Silent Hill is one of my favourite video game franchises, so the announcement of several new projects last year was music to my ears. Silent Hill: Ascension was the first of these to materialise and at first sounded intriguing. This is a blend of show and game, though more truthfully it is a show that allows somewhat limited interaction from viewers to shape the direction the story heads in via constant voting on story decisions characters can make. Think Until Dawn, but rather than controlling things yourself, it is a much more hands-off experience.
I spoke plenty about Ascension back in November when it first launched. After seemingly decades and decades (but in actuality around six months including a break for Christmas), it has all came to an end. To begin with there were seven shows a week, each day bringing with it three episodes, typically between a minute and three minutes in length. This was swiftly changed to be five times a week instead. Due to the small length of the episodes, as well as two separate storylines going on, it was easy to forget what was happening. There was a battle pass released for this, but it was pointless, even not purchasing it you are constantly unlocking pointless junk such as stickers and banners for use within the profile page and chat screen.
The show is split between two different locations. In a small rural town in Finland, the death of a cruel matriarch of a locally despised family sets off a chain of events that sees the real world being invaded by the 'Otherworld', a nightmare realm where monsters roam. Astrid and her family become the focal point for this invasion, with events escalating when her young son Orson goes missing. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet in a small town in Pennsylvania, the Otherworld is also bleeding into reality, here, it is believed to be the result of a failed ritual performed by a cult who worship the denizens of that realm. Events too escalate with the disappearance of a child, in this case, Faith, the young daughter of Rachel, a high ranking cult member.
This show seemed to go on eternally, and to my credit I didn't miss a single episode. Apparently you could watch the show live (very early morning in the UK), and could influence decisions live, yet the one time I stayed up late to try this, I was unable to work out how to actually join it. I voted on all decisions, but these often felt like choices made wouldn't really affect things much. The show is done using computer imagery, with stiff stilted animations that never looked spectacular. The one area the show does get right is the monster designs, the monsters always looked great thankfully, with both storylines featuring their own key antagonist monster.
For a long time I thought that the story was being performed by A.I, due to the clunky dialogue and frequent wooden acting. It turns out there were actual voice actors used, and while some of these were good, they couldn't save what was a meandering and unexciting story. Probably due to the short episode lengths, but this seemed to drag on and on painfully slowly. There were some neat elements to the story, and I did like the idea of showing a Silent Hill type story from when the horror begins, rather than characters arriving in an already doomed location. The story was all so unsatisfying, I read a comment on Reddit stating that the America storyline should have been dumped, to focus on the more engaging Finland based one, and I have to agree. The stories are almost carbon copies of each other in some respects (such as the missing children), but the Finland one in general was more interesting. There are some fun moments, such as when characters from the separate stories discover each other while in the Otherworld, but the long winded story often failed to maintain any sort of momentum.
Even as a huge fan of Silent Hill, I cannot recommend this. It felt like a bit of a disaster from the beginning, and it seemed to suffer a long, long death, when it might have been more compassionate to pull the plug as soon as it was obvious how terrible this all mostly was. The show is finished now, and it is free to watch, so if you have a spare ten or so hours spare, and the desire to watch about a million short episodes then knock yourself out. There are far better ways to spend your time however, so Silent Hill: Ascension isn't something I would recommend, decent enough soundtrack though.
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