I have no idea what is going on in Silent Hill Ascension, despite following my morbid curiosity and watching people stream the game on Twitch. YouTuber SuperEyepatchWolf is here to try to help.
SuperEyepatchWolf, whose real name is bafflingly John Walsh, has a weekly stream on Twitch where he plays horror games, like Fear and Hunger or Slay the Princess. Of Walsh’s streams, my favorite are the ones where he watches the recordings of Silent Hill Ascension, both because of my bile fascination with the game itself and because of Walsh’s reactions.
Silent Hill Ascension is one of a few new entries in the Silent Hill series that Konami announced in 2022, including a Silent Hill 2 remake. As a fan of the series, some of the things in this announcement were exciting, like Silent Hill: Townfall, from the developer of indie horror game Stories Untold. Ascension, an interactive television show, stood out like a sore thumb in that announcement, because it’s a weird, bad idea.
Guess what: it’s terrible! The developer had to deny claims that it was written by AI. You play it, to quote Walsh, by “going to a website and watching a bunch of videos.” It has a battle pass. For a while, it was totally broken. Everyone’s accent is a new surprise. It’s what would happen if an alien was forced to make a television show. It is unfortunate that this is the first new entry in Silent Hill in ten years.
I’m glad that Walsh decided to recap the plot, because my impressions of it are vague. There’s a cult, and a dead wife, and some of the characters are in Norway? The other half of the characters are in the US, in a location that I thought was maybe Boston, but Walsh thinks is in the Pacific Northwest. Everyone’s mad at each other and it’s stressful.
Helpfully, Walsh has made a chart. Don’t worry, he goes over it a couple of times:
It’s worth watching all of Walsh’s playthrough on his channel, as well as his extremely long videos about anime and Garfield. You can play Silent Hill Ascension on this website.
