I knew it would be bad and tuned in out of curiosity but it wildly exceeded my expectations. Dark to the point of being indecipherable at times, poorly animated with stilted writing and overlaid with a faux Twitch chat that is far scarier than anything else in the show (but can be minimized) this thing is some kind of bizarre insult to Silent Hill fandom. It is like desecrating a corpse.

If you don't know what it is it's a community voted interactive CG movie with microtransactions and a battle pass. It's part of the Silent Hill franchise and it's worse than late-stage syphilis. People vote or pay to vote to select what characters do at critical junctures as the movie plays out over 16 excruciating nights. Then there's a QTE section.

I can't really tell you what happened in the interactive movie except to say that I've played some of Man of Medan and that game is pretty engaging while this was like some kind of dystopian TV show from hell. After the main show where you invest points that you can buy for real money in the TV SHOW BATTLEPASS there was an extended QTE sequence where a character wanders around from deadly scenario to deadly scenario like in a video game. At the end he walked through a door and the show said we failed and he died, but we didn't get to see him die.

Someone else can try to summarize the plot or you can catch up on the website but I am in awe in how bad this thing actually is. It's a terrible idea executed much worse than you can imagine. It makes Balan Wonderworld look like Super Mario Odyssey. It makes Gollum look like Tears of the Kingdom. It makes Man of Medan look like John Carpenter's The Thing.

This thing is going to be immediately forgotten by most and remembered very clearly by the few, the proud, the stupid like me who watched.

I was busy with Halloween stuff, but I can’t wait to watch the VOD of Jess and bobvids talking over this game. I’m a trash connoisseur, and this seems like some real bullshit that’s worth tuning in(to people mocking it). The screenshot of the not-Twitch overlay is so bad that I scrolled past it in a Polygon article I read because I thought it was an ad.

I would say that Silent Hill fans wished for more content and the monkey’s paw curled, but at this point being a Silent Hill fan has to be Oops! All Monkey’s Paws, right?

One of the most predictable flops in gaming. It sounded like a bad idea when they announced it. Konami's behind it. And Silent Hill has infamously gotten no respect from Konami in years.

..Yeah, I definitely have to see someone watch/participate in this (poor Jess seems like a good choice.. poor, poor Jess). It sounds horrendous and fascinating in how horrendous it sounds.

Truly the most horrifying Silent Hill game...

I feel like there used to be a lot of disagreement about what the worst Silent Hill game was and then BAM! Ascension shows up to unite us all under one banner. We didn't think Konami could do worse than spinning their IPs off to be Pachinko machines but here we are. I think I heard somewhere that new Japanese gambling laws made it harder to profit from pachinko machines so that probably explains Konami's pivot back to games and this parody of bad mobile game monetization.

I hope you all saw they even have exclusive loading screens behind the battle pass. They monetized loading screens!!! Seriously!

This whole thing is so weird. There are puzzles that you can play to earn "influence points" which you can also buy, and are used to influence the decisions characters make, but the studio head is making a big deal out of how there are so many players that no individual can have a big impact via influence points, which raises the question of why you would want to buy them.

The puzzles themselves are incredibly basic, the kind of thing that would be laughed at by a 1996 adventure game that @zombiepie would write 6,000 word on, and just absolutely not engaging. You can buy the battle pass to play more of them.

Why is this thing not ad supported? Watch an ad to play another puzzle is something someone might do. Watch ads for influence points. Buying this stuff just seems truly insane, and the hardcore Silent Hill fans hate it so intensely I can't imagine who the whales would be.

It's definitely a fascinating trainwreck. Everything around it is much more interesting than the Silent Hill story it is telling, which is boring and awful.

Now, now, let's not forget we live in a world where "The Quiet Man" exists.

Games can be more disappointing, play worse, have worse writing, be a bigger embarrassment to established franchises, but I'm not sure ANYTHING comes together to be a worse piece of entertainment than that. Unless you're watching someone else play it, then it's a 10/10.

That having been said: what you're describing sounds like something that would be advertised in-universe if Paul Verhoeven made Robocop in 2023.

@undeadpool: I think this thing is worse than the Quiet Man. The Quiet Man has the badness advantage of being a game you have to play, while this can be passively watched, but it has a coherent idea behind it (albeit a bad one) and some so bad its good charm. Plus its gameplay is bad but not so bad that nobody could enjoy it.

Plus if you play the Quiet Man you will not hear or see a single hard R n word like you will in Ascension chat. He's the quiet man! You won't hear any words at all, let alone racial slurs!

The other thing is that nobody had any expectations for the Quiet Man. Expectations for this weren't great, but what was delivered is so much worse than anyone could have imagined.

I've just had to google what this thing is. What an odd thing. Things.

I'm playing this right now and I want the record to say that I did NOT get in trouble for chatting about human bodily fluids.

@zombiepie: Okay, I believe you, but how many chat emojis have you bought so far?

Book of Memories don't sound so bad anymore now huh 😤

Okay, but was your user name about your appreciation for certain bodily fluids? Because you can apparently be named things chat won't let you say but Johnny Vignocchi's phone will auto-correct to.

The inclusion of exclusive loading screens behind a battle pass is a particularly egregious example of monetization gone too far. It's a sad state of affairs when even the downtime between gameplay sessions is being used as a revenue stream.