- ascensionreviewwek1.png (159.1 KiB) Viewed 55814 times
YT vid at the link above
Text review from following link:
alchemilla/ascension.html
In 2018, Netflix released the Bandersnatch interactive movie. I thought it was a lot of fun. It went along the same lines as the old Choose Your Own Adventure books, in that you were able to make some choices for the characters which would then impact the story and eventually which ending you would get. Anyway, I liked it, and I even made a fangame based on the game in the movie, "Nozhdyve," in Unity. Semi-interactive stuff can be done well.
And I see that GenVid have done other things in this vein. In fact, it is their entire schtick. This could work well for some IPs, but I think it's just not a great fit for Silent Hill, in particular. Maybe the superhero stuff, sure. And it's been said before, but the rainbow "it's trauma!" sticker just feels tone-deaf and as though it's making fun of the series itself, in addition to making fun of psychological trauma. The bread sticker, on the other hand, is cute and would've been a nice sticker, just like the artifacts in the also-maligned Book of Memories. That had Buttercakes and a channeling stone, among other things, and these were cute additions.
Watching a sticker that says "it's trauma!" in rainbow lettering floating up the screen while people in chat talk about Kojima's "cummy in their tummy" kind of sours the mood a bit. The fact that they didn't see this...coming... initially made me think this was their first time on the internet, but it's not. It's more that the Silent Hill IP doesn't fit well with their interactive story thing, and they were not a great fit for the series, especially not for being the first of the things that were announced last year on the "Silent Hill Transmission."
On some level, fans will bash things just to bash things. And when a series goes on long enough, sometimes things will not feel as fresh anymore, see also: The Simpsons. How has that been on this long? And I liked many of the later games, or at least aspects of them. But this isn't a game. It also isn't a movie. It's a Massively Interactive Live Event.
Think of a video game, GenVid's site says. Think of a TV show. A MILE is the best of both. I would disagree, at least in this case. Some of the best parts of video games are when you are able to actually fight and explore the game's world. The best parts of video games are NOT quick time events or, usually, cutscenes. Silent Hill has has some good cutscenes, like Lisa's death in Silent Hill 1, but these are meant to give you a reason to explore more or to allow you to get to know the characters better. They're not the best part. Fighting, exploring, interacting with things, that's the fun part of games. People complain about the quicktime events, in particular.
Silent Hill 1 had the piano puzzle, which many fans considered difficult. But it tied in with the story, it made you look for clues and then interact with the environment to get a medallion which you could then use to advance further in the game. Despite the difficulty of some of the puzzles, they weren't just random cellphone-type games stuck in there for no reason. The puzzles in Ascension kind of are random things stuck in there for no reason, and you're locked out of most of them unless you buy their battle pass, sorry, "season pass."
Yes, you get points for showing up and points for doing your one free puzzle per day, but you can either grind along for free, or you can buy your way into more points, stickers, and cosmetic upgrades for your avatar. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but the reason people buy cosmetic upgrades for their character is usually because people will see their character or because they're playing the game using that character. In Ascension, your character is your avatar, but largely remains unseen. The default options are pretty generic and terrible. You can change hair and skin color, and some face shapes, but there are like two shirts and two pair of pants to choose from. You can have glasses or not have glasses. That's about it.
They are calling the points "influence points," but they're voting points. And your vote doesn't count very much. It can count more if you're a "whale" and want to spend real money to buy more points, of course.
As for the gamelike segments, I tuned in tonight to "play" along with the community. The main problem here, again, is it's not enjoyable. You can button mash a bit when it says "tap," press and hold when it tells you to do that, swipe across the screen when it shows arrows, and so on. But since the interactivity is extremely limited, it just doesn't feel fun or like you're really influencing all that much.
Since the chat has been disabled, the chat bar is essentially useless now, along with the stickers. A line of stickers on the screen saying "no way," or "it's trauma!" does not add anything to the experience, and I understand the issue was with chat moderation. Kojima's cum, racial slurs, and so on, were happening. But again, this is the internet. I can see you're new here or something.
And it's distracting from the story. Much has been said about the story not being very interesting already, so I won't go too much into that. The animation isn't the best, but it would be forgivable if the experience had been enjoyable in the first place. But it isn't, and even if it had been, chat and stickers don't really add much. Nor does the whole idea of getting your avatar, which looks a bit shite, into a story you don't care much about.
It was the storytelling and immersive and ominous atmosphere that most fans loved about the series, and the stickers and live chat only serve to kill any atmosphere it may have had. GenVid does multiplayer live events with group chat and community decisions, Silent Hill was a gloomy, lonely, one-player game. This is simply not a good fit. It's not even really GenVid's fault, it's more that this kind of thing probably wasn't going to work well in the Silent Hill universe no matter how you did it. Which just leads to fans talking about James having a cock ring and wanting Pyramid Head to impregnate them, apparently.
If there's anything good to take away from this, it can remind us of all the reasons we loved the series to begin with. But I don't see myself tuning in for future livestreams.
