Silent Hill: Ascension offers players the chance to choose their own horror story
By Ash Parrish, a reporter who has covered the business, culture, and communities of video games for seven years. Previously, she worked at Kotaku.
Silent Hill: Ascension, one of the handful of new Silent Hill projects announced last year, has its first trailer. Ascension, developed by Genvid Technologies in collaboration with Konami and Bad Robot Games, is unique in that it’s not quite a game but, rather, what Genvid calls a MILE, or massively interactive live event. Players, or I guess viewers, in this case, will be able to influence how the narrative of Ascension plays out, giving them control over characters’ actions and fates.
The trailer doesn’t show exactly what that kind of interaction looks like, only offering a brief introduction to the characters and the spooky-as-shit world they’ll have to fight through to survive. An unknown narrator talks about guilt and how it can infect loved ones “like a sickness” while characters run from the kinds of monsters we’ve come to expect from a Silent Hill game.
Genvid has developed other interactive experiences before, including one for The Walking Dead. In fact, Ascension’s premise — the idea that viewers get to control how events unfold — seems like the Telltale Walking Dead games writ large, with millions of participants affecting a singular shared outcome instead of a single player having their own bespoke experience.
“By participating in Silent Hill: Ascension you will leave your legacy in the canon of Silent Hill,” said Genvid CEO Jacob Navok in the press release accompanying the new trailer. “We’re offering fans the unique chance to become part of the story themselves.”
Silent Hill: Ascension is due later this year.
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