Silent Hill: Ascension releases on Halloween

Pre-registrations have gone live for Konami’s Silent Hill: Ascension, an interactive drama for mobiles – I know, shush, I’m sure it’ll come to PCs eventually – which follows a cast of characters around the world who are being tormented by monsters from the eponymous Town of Woe.

My enthusiasm for Silent Hill these days is approximately that of a dog returning to his vomit (or better, a depressive male protagonist with repressed memories that keep reeling him back to the same, misty high street). There have been so many middling sequels and spin-offs. But somehow, I can’t let go. And Ascension does sound quite intriguing, not least for being a crowd-sourced storytelling enterprise akin to a massively multiplayer Until Dawn.

A collaboration between Dead By Daylight studio Behaviour Interactive, Bad Robot Games and Genvid Entertainment, the game consists of daily story scenes with viewers voting on the outcome, and a catch-up option if you miss an episode. It’s listed on Google Play to kick off on 31st October, which of course is the best day of the year for a horror game.

Here’s the Google Play blurb in full: “The series follows multiple main characters from locations around the world tormented by new and terrifying Silent Hill monsters. Lurking in the shadows, these monsters threaten to consume people, their children, and entire towns as they’re drawn into the darkness by both recent murders and long-suppressed guilt and fears. Join this immersive journey as your decisions shape the story, leading to gripping moments of redemption, suffering, or damnation.”

You can expect new monsters, like, er, a version of Pyramid Head who’s got a square, porous head instead. Konami surely have enough Pyramid Head variations to fill out a Smash Bros clone by now, or at least a very grisly fashion show. As for Genvid – they’ve made a game like this before, a Walking Dead adaptation called Last Mile, and are currently doing another project set in the Borderlands universe.

As for future Silent Hill games in general, I have tempered expectations for Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 remake, after greatly disliking The Medium, and am vaguely interested in Silent Hill f, which is set in 1960s Japan, but I’m absolutely thrilled at the thought of Silent Hill: Townhall, which is being developed by Observation and Stories Untold developer No Code. That team knows how to make a setting feel grim.