Silent Hill: Ascension does not look like the game we’ve been holding out for

Silent Hill: Ascension has revealed a new trailer, giving us a glimpse of exactly what this live-play experience will entail. And it doesn’t feel like the game we’ve been waiting for. For multiple reasons.

The first is that, well, Ascension won’t be your standard game. Silent Hill: Ascension will take the form of a ‘broadcast series’ in which its viewers decide the fate of each character. Sounds eerily a lot like Until Dawn and The Quarry from Supermassive Games? Yeah.

You’re not wrong to think that either. If someone presented me with the Ascension trailer without prior context or branding, I would have honestly mistaken this trailer for another Supermassive effort. This isn’t a bad thing, considering Supermassive’s titles are both baffling and fun.

The Silent Hill: Ascension trailer introduces us to several main characters; as we see them flee in terror and catch glimpses of hideous monsters, it’s explicit that Ascension will explore their trauma. What happened in the past for these characters to end up here? Will they be able to face their trauma and escape? Or will they simply pass on their trauma to their children? The trailer raises a lot of questions for players, but for me it cemented one thing: this can’t be good.

I’m not denying that the format in which Silent Hill: Ascension is presented will be fascinating to watch unfold: a real-time interactive system for viewers to decide what happens next, playing with a format like the Blair Witch of her time. . . I think the problem here revolves around Konami forgetting what made Silent Hill so special and just putting that brand tag on their future games to generate more hype.

The original Silent Hill titles focused on psychological terror, there’s no question about that. More specifically, how a character carries their trauma with them and how it manifests itself. James Sunderland battled his inner demons in the form of Pyramid Head in Silent Hill 2, for example. Sorry if you missed that one.

You could play Silent Hill 2 through and take it at face value, without even realizing that the real horror at stake was the unresolved trauma that James carried with him. Once you realize the journey James is on, Silent Hill 2 suddenly becomes even more unnerving: it’s no longer about the physical threats James faces, but a much more real and personal horror. who he is facing. You don’t need a therapist to tell you why that, for many people, goes beyond the material world and tickles something much more unsettling deep down in the amygdala.

Team Silent captured lightning in a bottle with the original Silent Hill trio; It was a period of time when horror was finding its place as a genre, and Silent Hill 2 was shaping up to be one of the best horror games of all time. There was a level of intrigue and mystery surrounding this nasty little game because of how it managed to get low skin your player so easily. You can revive a series and redo a game, but you can’t recreate a moment like that. Especially not if you pull out all the subtext in a movie trailer like teeth in a jaw.

Silent Hill: Ascension seems like an interesting experience to share with other Silent Hill fans, but it’s not like Silent Hill. Maybe Bloober Team will blow my mind with the Silent Hill 2 remake and I’ll eat my words.

But perhaps it’s worth considering what would happen if Konami were to consider starting a new series, instead of slapping the ‘Silent Hill’ stamp of approval on some trauma-focused horror games. Perhaps he would have another classic property in development. And maybe it would stop tarnishing the name of the good that came before.