Silent Hill: Ascension

Man, where to start? The first thing that stood out to me was the writing felt like it was written by very earnest teens in a Spooky Story Club or something. 100% dumb tropes, disjointed (in a BAD way) dialogue, just really awful and a lot of it was extremely uninteresting.

Uninteresting? Yes, it was more interesting to try and figure out why a majority of the voice acting was so over-the-top terrible. The pacing was off, the voicework was either deadpan or emotionally out of place for no real reason. At one point a girl just found out her Grandma died and is trying to ask her Grandad if he killed her Granny, and she put about as much emotion into it as if she were asking someone to pass the salt.

Oh, don't worry, that wasn't a spoiler or anything, because the entire show is such a disjointed toilet mess you really won't CARE what's going on about 15 -30 minutes in when you realize you are only sticking around to see just how bad the show will actually get.

Even if this were a traditional Console or PC game, the voice acting and jank story and writing would have resulted in negative reviews, even in a day and age where Retro is cool again. Just like tank controls, this Show or Game or whatever it's trying to be should have been left as what it was: a really, really bad idea.

I watched almost three episodes. At first, I was hyped. Silent Hill was my first favorite video game, and I thought that I would gladly consume any type of Silent Hill content because of how rare something new comes up. And the idea where users have an influence on the story? So cool! It can't go wrong, right? Oh dear, sure it can...

It's terrible.

Story? It's not "Silent Hill". It could be, but it's not. The sequence is chopped, disconnected, incoherent, filled with completely unnecessary scenes, important scenes are not developed enough. It feels more like a YouTube fan made fiction montage using cutscenes from a video games, then a series. This is not a professional product at all.

Characters? The last ounce of creativity was spent on modern characters (bossy women, flimsy men, mustachioed girl, zoo of all races, etc.), so there was no creativity to add at least some complexity to any character. That's exploitation.

Video? That would be cool for a ~2010 game, it's a bit late for a 2023 series. Hell, the series never took any of the advantages of computer graphics (impossible angles and transitions). Lip-sync is hit or miss, faces are mostly stuck in a single emotion.

Music? Ha-ha... ha-HA-HAHA. No.

There's nothing of value here.

Obviously, this "product" has nothing to do with the actual creators of Silent Hill.

I'd rather play Silent Hill Pachinko Machine till my last breath than finish this series.

I just watched the first hour long "episode", and leaving the pricing and monetization aside, this is pretty abysmal.

Writing and delivery are awful across the board, and on the tech side, it looks like an old ps3 game. Characters are stiff and awkward, like wobbly puppets not fully interacting with each other.

And then there's the story... So far this "story" is a choppy disconnected mess that intersperses silent hill looking horror monsters into two main narratives for no discernible reason.

Scenes go by with little connection, no sense of place or overarching plot. Maybe it'll get better, but its so disjointed as it is, that It's hard to imagine it recovering achieving any level of cohesion. As a side note the series doesn't even credit a single writer in its credits. But honestly, if you told me this is written by AI, I wouldn't doubt it.

Finally, so far there is no reason why this is in any way related to the SILENT HILL franchise either. Its all just stylistic window dressing.

So if you want to watch something terribly dull, this is for you.

A completely disjointed storyline, incomprehensible character writing and editing, it's amazing it got made. The voice acting is miserable, but is matched only by how bad the animation is. I have no clue what the story is supposed to be, or what any character motivations are. Every scene is both completely forgettable and reaching new depths of misery. Silent Hill Ascension fails completely on every single level. This isn't even including the absolute mess that is the paid "season pass" that offers almost nothing, the insane background characters designed by the audience, or the fact that decisions are made by the highest bidder, despite them doing apparently nothing to the story. It's so bad it's almost entertaining. I can't wait to watch the documentary in 10 years about how somehow people who have presumably watched a TV show before allowed this to be made.

God bless the voice actors. And if you want the most impotent, repetitive monsters you've ever seen, and an endless, boring soap opera, then this is for you. Oh, and of course there's the lamest 1990s game-play character editions. I watched the whole thing out of a morbid curiosity, and some kind of misplaced dedication to the genuinely creeping and frightening SH movies. In episode 16, when something actually started to happen, I was so starved for any kind of forward action I actually expressed my gratitude out loud. He fact that I sat through the whole thing says more about me than the show... and what it says is not healthy.