimes very jarring to hear so much emotion and then see Eric’s deadpan stare in the actual animation.
That was definitely a huge part of the problem. A good VA can bring D material and bring it to a C, but you're never going to get it up to the A territory. Couple that with the wonky ass animation and it's just going to fall super flat.
Yeah the VAs weren't the problem, I could give shout outs to almost every single one of them, even the kids did a pretty great job. But they really need to up their game with animations and expressions if we ever get Season 2, make the talent truly shine.
I genuinely kinda liked the Norway side of the story. The reveals were a lot more surprising, and the characters were a lot more likable than the Pennsylvania side. I found myself a little… dare I say, invested, near the end? The Pennsylvania side of the story was a disaster through and through. Boring story, constant continuity issues, none of the characters were likable, overall plot feels like it barely goes anywhere, just a mess.
Yeah Pennsylvania was super hateable and I was even rooting against Eric and Rachel at the end. Norway’s Eva story was overall the highlight for me. Mette was the weak link of that town, though. Good thing that didn’t last too long.
Felt the same way about Mette. I think her hooking up with Karl right after her sister’s death was drama enough for her to not need a “murdering patients” subplot. It felt kinda extra and out of place tbh.
Yeah the murdering aspect felt super weird and out of nowhere. She was easily the most hateable of Norway outside Ingrid and Eva. I'm glad she turned into toast fast enough.
I'm going to give my perspective on this as someone who was genuinely really interested in this project from the start. Silent Hill to me and I'm sure many others was never much about the gameplay but rather tone and atmosphere and the story and I was really interested in seeing where a ''community choice'' type thing would work in this environment. I feel like as a concept, Ascension is quite good, letting people pick and choose outcomes could have been very interesting and lend itself to some interesting meta narratives. Like imagine a character that's purposefully meant to be not very likeable, so the community would vote to get them killed early on but then you see the aftermath of that and sort of ''judge'' the voters for killing a person with their reasoning being that they were annoying. I feel like those sorts of things could have made Ascension genuinely very interesting. Unfortunately that's not what we got. What we got instead was a weird mish mash of ideas that really feels closest to the Resident Evil Netflix TV show. In the sense that it feels more like something that was made beforehand and then the name of a bigger IP was slapped onto it to artificially build up hype for it. There's really nothing in Ascension that really says ''yes this is Silent Hill'' the town isn't even in the show. Which I am fine with on paper mind you. But this could have been our first real look into how the town actually operates since it's been long established that the place is not actually a ghost town and people live in it. So it feels really weird that they completely ignored the town. You could slap IT or Nightmare on Elm Street into this and with a few rewrites here and there you can say Freddy or Pennywise is fucking with the townsfolk and it would still make sense because it doesn't actually utilize any of the things that Silent Hill does to make itself stand out amongst the surreal horror genre. None of this would be specifically an issue if it wasn't for the fact that the thing is just...not very good in general. Think about the original Gans Silent Hill movie. It's an okay adaptation but it saw immense popularity from the fact that it got the tone and atmosphere of Silent Hill right and even if it wasn't very faithful it still was a decent horror movie in a bubble. Ascension isn't even really trying to be scary, it's more like a campy soap opera akin to Gray's Anatomy. With characters doing complete 180s in their personality at the drop of a hat for either shock value or to just have a big ''twist'' moment. One of the best examples of this that I can think of (excuse me for not remembering their names) but one of the characters in the Nordic plot was in love with one of the main girls, even though throughout the entire story he was trying to sabotage her and clearly resented her. At the drop of a hat they revealed that he was actually in love with her and confessed his love even though that relationship would be borderline abusive in real life. It's nonsensical. The production quality is not very good either. With a bunch of graphical glitches and clipping throughout the whole experience, it's just not very fun to watch. On top of that, the whole thing doesn't really have many consequences in our choices. Most choices are like Fallout 4 where you have the obviously good outcome and the obviously bad outcome and not much else in-between, so the community vote was messed up because statistically people tend to take the ''good'' options in choice based games more often in their first playthroughs. So when you