There’s a new entry in the Silent Hill video game franchise coming our way later this year – and you can watch the trailer for Silent Hill: Ascension in the embed above! This particular game is a collaboration between Behaviour Interactive, Bad Robot Games, Genvid Entertainment, DJ2 Entertainment, and Konami Digital Entertainment – and it’s promising to be something very different than what has come before. So different, it has been described as an “interactive streaming series.”
Genvid provides the following information: In Silent Hill: Ascension, the actions of millions will determine the outcome. By the time the last scene streams, which characters have survived? Will those who are left be redeemed, damned, or suffer? Even the project’s creators do not know how Silent Hill: Ascension will end. Instead, the character’s fates are in the audience’s hands. The project runs on a real-time interactive system that will allow millions of people to help characters survive and change those characters’ fates. The series will expand the Silent Hill universe, explore intergenerational trauma, and give the audience the power to impact Silent Hill canon forever while featuring daily can’t-miss live story moments where each day is different than the last based on audience actions.
Genvid’s CEO Jacob Novak adds: “Silent Hill: Ascension will captivate audiences with its immersive experience, spotlighting stunning visuals and live community-driven moments, all while exploring the psychological horror that has made the Silent Hill series so beloved by fans worldwide. By participating in Silent Hill: Ascension you will leave your legacy in the canon of Silent Hill. And, in collaboration with Konami Digital Entertainment, Bad Robot Games and Behaviour Interactive, we’re offering fans the unique chance to become part of the story themselves.“
Chris Amaral, art director at Bad Robot Games, said: “We’ve gone the extra mile to create a dreamlike world in Silent Hill: Ascension with disturbing, hyper-detailed characters, other-worldly monsters, immersive atmospheres, and an overall audio and visual design that our team is very proud of.“
Novak talked a little more about how this is going to work during an interview with Polygon: “We create interactive streaming shows, but they’re not [Black Mirror:] Bandersnatch. You’re not just individually playing it as a live stream — we’re actually using the same back end that Twitch operates on, and it’s streaming live from a game engine [that] is accepting all of the inputs from the audience [all] at the same time. You’re basically doing crowd-control decision making. Now, many of those decisions will be made in advance to the audience so that you don’t need to be there live at that moment. If you’re not available at the time at which the streams are on that day, you’ll be able to participate and make sure that your voice is counted inside of the decisions. But if you are there, you’re going to see the outcomes of the audience decisions in real time, but you’re also going to play. There are sequences that will be streaming live, where the audience is going to see characters in danger and you are going to be able to assist them in real time through the video stream, you will see your input and the rest of the audience’s input, and the characters may not survive some of these sequences. When we talk about [how] we actually don’t know how the show is going to end, we mean that. We’ve set up multiple main characters who are going to go through this nightmare of Silent Hill: Ascension. And we needed multiple mains because as the audience decides what’s going to happen — you saw some of that in the trailer; you saw redemption, suffering, and damnation — as the audience plays, when that character is going through that hallway, and those arms are grabbing at him, you’re gonna have quicktime event-like buttons that you need to tap. If enough of the audience fails, he will be killed in that sequence, and will wake up with reduced hope. And that’s going to lead him toward a path toward death. So this series is going to go on for months, we have a massive storyline planned and which characters make it to the end and which characters do not make it to the end, we have no clue yet. Typically, in a Silent Hill game, you’re playing as the protagonist. And basically, you just keep restarting up until you survive, right? That’s how a single-player game works. But in my earliest discussions on Silent Hill: Ascension, I said there’s no reset button. And I meant that. So once that character gets on a path toward destruction, and as their hope is reduced, they’re probably going to be permanently out of the story. And so we need enough characters to see who can actually survive the gauntlet of Ascension, because the audience is actually directing the story.“
You can find out even more by clicking over to the Polygon interview article.
How does Silent Hill: Ascension sound to you, and what did you think of the trailer? Will you be participating in this interactive streaming series? Share your thoughts on this one by leaving a comment below.
While we wait to see how this series turns out, there’s also a new live-action feature film coming our way, Return to Silent Hill.