Silent Hill: Ascension Preview – Ascension Takes Place Before The Originals But Isn’t Quite A Prequel

Launch? Launch?) We had the chance to talk with Genvid, the creator of Silent Hill Ascension about the game tonight (TV show?) Crowd-directed narrative?) Crowd-directed narrative?

Ascension is not a typical video game. There is an interactive element, but you won’t be holding a controller in your hand pushing characters to make decisions in the traditional sense. Viewers will instead download the Silent Hill Ascension application on their mobile device or PC. (There is also a PlayStation version, but it’s only available for watching episodes without participating.) They will then watch a brief sequence that contains choices. The participants will vote and the results will determine what will happen in a full episode of approximately 45 minutes. The shorter opening sequence showed us two women performing an oath that awakened a monster. Viewer interaction can cause characters to die, be replaced by others or suffer a loss of limbs that could affect their character for the remainder of the series.

In the Silent Hill app, the players can also solve puzzles inspired by Silent Hill to earn Influence Points (IP), which they then apply towards the choices they want to pursue. You can’t buy IP. It will instead be monetized by chat options which can be used in live-streamed episode, along with avatar customization. Your avatar may then appear on the show, but as a secondary character. This looks like an even more public Telltale-style approach to storytelling games. It makes sense, since a majority of the team was formerly from Telltale.

Silent Hill’s fans are probably wondering where Ascension fits into the greater lore. “We are before a lot of the events that happen on purpose,” Ganvid’s Jacob Navok tells me. “At the start of Ascension, the Foundation cult here in Pennsylvania is very active. Typically, in a Silent Hill game, you’re there after the cult has already gone to s***. When you enter those rooms, there is blood and notes on the wall and it’s up to you to deduce what happened. But you saw that the cult is very active, that room is clean… right up until the monster comes.”

The real-world timeline of the Silent Hill games has always been vague with suspicions that the first two games take place in the 70s and 80s and Navok is similarly vague about Ascension saying, “We’re not specifying. We’re keeping that mysterious.” But he did confirm that Ascension’s story takes place over many months and that it isn’t false to call it a subtle prequel. It’s an original story in the Silent Hill universe that won’t necessarily tie into what comes next, especially since viewers will be deciding the forward progress of the narrative.

There are thousands  of potential endings for the game, and much of its introductory story moments have already been pre-produced, the team is not creating every possible scenario. “We’re running about four weeks ahead, which means like we’ve got through week four right now,” Navok says. “And then, as we don’t have to animate certain things, we will just not do them. So, it is being built as the series is taking place to reduce some of that burden on purpose.”

Silent Hill Ascension has a unique style that I find impressive, though I admit to being concerned about its subject. Silent Hill can be a very personal story about characters who live within their own hell. It has always revolved around people struggling with inner demons who take on physical forms and their difficulty in recognizing them. They’re surprisingly quiet games, and I don’t know that watching characters as a chat scrolls by with emojis bought by excited viewers rooting for their favorite characters to live or die lines up with Silent Hill’s idealogy. Silent Hill does not take place at midnight. It’s about watching James Sunderland as he contemplates stepping into a grave with his name on it in order to continue following breadcrumbs left by his dead wife, whom he may or may not have killed.

But I still am curious if this game can find an audience. It could be the template for an entirely new kind of narrative-based video game.

“The important thing for me is that the audience is going to create a cannon,” Navok says. “In a Telltale game, every ending is equally valid because you’re the player. It’s different here. This is a TV series. This thing will lock in when it’s chosen.”

Silent Hill AscensionToday, sion can be purchased.