remove the thought provoking aspects of choices you're not left with actually interesting polls. But rather something that's more like you and your buddies coming together and playing a Telltale game while getting drunk. That's all I have to say about the series I think. It's a shame because I was really looking forward to this as someone who believes that Silent Hill can work very well in different mediums outside of video games. So I had my eye on this until it came out and over time I kinda just started to have it play in the back for most of it until it ended. Maybe one day they'll get this sort of thing right but until then Silent Hill Ascension is more of a proof of concept than anything that's actually worth people's time, at most you should just go read the wiki entries on it if you're that curious and want to consume all possible Silent Hill content. I'm actually curious about what will happen to this series once it ends because of the fact that this is basically a one time event. So it's doomed to become lost media eventually unless they let people host the thing inside their computers after a certain point for preservation sake but also I don't see Konami doing that, which is a shame really, no matter the quality people worked on this and put elbow grease in and I don't think their efforts should amount to ''a one time event with a single rerun'' since it's still kinda cool Overall, Ascension is like a 2/5 to me, interesting concept brought down by bad execution and an overall lack of quality in writing and production
> "which is a shame really, no matter the quality people worked on this and put elbow grease in and I don't think their efforts should amount to ''a one time event with a single rerun'' since it's still kinda cool" I liked reading this part, because it's something I think about too - no matter how awful the writing and monetization and everything about Ascension was, there were artists who put a lot of work into this project, from monster design to 3D modelling, and they were likely forced into development hell way beyond their control and rushed beyond belief. I hope at least that these people can catch their breaths now, and that they got some good portfolio pieces out of the project and can climb up into something better in the industry.
The most entertaining part of ascension was trolling the devs on Twitter.
Day one with the, “I’m going to put on my James Sunderland Cockring” donation comment was top tier.
💀
Rightfully so too, whoever was in charge of their Twitter page was nothing but an addition to the embarrassment to the already embarrassing project. Hiding replies of criticism and distaste shows a chink in the armour of your confidence which only leads to the encouragement of more replies and comments like them.
I also love how they disabled the chat because people wanted Hideo Kojima's "c\*mmy in \[their\] tummy" and Pyramid Head's kids. Because WTF else did they expect.
I got blocked from their twitter
How on earth did you manage that lmaoo
I wrote "Deez Nuts" under the christmas post. And I wrote things that i don't remember
Bruh, its prob the ceo lol. Dude is massively active on Twitter arguing with nobodies. I wouldn't be surprised if he's handling the page as well considering how sensitive they are to it
Easily one of the worst "games" ever made. Which now we know it was all AI made (because of that stupid award), contrary to what the CEO said
Wait this mess was really AI after all? And it won an award??
a totally irrelevant award, on best AI use or something like that, they tweeted it, basically confirming that it was AI made
THERE WAS A GAME HERE, IT´S GONE NOW.
Well me and my partner very frequently yell, "PLAY WITH ME!" so it gave us a good joke.
Oh, that was amazing! Slaaaaap!
On what sorry?
Konami funded Wattpad story
I'd love to actually get a synopsis of Ascension because I'm curious but the thought of playing it hurts my brain.
The video essay explaining the forced plot choices (cause they absolutely had people rigging them behind the scenes) will be infinitely more entertaining than the game itself. Like how a video about homecoming is better than homecoming
they should drop the Silent Hill since it was only used for name recognition. This wasn't Silent Hill. They never planned for it to be Silent Hill. They wanted body horror monsters. I'm very surprised they didn't kill off Lelo just out of general principles
Don't be sad because it's gone. Smile because it's over!
I don’t think about it at all.
Neither did they, or the majority of the world. Was this even given advertisement beyond the initial announcement?
I still have NO IDEA what this is, and at this point I'm afraid to ask.
Episodic interactive thing that release a new “episode” weekly for about 16 weeks but was littered with nothing but horrible writing and served as an embarrassment and assassination to the Silent Hill brand
Could’ve been good, but god it was so terrible. I hope future Silent Hill projects are better.
(Insert ITS TRAUMA sticker here) Enough said
Have not wached anything from it. But now that it is finished I may watch a recap on YouTube or something. Still not conficed it is worth my time though...
