Summary
- Silent Hill Ascension turned out to be a bad game, with a brutal in-game economy that undermines the value of player votes.
- The game's graphics and animations are outdated, lacking the level of detail and realism expected in 2023.
- The storytelling and character reactions in Silent Hill Ascension are lackluster, with poorly executed plot points and unconvincing emotional responses.
When Ascension was first announced, I 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:was kind of worried about it. Then its developer, Genvid, revealed a few more details and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:I was still worried about it. But you know what? I’m not worried anymore. Because I’ve spent some time with Silent Hill Ascension and it’s almos🌌t impressive with how bad it turned out to be. It’s magic. It’s art. It took real work to develop a brutal in-game economy that allows people to weigh their votes heavier than others - and then make it so those votes don’t even count in real-time.
If there were an Olympics of bad games, it might not take the gold this year (Gollum is hard to beat!) but definitely silver or bronze. Lord✨ almigh🐲ty! What an experience!
Now, look. I’ve worked on projects in multiple mediums, both good and bad. Very few people want to make a bad game or a movie or a TV show. Sure, there’s people who confuse shoddiness with ‘it’s so bad, it’s good’, but projects can turn out wrong for a number of reasons. Low budgets. Weird deadlines. Corporate interference. Turnover. Developer hubris. But when people make a creative project, they usually want it to be a good experience. I wantᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ to be fair about this before I get ve💯ry unfair about this. I do truly believe that there is a lot of love and passion in that studio.
But there’s a limit, guys! I don’t even know where to start on this. Do you know how bad your show/game (gameshow?) has to be for fans to start saying ‘we were too mean to that Silent Hill Pachinko game’. The folks at Bloober remaking Silent Hill 2 are probably doing backflips right now because, for a lot of fans, that was the one they were worried about. At this point,✨ Bloober could add a scene of James taking a giant dump on the gro🐬und and it would still get a pass because of how awful Ascension is.
Yes, Silent Hill fans can be somewhat demanding. For example, look at me! Here I am demanding things. They have high expectations of the series and many of them have strong boundaries on what they think does and does not make a good Silent Hill game. But if you’re looking for what makes a good Silent Hill game, just p🐭lay🧸 Alan Wake 2.
Sure, Alan Wake 2 might not be a real Silent Hill game, but neither is Silent Hill Ascension. Yes, that’s an insult. But it’s also their marketing strategy! Genvid has said time and again that Ascension isn’t a game, it’s an interactive streaming series with community interaction. And then, when fans began spamming the chat with ‘Hideo Kojima cummy in my tummy&rsquo♋;, that community interaction part stopped. On the bright side, when fans voted for a choice♊ recently, the show played an entirely different choice instead. Genvid promised they’d put the correct choice in the replay videos - but come on, man. Why are we even here?
And time out, there’s a season pass for a streaming show? How did anyone think this was a good idea? I’m actually asking. I love in the deepest part of my heart that Genvis expects people to pay $20 so they can get a sticker that says IT’S TRAUMA! - I get that it’s an inside joke for the community, but it also represents how Genvid truly just doesn’t know what they’re doing with this series. It’s all surface-level. With ཧall due respect, it’s like the team read half a Wikipedia article on the Silent Hill series, browsed some monster drawings, and went, “I think we got a handle on this thing.”
Don’t get me wrong - I’m✤ not offended by the ITﷺ’S TRAUMA! sticker. It’s more just a sign that Genvid was so insecure in their own product that they had to do the old Conan O’Brien bit, ? - they might as well put on some new sneakers and run from fan to fan going, ‘No, this is a real Silent Hill experience. Really. Here’s a sticker. Look, we made a wet monster! Do you like us? Will you pay us?’
And it doesn’t stop there, because why would it? Silent Hill Ascension works so hard to trace over moments from other Silent Hill games that it becomes an immediate parody of itself. In the first hour of the - I dunno, thing - we get a dude with a verbally abusive, terminally ill wife. Uh oh! Guess what happens?! She dies! Wꦡhat a mystery! That’s literally the main plot point of Silent Hill 2. It’s not even a tribute. It’s just, ‘Well… this worked before’. Whether or not the dude killed her is probably up to the fans, or something. But still. This is pure James Sunderland vibes.
Also, it’s supposed to be a streaming show, but it runs on an engine that looks almost as good as Half-Life 2 did in 2004. Maybe that’s fine. Silent Hill has never been a series that needed stunning graphics to create a sense of dread and fear. But this is 2023, folks. Maybe characters’ voices could even vaguely match the way mouths move? Maybe character animations don’t have to be all broad arm sweeps. It’s like watching a pupp💝et show performed by people who sound like they’re doing an impression of Norwegian Siri.
