Last night’s Silent Hill presentation introduced us to several new games, including Silent Hill: Ascension, a game that Konami described as a "live, real-time, interactive series." We weren’t provided much in terms of details, but we were told that it would be something like watching a scary movie with friends, only instead of it being a few besties on your living room couch, it'll be millions of people all watching the same livestream. We’re still a little unclear on the exact nature of the game, but we’re getting a bit closer thanks to Yai Gameworks’ AestheticGamer, also known as Dusk Golem or simply "Ryan." This solo dev specializing in indie horror games reached out to Silent Hill: Ascension developer Genvid’s CEO, Jacob Navok, to get a better sense of just what to expect in the coming "interactive series."According to Dusk Golem, Ascension is "a narrative branching-choice cloud streaming experiment that is going to be aired ONCE as a mini-series to tune into, and has community-made choices affect variations character relations, fates, if they live or die." The indie dev also noted that Ascension will be made with the help of ex-Telltale staffers that know a thing or two about writing an interactive story.
After yesterday’s presentations, I said it sounded like Ascension will be like Dark Pictures Anthology on a grander scale. Dusk Golem said that it’s probably going to be more like Genvid’s other game, The Walking Dead: Last Mile, which was released on Facebook Gaming back in July.
"In the Walking Dead game, players individually did tasks to take care of an avatar character, solve puzzles, do survival scenarios, to earn ‘Influence’ points, then could use those points to vote on community-driven choices," wrote Dusk Golem. Those activities all boil down to some pretty simple minigames and quick-time events to fend off attacking zombies, earning more points the better you perform.
Before new episodes air, players get to spend their Influence points to decide on certain things for the narrative. Episodes are essentially CG cutscenes that play out similar to Life is Strange or Until Dawn, only with a single canon story.
Silent Hill: Ascension will arrive sometime in 2023 with no word yet on which streaming platform players will watch from.