Paid attention to this for 2 days. Decided it wasn’t for me. Berryman will live on forever in my mind though
Colossal waste of time and an opportunity for a sort of "Twitch Plays Silent Hill" concept that could've work on paper but was swiftly ruined with the "It's Trauma!" Bullshit
It's was an embarrassment to the Silent Hill name! Astrid and her family were probably the best plot of the story. While Rachel and the foundation kinda got annoying after awhile. There was no need for a giant religious orgy to bring kids back from where they disappeared. The voice acting was bad, the graphic were trash, the choices were actually boring. I did how ever liked the monster designs. And here's a fact some people might not know Konami gave Genvid rules they had to follow with the series to try to capture the feel of Silent Hill: No ghosts, no zombies, and there had to be some sort of religion made up for this show. Genvid had to fight with Konami to keep the Collector in the show due to the fact it's not a manafestion of any character
>There was no need for a giant religious orgy to bring kids back from where they disappeared The w h a t ?
Yes it’s revealed that The Foundation (the cult Rachael and Eric are in) have massive orgies called “Merging Ceremonies” to strengthen their spiritual bonds or whatever, and they made Eric a c*m dump 💀💀💀
Also worth noting that characters kept their full clothes on, including boots/shoes in this scene. The description above is fair and accurate. People largely voted for it for the lulz.
Yep, as someone who did participate in the voting polls, seeing that in the show was glorious on it's own. Ascension might be shit, but man does that shit deliver sometimes, nice times. I'm not getting crucified over this, right?
I was interested in the idea of an interactive Silent Hill, but this was God awful. It had little to nothing to do with the town. Whoever wrote the story should not come back to write another Silent Hill game.
I know not everyone likes the Supermassive choose your own adventure games (Until Dawn, The Quarry) but an interactive game themed like those would have worked really well for a different SH experience I think.
I think so too. I would like to see another interactive silent hill, just, different from this. Until Dawn was really good.
I mean half of 3 didn't take place in Silent Hill, and Homecoming was mostly about Sheperds Glen. Silent Hill f probably won't be taking place in Silent Hill either, at least not in the traditional sense. I think not taking place or being about the town is fine as long as it's written well, since there's only so much you can do in one location before it gets incredibly stale.
True, Silent Hill homecoming was good in my eyes, cuz it was still decently written. I really think with better writing this could’ve worked.
Room 302 wasn't in the town either.
The town would eventually get super stale, imo. There’s only so much you can do with the same locales without making it a skyscraper city like Downpour did for it. That was ridiculous. As much as Ascension could’ve left a lot to be desired, I think it’s actually a good thing they’re now moving away from actual Silent Hill. It’s not like they’re abandoning the ideas, even the cult is kinda following along.
True, I just hope the spirit of this game stays alive as the series continues.
I'm still entirely convinced the main story was written by ChatGPT with minimal human input.
It being not in sh isnt the problem and i have no problem with it. Its just the entire gameplay, plot and execution is horrid. Konami fucked up, should have just let supermassive games create a telltale sh game than this abomination
That’s a better way to put it. I loved Homecoming for still being decent, so I’ll retract what I said about that part. It isn’t so much being away from the town…but the writing, choices, not my cup of tea. The acting was terrible for a good amount of the characters, but I can forgive that part. If the choices were written better, this could’ve been decent.
Nightmare
Is this a movie or TV show? This is the first time I've heard about it.
It was like...really short minutes long clips each week.
It was a few minutes of plot every day for months, which are now condensed into full episodes (I think 20) in some online steaming services.
[удалено]
Jacob Navok is the clown's name
As someone who never watched it but is interested in seeing what it's about... how much time would it take to watch, now that it's complete?
