• Light/Dark

SILENT HILL: Ascension | The Essentials

Anya7890

Anya7890

Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,756
In between apocalyptic dystopian hellscapes.
Hassansan said:
I don't know much about the SH franchise or this game, but this thread is wild!j
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
All you need to know about silent hill is that it's final circle of fandom hell. You think your favorite franchise is suffering? Whatever fuck Konami does with silent hill will always top it! Kind of ironic & poetic given the series nature of being a literal human made hell.
 
petetnt

petetnt

Member
Oct 28, 2017
1,264
Did Karl forget his accent in the newest episode when talking to the detective?

I've been wondering if these are even voice acted instead of AI generated, the quality seems to be all over the place
 
Arukado

Arukado

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,665
With the end of the daily saving time in the us, this thing starts now at 2 am UTC, so no more QTEs for me.
 
AleeN634

AleeN634

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 27, 2017
363
Yeah missed the start but at least part of the endure sequences had a gun to mix it up.
 
petetnt

petetnt

Member
Oct 28, 2017
1,264
"I gotta hit the head" lmao

Was that second bar an igloo of some sort? Interestingly where's also a half a second cut in the 3rd video where the decision based video cuts to the generic video, I wonder if the videos are manually edited together every day?
 
Arukado

Arukado

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,665
petetnt said:
"I gotta hit the head" lmao

Was that second bar an igloo of some sort? Interestingly where's also a half a second cut in the 3rd video where the decision based video cuts to the generic video, I wonder if the videos are manually edited together every day?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Presumably they record the live episodes and post them later. Last thursday they fixed one of the episodes before posting it (the live version of said episode did not match the winning choice for some reason).
 
AleeN634

AleeN634

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 27, 2017
363
I just noticed, isn't the laundry the same one they use in Arcade Paradise (maybe it's a preset asset)?
 
Gouf

Gouf

Member
May 17, 2018
1,070
Hope the damnation fiends pull through in the final stretch so we can get Toby to attack the foundation lol.
 
petetnt

petetnt

Member
Oct 28, 2017
1,264
"I want Krista to do it"

"What are you crazy"

"..."

"Okay. Fine" *leaves*

I'm a Silent Hill: Ascension super fan and I am still having a hard time to stay invested in this
 
Patitoloco

Patitoloco

Member
Oct 27, 2017
25,072
I haven't seen a single thing about this, but this thread is hilarious.

Is there a recap or something about this? Maybe not the actual story but how damn terrible this seems to be.
 
Arukado

Arukado

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,665
petetnt said:
"I want Krista to do it"

"What are you crazy"

"..."

"Okay. Fine" *leaves*

I'm a Silent Hill: Ascension super fan and I am still having a hard time to stay invested in this
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The characters are as invested in the story as we are. Just imagine what Rachel went through when she saw the shadowy figures Anwyll and Owl_waxer.
 
petetnt

petetnt

Member
Oct 28, 2017
1,264
I think Sterling pretty much covers all the main points well in the video. It's bad, but it's also very boring.

However, I don't think that this "tv show with microtransactions" are as new of an concept as GenVid thinks. Back in the early 2000s or late 90s, I vividly remember linear tv shows where you could vote with SMS messages on what happens next week and this might have even predated Big Brother here in Finland.

Hell, even SMS TV games made by (now Ubisoft) Red Lynx of the Trials-fame that were super popular here in the early 2000s were more game than Silent Hill: Ascension. https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS-TV-peli
 
Arukado

Arukado

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,665
I received an email from Sony saying that this will be available on Sony Pictures Core starting tomorrow.
 
TheJollyCorner

TheJollyCorner

AVALANCHE
The Fallen
Nov 7, 2017
9,902
Arukado said:
I received an email from Sony saying that this will be available on Sony Pictures Core starting tomorrow.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

More specifically:

Enjoy SILENT HILL: Ascension**** from November 8​
Watch the mind-bending new interactive series SILENT HILL: Ascension on SONY PICTURES CORE.

Enjoy a weekly compilation of audience-influenced storylines packaged into TV episodes.

PlayStation Plus Premium members get exclusive access to weekly episodes every Wednesday – 24-hours before they debut on other platforms – and can also catch the first one early on November 8 at noon PSTlocal time , before its wide release on November 9.****​
 
Buttonbasher

Buttonbasher

Member
Dec 4, 2017
4,778
TheJollyCorner said:
More specifically:

Enjoy SILENT HILL: Ascension**** from November 8​
Watch the mind-bending new interactive series SILENT HILL: Ascension on SONY PICTURES CORE.

Enjoy a weekly compilation of audience-influenced storylines packaged into TV episodes.