Everything also happens so fast. Think back to the first Silent Hill. Even in that opening scene, it takes a few moments to reach something confusing and horrifying. And then it immediately pulls back from that, only to deliver a huge jump scare moments later. There’s tension built. Silent Hill games are at their best when they take their time. Look at P.T.. The game is a looping hallway, but it’s terrifying because you don’t know what’s going to happen. Meanwhile, Silent Hill Ascension gives you a look at its baddies ꩲin the very first moments.
And this doesn’t even address the fact that every character is very calm when they suddenly find themselves in a rusty blood world. Norwegian Robot Grandpa finds himself in an entirely different world, gets chased by an armless red bag of flesh, and then gets home pretty calm. Also, his wife just died. Still calm. Dude is cool as a cucumber, just as any normal human being would be after what just happe📖ned.
Sure, this could be planting seeds for a huge revelation. But, in the moment, it just strikes me that nobody in this universe has any deep reaction to anything. When a woman’s friend☂ dies in a cult ritual (again, this all happens within five minutes), the woman seems more upset that people are going to be mad at her than she is that a giant monster shoved a plant tentacle down her buddy&r🥀squo;s throat. I’d be scared of being blamed too, but - I dunno - monsters are scary?
There is a cult in the game that treats all this as normal, which also makes no sense. Genvid has promised that this is a “prequel” to the series, whatever that means, so this is supposed to be the rise of the religion. The cult in Ascension is passing out flyers and desperately trying to get new members to join, while also doing blood magic that summons forth demons from Hell. That isn’t a contradiction, but it is very strange. And they love quoting prophecies that are clearly written to just add super spookiness to whatever happens in the game. And also maybe we can put away ‘it’s a prophecy’ as a storytelling 🐻device now.
Genvid’s charisma king Jacob Navok has been taking to livestreams and social media to explain to every single person why they just don’t get his brilliant free interactive TV show that you have to pay for and can’t really interact with. Each defense appears angrier and angrier at fans. There are entire thousand-word screeds 🐷breaking down how each different portion of the economy works and why fans are misunderstanding it. Always a great sign when you have to write a series of instruction manuals on how to click ‘Don’t Open The Door’ on a menu. The more of them I read, the less sense the business model makes sense. Somehow Genvid wants to annoy fans and lose as much money as possible. Then again, it doesn’t look like a lot of funding went to the production of the series itself. It’s all so shoddy.
As a side note, I have seen Jacob Navok get some antisemitic abuse. We don’t need that. At all. Get lost 💫with it. Racism and bigot𝓡ry isn’t going to get Team Silent back together for one more jam session. Okay? Silent Hill Ascension can fall off its own two feet. Nobody should be attacking Navok because of his family history or religious beliefs. It’s stupid and it isn’t productive. If anything, those attacks make it seem like legitimate complaints are coming from a place of bad faith.
We should not criticize someꦆone because of who they are. We should criticize someone because they made a godawful experiment that is the opposite of entertainment. And, really, that’s what Silent Hill Ascension is. It’s a semi-free semi-game experience, where puzzles are locked behind paywalls. It’s an interactive show, except sometimes thosꦛe interactions don’t actually play out on screen. And other times, those choices have extraordinarily minor different results. It’s a Silent Hill game that doesn’t feel interested in anything closely related to Silent Hill other than its cult. Which would be interesting if 75 percent of horror films weren’t also about evil cults.
Nobody wants to make a bad product. But sometimes people - and the companies they run - have competing goals. Making money off Silent Hill Ascension was always going to be at cross purpos🍒es with making it an enjoyable free experience. And the desire to keep people engaged with daily content has caused the story to be chopped up into barely coherent segments. Catching up isn’t fun either, because the streaming app does not care about where you left off. It just assumes you want to watch the whole week’s events so far.
Sometimes when I criticize a game, I remember that not everything is for me. I was probably never going to like Gollum anyway because I’m not a big Lord of the Rings fan. But I love Silent Hill. This is my hole. It was made for me. I𝔉 didn’t want to see the first Silent Hill in ten years crash to the ground and explode. I wanted to be wrong. I wanted Silent Hill Ascensi𓆏on to make me eat my words as I got sucked into a beautiful world of sorrow. That’s not what happened. I’ve given it my best. For a week or two more, I’ll see if this Titanic can un-hit the iceberg it crashed into on Halloween. But unfortunately, there’s no way in this world you’re going to get me to pay $20 so my vote actually matters in a barely-interactive streaming show that occasionally runs correctly on mobile.