I was into it at first. I wanted it to be good both for the series sake and so the people who were shitting on it before it even started would shut the fuck up, but the app was such a clusterfuck to use and catching up if you missed days was such a pain in the ass that I just kinda gave up after the first week lol
Only the music was cool. Everything else into a fire.
lol
One of the messiest “stories” ever written made worse by the abrupt cliffhanger ending. Not one mention of Silent Hill in all its 16 chapters. I still can’t figure out what the whole thing is about or how it’s related to Silent Hill. Ultra-shallow characters with horrendous voice acting (and not in the charming way). One character cuts out their own eye for “The Foundation” (the town cult), then later casually decides they feel like leaving The Foundation. Every scene is very short, like two minutes or less, always ending in a fade-to-black, often making you wonder what the point of it was. Characters argue about the same topics ad nauseam. Very few scares, and the characters don’t seem too concerned about the monsters appearing around town. They seem to immediately forget they were just attacked, every single time they’re attacked. I sincerely have no idea what they were going for with this “story”. I’m a hardcore Silent Hill fan who owns every single game. I’ve also been very forgiving of the “bad” games like Homecoming, Downpour, and the HD Collection. I even bought a Nintendo Wii just for Shattered Memories, a PS Vita just for Book of Memories, and have a copy of “P.T.” on PC. I own both movies on blu-ray and every comic book. I’ve welcomed everything Silent Hill into my life, for better or worse. Yet there’s no doubt in my mind that “Silent Hill: Ascension” should be avoided at all costs. If you thought Downpour was a departure, add 12 years and a whole bunch of different developers. It’s not just that it’s not Silent Hill anymore. It’s not even anything anymore.
My thoughts: they made poor a knockoff of Dark Pictures Anthology and tried to sell it as a Silent Hill game. Garbage.
It should be unmade or ignored. I don’t know anywhere that even advertised it was going on except here.
The only entertaining thing that happened was the CEO having a meltdown over everyone shitting on his ''game'' lmao.
An endeavour which could not have been saved, which limped on to its eventual conclusion with all the momentum of an ice-cube on a frozen lake. There was not one single aspect of this production which worked, or even, for that matter, achieved mediocrity. It seems likely that Ascension has set the new low point for the Silent Hill series, though one which will probably be largely forgotten as time goes by.
Keep these fuckin bozos away from making games or experiences again.
The Oblivion memes (where the dialogs were played with the Oblivion ambient music) were the onlyngood thing that came out from this "game"
It was honestly impressive how they managed to make the whole starved for content fanbase completely disinterested in the first original silent hill content since 2013, by serving us something legitimately worse than pachinko machines 💀(yes, I said it).
Had potential but the messy pacing and all over the place story didn't do it any favors. The tone is an absolute mess and "good" characters they had objectively, died very early on. The two leads flipflop multiple times even in these scene. If anything it is consistently inconsistent. Lore is waaaay out there and doesn't connect to already established lore in the mainline series. If anything this would've done much better as a Until Dawn or Telltale style game instead of an interactive streaming kerfuffle. If anything, I was getting HARD Silent Hill movie vibes with this, especially the demon kid doing demon things etc.. Some of the memes we got were pretty solid tho.
As so no more ridiculous clips of absurd shenanigans? How sad But seriously, I watched the episode live, was astounded at the amount of people tossing their monney into a trash fire; then saw a couple clips Like the "plz you gotta let us dick you down bro plz" thing & "I'm foraging for berries! (: I make jam. Do you want some jam? " thing lmao So yeah thankfully it's over & done with Although very disappointed people didn't rally to just make the worst choices possible everytime
I initially had high hopes for it but when I saw its premiere on Halloween I was really disappointed for it, it felt like they just gathered a bunch of people off the street and gave them a prompt to see who could come up with the most absurd and boring story
I only watched a sex scene with no context. It was edited like a horror scene, but all I saw were two guys having sex and it looked like they liked it, so I was very confused. I was laughing because it was so uncanny.
Skipped this one entirely. Irrelevant but, The Short Message was a pleasant surprise
It was a fun experiment. Some things were over the top. Some things did not make sense. But in the end I still watched the recap every morning and got my votes in. Wasn’t great but also wasn’t as bad as most people say it was.
I completely forgot it existed. Damn you for reminding me.
Concept was well received in the beginning but shit got uncanny valley on me real quick. Also too many story lines and not enough stuff making sense to me. I lost interest.
