Konami’s previously announced Silent Hill: Ascension, has gotten its first official trailer today alongside new information about the experimental Silent Hill title. Announced in 2022 during Konami’s Silent Hill Transmission, Ascension developed by Genvid Entertainment alongside Konami, seeks to blend the title into an interactive streaming series where viewer’s choices influence the outcome of the overall story. While at face value resembles an interactive video game, Genvid describes it as “MILE” or Massively Interactive Live Events.
The trailer released today doesn’t show any of the “gameplay” aspects, or rather how the choices for viewers to make will look like. Instead, the trailer teases the spooky foggy forest, creepy monster-filled world, and a cryptic story viewers can expect. With the choice aspect, viewers can decide who survives, whose actions make an impact on the larger story, or who will face horrific ends. Genvid says they don’t know where the story will wind up.
In what seems like a mashup of Supermassive Games’ Until Dawn, Netflix’s Bandersnatch, and Telltale’s The Walking Dead episodic choices video game, Silent Hill: Ascension will be a worldwide streaming phenomenon which, in real-time, viewers watching will get to choose what happens next, with whatever choice that gets picked most by viewers will thus change the narrative and its outcome.
It’s a unique concept, one that Genvid Entertainment has dabbled with before in a prior format for The Walking Dead: Last Mile. Presented on Facebook Gaming and a Facebook Watch exclusive, the MILE for Last Mile, was launched on July 11, 2022, and ended its first season in late November 2022. Their Last Mile saw millions of viewers pick their choices of behaviors among the characters, choices characters could make and most notably viewers could pick who died, and who lived to see another day. Touted more as a social experiment, it amassed nearly 50+ million views with over 50 countries participating.
Silent Hill: Ascension will stream later this year. It’s unclear where the format will be held on currently.