Silent Hill: Ascension is a streaming show with the frills of a multiplayer game – The Verge

By Andrew Webster, an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.
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Silent Hill: Ascension has been billed not as a game but, rather, as an interactive streaming series. And now, ahead of the show’s premiere on Halloween night, we finally have some sense of what that means. Developer Genvid Entertainment has just released a new explainer video that, well, explains how Ascension will actually work.
Essentially, the experience sounds like a mix of choice-based games like Telltale’s The Walking Dead and “choose your own adventure” shows like Netflix’s Bandersnatch. (Notably, the team at Genvid consists of a number of ex-Telltale staff.) Each evening, part of the story streams live, and there are various ways that players can interact with the experience. The most basic are quick-time events — called “endurance streams” — where players work together to keep a character safe during a dangerous scenario.
The much bigger feature, though, are plot points where viewers make a choice that will influence the outcome of the story. There are different decisions each day, and Ascension features a novel system for how the story will land on specific outcomes. Instead of straight-up voting, players will use an in-game currency called “influence points” that can be spent to sway a decision. The more influence you use, the stronger your sway. Influence points can be earned by participating in various ways, including helping with those deadly QTEs and solving daily puzzles on the Ascension website.
You can watch the show like a typical streaming series — the daily streams will even be recut into weekly noninteractive episodes for those who just want the story — but it also has a handful of multiplayer elements. You can have chat running while you watch, for instance, along with all of the on-screen information about pending decisions. When all that is turned on, it looks a bit like watching a Twitch stream:
You can even customize an avatar like in a multiplayer game, with the chance that it’ll have a cameo in an episode.
Since the streams will be happening live, the experience is being designed so that people can participate even if they’re in a time zone that makes a 9PM ET stream difficult to check out. There are recaps to help you catch up if you miss a day, and viewers will have at least 24 hours to participate in the big decisions before the final choice is made.
Basically, it seems like Ascension is trying to marry the stickiness of a live-service game with the storytelling of a streaming series. We’ll be able to find out soon how well that marriage will work: the first episode is streaming on October 31st at 9PM ET. You can watch for free via an app on or as well as the series’ site. New episodes will be running daily, and the developer says the story will unfold over “months.”
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