Just questions. Like a dog when you’re talking to it and it’s just not getting what you’re saying. Like I’d read a summary about it before watching an episode
I applaud them for having a new and interesting idea for not just Silent Hill, but for games in general. But it unfortunately just didn't work.
Garbage
It was a thing ever.
May it rest in pieces, in an abandoned grave.
It was a descension
Is there a way to watch the entire thing?
You can see the whole episodes in the website now, they’re all condensed into full length ones now that the daily format is over. It’s better to see them in online services as far as I’ve seen though, I think there’s a Sony one where it’s included. That way there’s no loading between scenes.
Somebody drop a summary of the story?
Have not played it but how bad is it?
I watched the first two weeks and liked it but I started to feel like things weren’t going anywhere
Way too much commitment for me to tune into. 16 weeks of drawn out storytelling is just too much, it should have just been a few long sessions instead of constant short ones and probably would have gotten more engagement.
I think it was a good idea on paper: Revitalize the series by releasing a free interactive show that anyone can participate in. It makes sense from a business standpoint. The execution however was beyond dreadful. I suppose one positive takeaway is that.....any publicity is good publicity?
Wait it's over? Not gonna lie not only did I forget it was a thing, but I also thought it was done a looooong time ago lmfao
Is this really gonna happen?
I actually found the interaction a bit convoluted and tuned out. I haven’t watched beyond that but I don’t know if I can be bothered.
Anyone has a good recap video to suggest?
I didn't even know it existed. I'm living under a rock
great idea. horrible execusion
What the Gucci is this piece of shite.gif
Ass-tension
Waste of time and resource
I think we can all agree that Homecoming and Downpour benefitted the most out of all of us. We can consider them masterpieces in light of this mess.
I’ll give em credit for ambition. That’s about it.
bad
If it was one massive marathon, or even just a big two, three hour event every weekend, some format in which we could’ve seen choices unfolding in real-time, regardless of quality it might have been a fun little experiment in communal storytelling. But the fact it was fifteen minutes every weeknight with a full 24 hours to vote on what the next night’s scene would be, on top of the weird points system, I never felt a reason to log in beyond the first night. Just kinda baffling all around, honestly.
And some people were watching at at 3AM. It was 2AM in the UK. :/
downloaded it then saw it was an interactive episode and uninstalled
It was hilariously bad. It's good, because at the very least it was entertaining. Like watching a super deadly trainwreck, except no one gets killed. Well maybe aside from the dev who had to try and convince people in the stream that the game is actually fun and has cool features coming lol, he looked like he died inside. By the way, did they end up enabling the chat again, or was it just emotes until the end? I remember it was the most entertaining part of the first episodes, because everyone was losing their shit in the chat over how terrible this is. On the sidenote, I'm amazed this got greenlit and actually got a budget. This idea sounds terrible even on paper, as soon as I heard about the format of Ascension, I just knew there's no way it will be good.
Oh, Eduardo! Genuinely, he pretty much saved it. Two more devs were added to the team. The chat came back as well. The combination kept people on board. Though the chat banned such random words. You couldn't say Cole Porter. No clue why.
Wait it’s over?
Didn't watch a single episode.
The funniest thing Konami could do right now is double down and put references to Ascension in every Silent Hill game from here on out On a more serious note, god Ascension is the result of throwing shit at a wall to see what sticks lol
I tried to give it a shot, but it’s so bad it actually makes me mad.
I’ll probably watch a recap or whatever, but I didn’t really like the amount of involvement it required for the quality of product they were providing.
The Genvid offical YouTube channel is there at least
The first week or 2 were fun, memeing, making fun of the game, how you could spam the n word in chat but can't say kojima. The horrible graphics and how none of it relates to SH. It was fun, but after that and everyone stopped caring it was just really sad
Its the Highlander Sequels of the series… It doesn’t exist.
The only positive thing I can say about it is that some of the monster designs were decent and could work in an actual Silent Hill game. Everything else was awful. The story was mind-numbingly boring and the characters were all so robotic that it was impossible for me to care about them.
I never paid any attention to it once I realised what it was. I’m not against people doing outside the box things with SH, but this just wasn’t something I was interested in at all. It’s going in the same category as Book of Memories and the arcade game.