PlayStation Plus Premium members get exclusive access to weekly episodes every Wednesday – 24-hours before they debut on other platforms – and can also catch the first one early on November 8 at noon PSTlocal time , before its wide release on November 9.****​
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
for anyone curious about the asterisks, it's just:
QfOKcbB.png

for some reason.
 
MinusTydus

MinusTydus

The Fallen
Jul 28, 2018
8,484
PlayStation Plus Premium members get exclusive access to weekly episodes every Wednesday – 24-hours before they debut on other platforms – and can also catch the first one early on November 8 at noon PSTlocal time , before its wide release on November 9.****​
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Trying to figure out if this is a benefit or a punishment.

🤔
 
petetnt

petetnt

Member
Oct 28, 2017
1,264
Funny how the show suddenly devolved into not just ripping whole story points from Silent Hill 1 & 2, but even the whole enemy reveal in the second video was ripped straight from 2. Great to see that we have another character, Britney, whose suffering from alcoholism too.

"LONG WHALE as detective" cracked me up though.
 
petetnt

petetnt

Member
Oct 28, 2017
1,264
squarejawhero said:
For those watching, is this a masochism thing?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

For me personally it's 50/50, on the other hand I want to see them turn this around (which they probably don't) and it's same time to laugh at the ridiculousness amongst the super boring videos. Like today, you have that above mentioned Silent Hill 2 rip off scene and some random person just comes and BONKs it in the head with a baseball bat. BONK! Or how the voice actors just forget their accents in some lines and they never went back and recorded them. It's hilarious

I haven't done the mini games after "experiencing" them once though so it's a 5 minute investment daily.
 
Last edited:

Deleted member 13206

Banned
Feb 15, 2023
4,313
PC90 said:
it's a 'mind as well spend 10 minutes doing this' thing
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
petetnt said:
For me personally it's 50/50, on the other hand I want to see them turn this around (which they probably don't) and it's same time to laugh at the ridiculousness amongst the super boring videos. Like today, you have that above mentioned Silent Hill 2 rip off scene and some random person just comes and BONKs it in the head with a baseball bat. BONK! Or how the voice actors just forget their accents in some lines and they never went back and recorded them. It's hilarious

I haven't done the mini games after "experiencing" them once though so it's a 5 minute investment daily.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Arukado said:
It's more of a "let's watch this burn in real time" thing for me.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Fair.

I'm avoiding this as it gives them what they want; clicks and viewing figures. Even hate watching this bumps it, and I don't think I want to be a party in encouraging it. Will happily catch up via other means, say, Jimquisition or so on (I don't pirate). Will say it's entertaining, if for all the wrong reasons! If it takes reading about it second hand from you lot, at least I'm deriving some secondary entertainment...
 
Chance Hale

Chance Hale

Member
Oct 26, 2017
12,458
Colorado
Replaying Silent Hill 4 on pc now that the missing hauntings were finally restored and god the game is still terrifying. Amazing sound design and music like you'd expect but the added layer of only being able to save in your room, but dreading returning as it decays further and further is brilliant. Ghosts are such a scary enemy type
 
tonyhawkspotater2

tonyhawkspotater2

Member
Nov 4, 2023
282
If this wasn't Silent Hill, I probably would have just laughed at the botched launch with the broken app, absolute disaster of chat-function and lack of moderation, ridiculous monetization, mind-numbingly basic puzzles, NPC cameos and non-functioning audience voting and live quick-time events and other (non-)gameplay aspects etc. and then forgot about it and moved to the next thing.

But because this is Silent Hill, one of the greatest video game IP's ever produced and my favorite series of all time, I need to see this train-wreck through.

The real catch is the actual story, how it is delivered and the characters within. I think a lot of Ascension's commentary get focused on the things mentioned above, but there's so much wrong with the actual series.

The acting and the animation is one thing. There's a real lack of emotions in the scenes and the characters despite the fact the developers really want the audience to have a connection to the characters or their fate (which should be the thing why people would want to spend money or time in the app to have the ability to vote). The viewer is given all these characters they have no reason to care about at all.

Instead of giving the audience time to connect with the characters, the series just throws the viewer in the middle of these scenes that just don't work. After the first day or two, the daily episodes are couple minutes long at best, so the story must jump from a one scene to another, but there's no connection with what happened before. The locations don't match, there's always some new character (or even worse, an audience avatar) introduced and promptly discarded, or some monster shows up that instead of being uncanny, scary, or disturbing, ends just being funny or ridiculous. And because there are 3 stories going at once, it gets more and more hard to care about what has or will happen.

Every main and secondary character has a pretty basic set of problems.

