Silent Hill: Ascension (2023-24) - Horror Video Game/Show Review

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.

SCORE:

Silent Hill: Ascension (2023) - Horror Video Game/ Show - First Impressions

I would class the survival horror video game series Silent Hill as one of my all time favourites, I would even go as far as to say I am a pretty hardcore fan of the games. Ever since owning a phone I have had artwork from Silent Hill 4: The Room as my background image, I was one of the few who thought Silent Hill: Downpour was a good entry in the series, I have most of the graphic novels, and I even managed to have a go on the hard to find Silent Hill arcade machine once. I was quite happy when earlier this year they announced a bunch of new titles, the first to appear since Downpour back in 2012. Among these was a remake the most beloved entry, Silent Hill 2 by the team behind the good looking but dull The Medium, a mysterious title called Silent Hill: Townfall, and Silent Hill f, which appears to be set in 1960's Japan. In addition, a new film was announced, Return to Silent Hill, and the weird Silent Hill: Ascension.

Silent Hill: Ascension is described as a 'digital interactive streaming series', and was (thankfully) the one I was least looking forward to. nearly two weeks ago it went live, with each day three short scenes playing out at the same time each day. Watching live, viewers are able to make key decisions that shape how the story proceeds. In the UK, that time is 02:00, so it is going to be a rare day when I am up and about then. There was actually one day when the stars aligned and I happened to be awake, however the app is so confusing to navigate that I couldn't actually work out how to join the live video and ended up missing out due to the narrow window with which you can apparently join. Thankfully, each day you can 'catch up', playing the latest three episodes. Due to this going on for around four months straight, I wasn't going to wait until then to write about it, though, as I intend to watch every episode, a review will pop up then. So, having watched a week and a half (at the time of typing), is it any good?
The short answer is 'no'. In fact, it is kind of awful, featuring bland lifeless characters, and a drawn out story that is light on entertainment. Even more damning is its reliance on microtransactions for those wishing to make a genuine contribution to altering the path of the story.

It starts off terribly, with a video that serves as an advert, trying to get people to buy the ridiculously expensive battle pass, that comes in at a cool £20. As it isn't a game, all this gets you is some stickers to put in the chat window, and a bunch of XP. On the subject of the chat window, this was meant to be a place fans could discuss the story, but soon predictably became a cesspit of dick jokes. Currently you are only able to use stickers in this chat window, and I assume that is how it will stay. On the plus side, Ascension is a free download, with myself watching it via a app on the Apple store on my phone. The U.I is bad, frequently the touch controls to navigate the app don't work on first try, and sometimes when you've levelled up enough to get a reward (typically a cosmetic for your avatar you can make), you click onto the reward screen and its showing blank. Talking of avatars, you can apparently buy tickets to get a chance to feature your avatar and name as a character in the show, something which is distracting as most people's names are goofy, so stick out when they show up in such a dark show (my username on there is of course RottingZombie).

The star of Ascension is the show itself, aside from the first night which had around a twenty five minute run time, each of the three scenes each night clocks in anywhere between one to four minutes, making it something easy to stay on top of each day. The story takes place in two different unrelated locations, both of which are having the hellscape of Silent Hill bleeding in to them.Somewhere in remote Finland (I believe), Karl becomes the main suspect when his miserable bedridden wife dies mysteriously, no one believing him with his wild tales of having seen a monstrous figure in the room with her before she passed. Karl has a troubled relationship with his daughter, Astrid, someone who soon too keeps finding herself pulled into a twisted version of reality, which in turn affects her own relationship with her young son, Orson.
Elsewhere, on the other side of the world, a member of a cult called 'The Foundation' begins to see monsters emerging into the world. While her cult worship these beings, it is alarming to them all that they are appearing in the real world. After her friend, a new initiate, is killed during a ritual, the initiate's brother becomes determined to find out the truth.
Due to the bitesize nature, I don't really mind what is going on too much. It is all computer generated, and mostly it is fine, if nothing exciting. Where it does shine is its monsters, these have yet to appear anything other than great looking. The voice acting and script is drab and dreary, I think it may even be A.I generated, certainly sounds that way. The story hasn't gripped me in the slightest, but I will stick around for it all. XP gained by watching episodes and playing dull minigames can be used to contribute towards decisions that will affect the path of the story, with the creators saying even them themselves don't know where things will go. Being a 'free' user, I could never use enough XP to influence things, but I still do that part just for something to do.

As it currently stands, Silent Hill: Ascension is not a great experience, personally, not having put any money into this (nor intending to), its fine, but alarm bells are ringing already at this early stage due to how lifeless it all feels. I will leave with the most popular meme from the app to sum up my thoughts on how this is at the moment..."It's Trauma!".

Cube Escape Collection (2020) - Horror Video Game Review (iPhone)

(NOTE: this review was started way back in February, due to the way the games in this collection weave in and out of external games it has taken me this long to finally finish playing! As such, my prologue refers to events that all occured at years start).
To describe The Rotting Zombie HQ as 'battle damaged' this week would be quite accurate. Thanks to a blocked sink and accidentally leaving the tap on, the bathroom flooded through the ceiling into the front room so have spent days trying to dry downstairs, a pungent smell of wet dog fills the whole house now. My house roof also appears to be leaking as water is dripping out of my extraction fan. Then, the icing on the cake was someone reversing into my parked car and busting up the bumper. Hard times indeed. Due to all that, and with my downstairs being inaccessible, I have been wallowing in bed playing iPhone games, one of which was Cube Escape Collection.

Cube Escape Collection is made up of nine different escape room games that all take place within the same shared 'Rusty Lake' universe. The games were originally Flash games, but with that format being made obsolete they were saved by being ported. The iPhone is stuffed to bursting with simple escape room games, but with a nice artstyle and tinged with horror this one caught my interest. The collection is free to pay, though you can opt to pay around £2.50 to remove ads that would play should you select the hint option. I paid for this as having spent over an hour playing the first game here and enjoying it I felt I would show my support to the developer.

So, the games are said to all be linked and are varied a bit in what you do. It begins with the fantastic Cube Escape: Seasons. This takes place in a room with a window but no door. Initially you are in the sixties, but by solving puzzles you eventually get access to a black cube that allows you to travel through time to one of three different time periods, two in the seventies, and the final one in the early eighties. The slight story that plays out reveals that a woman may have been murdered in the room. There are some cool mechanics that play with the time element, such as loosening a pipe in the past so that it drips water, then in a later time period fungus has grown under the leak. This follows the format that all the escape room games here did. You have a 2D image of a wall, you can click a button at the side to change your perspective, in total the four different walls as well as the ceiling can be viewed. Maybe it was due to me not being familiar with these types of games, maybe because it is essentially four escape rooms in one, but this took me well over an hour to complete.