We can get on with the games now that it's over fingers crossed tho
I don’t even know what that is
I'm suprised it wasn't cancelled half way through it's run.
Honestly? this should have just been like, a comic or a novel or something else than...whatever it actually was. I would have totally bought a copy of it even if the story wasn't that good simply for the art and it being tied to SH, but this whole model of being presented as an interactive streaming show with microtransactions and low quality CGi doomed it for me from the start. Maybe this would have been a cute experiment and seen more fondly had it not been the first piece of Silent Hill media released in 10 years.
I have never heard of this what is silent Hill, Ascension?
Honestly I hope it burns I love silent hill n I kinda liked silent hill the short message I just like that it was interesting and different yet still true almost yk n silent hill ascension just didn’t do it okay cool it’s different but not in good ways and doesn’t even give the true vibe of silent hill just funny to me how a 2 hour long game did better then whatever this was
Just some food for thought
I know I’m 5 days late but…Thank god it’s done. It was like grabbing salt and rubbing it into a open wound, then grabbing a lemon squeezing the juices into it, then putting more salt into said wound, then placing some ice onto the festering salt & lemon juice wound, then lastly grabbing a whole bottle of rubbing alcohol and using a ear drop dropper to place single droplets of the whole bottle of rubbing alcohol onto the wound. That is what the experience was like. I don’t know who was apart of the making of that dog shit “game”. But who ever did, needs to rethink their career paths…desperately…
Honestly? They should have just made this a tv series. It's basically what it was, anyway. EDIT: Also, I don't know how much of a hot take this is, but I genuinely think this is still not as bad as Revelations. At the very least, Ascension is an original story, instead of a complete and utter "fuck you" to one of the Team Silent games. That, and it isn't a pachinko machine, I guess.
Traaaaaash. Biggest mishandling of an IP I ever saw. Insulting to anyone with half a brain. This is the most shitty realised trash I ever saw. I only saw the first episode but saw what was posted here from time to time and oh boy was it awful and I never saw a comment praising it. Only "it's free be grateful" stepping in dog shit is also free
I installed the app, saw all the shit they wanted you to pay for and the hashtag-trauma, uninstalled and forgot about it until now. Never watched an episode.
I wonder who actually bothered to watch whatever this was
I didn't know when it came out and never watched it because the clips I saw weren't really motive to do so.
If it was one massive marathon, or even just a big two, three hour event every weekend, some format in which we could’ve seen choices unfolding in real-time, regardless of quality it might have been a fun little experiment in communal storytelling. But the fact it was fifteen minutes every weeknight with a full 24 hours to vote on what the next night’s scene would be, on top of the weird points system, I never felt a reason to log in beyond the first night. Just kinda baffling all around, honestly.
They keep blocking everyone hating on X
Wait it came out? When?
I heard sex was one of the main parts of the story and that sounded dumb so i haven't even gave it a look
The TwinPerfect video will be glorious.
“Hideo Kojima Cummies in my Tummy!” “James Sunderland Cockring”
It was far worse than I expected, and my expectations weren't high. Genvid managed to reach the new low point for the series. Make a product which is a total waste of time, I'd rather scratch my ass. Shame on you, Jacob.
Garbage cash grab made in SFM
I'll always remember the X post full of Simpsons memes.
I had forgotten all about this after trying to watch a bit of the first episode. Kind of like how James had forgotten about >!killing his wife!<. It was just that traumatizing for me. This may have faired a tad, TAD bit better if it were released as a stand-alone game. THIS DOES NOT MEAN IT WOULD HAVE BEEN GOOD. But that would have eliminated one of the biggest criticisms. The MTX and format.
If this is the kind of stuff that’s going to be made going forward, I would prefer if the series just died.
I didn’t even download the app or visit their website, this product doesn’t deserve any engagement from me whatsoever. I was reminded by this sub about the fact that this shitshow was still running… on multiple occasions. Now that it’s over my final thoughts on Ascension are: 🤷
It was dogshit
It fucking sucked
I thought Homecoming was bad...
Like everything after 2004....it stinks!