  • Karl, a sad man who might have or have not killed his wife (who was a terrible person), but he's not really sure himself about that either. Maybe it was a monster….
  • Astrid, hates his dad for killing her mother (who she also kinda hated) with a troubled son and and alcoholic sister. Of yeah, she soon might or might not kill her son (which hasn't happened yet, but they already spoiled this.)
  • Rachel who might have or not killed her fellow cultist Joy (also an addict), also the cults nro.1 zealot (by the characters description in the game, but it doesn't seem like that at all in the actual story). She also has a daughter, wouldn't be surprised if she get's killed too.
  • Toby, an alcoholic who wants to revenge the cult for killing her sister (Joy), but is also haunted by because, she made her sister an addict too or something.
  • Then there's Eric, Rachel's husband and Toby's friend whose fault is that he's soft? I think. Or maybe is that he needs to choose between his wife or a friend (we the audience, don't have any kind of connection to either Eric, Rachel or Toby, so it's hard to care.).
When you have 3 might-be murderers, 3 addicts, 2 troubled kids (3 if you count Eva, Karls neighbor/babysitter or something like that) and more, the cast is already bigger than all of Silent Hill 1-4 combined. Then there's the cultist, the police, the random audience NPC-characters (whose role has been pretty been to give the audience the three options they can choose for every damn scene in the most obvious way). It's so hard to care about any of these.

The pacing is off in both the actual episodes and scenes itself. And it doesn't help that you instantly notice the change of tone when the audience choice scene changes to a normal scene, because the cuts are often so unnatural. To add to that, there has been multiple scenes, where the voice actors seems to forget to the accent they should be speaking with, that it creates an actual uncanny feeling that might have been the most disturbing part of the series.

I don't get in to if the series understand or respects the Silent Hill lore yet before the story is finished. But like in today's episode, where they in a minute part directly stole an scene from SH2 (the first lying figure appearance) and kinda tried to do the "they looked like monsters to you"-scene from SH3 (both with a lot less success), I wouldn't put my money on it…

To sum it, maybe I'm hate watching this, but at the same time I really want to see what ridiculous thing comes up in the next episode.
 
TheJollyCorner

TheJollyCorner

AVALANCHE
The Fallen
Nov 7, 2017
9,902
Chance Hale said:
Replaying Silent Hill 4 on pc now that the missing hauntings were finally restored and god the game is still terrifying. Amazing sound design and music like you'd expect but the added layer of only being able to save in your room, but dreading returning as it decays further and further is brilliant. Ghosts are such a scary enemy type
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Yeah. Game has its issues (rushed back-half of development being a main one, Konami becoming more KONAMIish as the mid '00s approached being another), but being able to look at it through the lens of what SH became after it really adds a whole new dimension (pun not indented).
I always really liked The Room. It made me excited regarding how the variations of Team Silent could play off of Imamura's idea of each SH being its own, anthological thing with the town's DNA being ever-present. The Room was ballsy; its ambitions were worn on both sleeves, and it still has one of the greatest (long) trailers ever made for a game IMO.

I'd love the opportunity to play it again on modern consoles.
 
Arukado

Arukado

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,665
Chance Hale said:
Replaying Silent Hill 4 on pc now that the missing hauntings were finally restored and god the game is still terrifying.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
So they restored them outside of some save files? Because i played the game for the first time 2 weeks ago, and i chose the ps2 over the pc version because of the hauntings (which turned out to be disappointing, so i wouldn't have lost much).

tonyhawkspotater2 said:
To sum it, maybe I'm hate watching this, but at the same time I really want to see what ridiculous thing comes up in the next episode.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Exactly.
 
Chance Hale

Chance Hale

Member
Oct 26, 2017
12,458
Colorado
Arukado said:
So they restored them outside of some save files? Because i played the game for the first time 2 weeks ago, and i chose the ps2 over the pc version because of the hauntings (which turned out to be disappointing, so i wouldn't have lost much).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Yeah, it's just included in a zip file fix alongside other things like widescreen now. Can find it on pcgamingwiki
 
Arukado

Arukado

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,665
Chance Hale said:
Yeah, it's just included in a zip file fix alongside other things like widescreen now. Can find it on pcgamingwiki
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Fantastic. I was able to emulate the ps2 version at 21:9 and everything, so it wasn't bad, but the pc version has the advantage of running the peephole scenes at high resolutions, whereas in the ps2 version they run at the native resolution regardless of your emulator settings.
 
Dusk Golem

Dusk Golem

Local Horror Enthusiast
Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,965
The endurance scene failing lead to the boss fight happening today, talking about it the post-show.

Actually thought today's episode was pretty fun, and indeed the choice overlap was fun to see.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.