Interactive series Silent Hill: Ascension begins Oct 31, 'if people are afraid of weird F2P monetization, it's not a game'

There are currently three Silent Hill games we know about in the works. There's Bloober Team's remake of Silent Hill 2, a prequel set in Japan called Silent Hill F, and No Code's Silent Hill: Townfall. But there's also a game-adjacent project called Silent Hill: Ascension being made by Genvid Entertainment, an interactive streaming series where viewers can vote to decide how parts of the story turn out.

Ascension's set to begin on October 31, and while the marketing makes a big deal about how viewers will "shape Silent Hill canon forever", there's plenty of skepticism about what sounds like Twitch Chat Plays Trauma-based Survival Horror, especially regarding the fact the mobile version mentions in-app purchases.

Jacob Navok, CEO of Genvid and executive producer of Silent Hill: Ascension, has been explaining the concept on Twitter, clarifying that all the episodes can be watched for free, either on mobile or other platforms, and "if people are afraid of weird F2P monetization, it's not a game. We don't sell magic swords to level you up for PvP arenas."

Navok compares the in-app purchase to a Twitch subscription, saying, "IAP is similar to Twitch channel perks and customization of the community viewing experience. We'll have puzzles you can do each day, chat emotes and stickers to unlock, etc. If people want to turn off chat, they can do that too. Then it just becomes like Netflix."

Silent Hill: Ascension will begin with a live premiere streamed on October 31 at 9pm ET/6pm ET, which will be available to view afterwards as a higher-res video-on-demand. People who prefer to watch the VOD version will still be able to vote, with Navok saying, "You do not need to be there live. There are some things that are only available live, but I set a rule early in production that anything that changes story outcome needs to be able to be participated in asynchronously."

Genvid is also working on an interactive series based on Borderlands called Borderlands EchoVision Live, and one set in the DC Universe.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.