This morning, the trailer dropped for Team Silent’s latest project (in a series of many new, upcoming projects). Titled Silent Hill: Ascension, this project will be … well, honestly? It’s kind of a doozy of a project to explain. It will be a streaming series, yet animated in a very video-game-y style, and similar to a video game, the viewer will be able to make choices within it.
You won’t be the only one, however: Millions of other viewers will be weighing in, too, meaning the show will evolve over time based on how viewers decide to “judge” the characters within it.
The show will be hosted through interactive streaming “event” service Genvid, which describes the show thusly:
“I can feel it. Your guilt. So thick it chokes the air. You want to know how you can escape from this place. But you can’t… any more than you can escape yourself… and the pain you carry. It fills you up. Like a sickness. A disease, that you pass on to everyone you meet. Everyone you love.”
SILENT HILL: Ascension follows multiple main characters from locations around the world tormented by new and terrifying SILENT HILL monsters. Lurking in the shadows, these monsters threaten to consume people, their children, and entire towns as they’re drawn into the darkness by both recent murders and long suppressed guilt and fears.
In SILENT HILL: Ascension the actions of millions will determine the outcome. By the time the last scene streams, which characters have survived? Will those who are left be redeemed, damned, or suffer? Even the project’s creators do not know how SILENT HILL: Ascension will end. Instead, the character’s fates are in the audience’s hands.
Conceptually, it reminds me of a few different things. The first thing that comes to mind is the interactive Black Mirror film Bandersnatch (on Netflix), in which you can directly control how the film develops using your remote. It also reminds me of some choice-based adventure games that use an internet connection to show you how other players made decisions, such as The Quarry. And, of course, the plot itself seems to hearken back to how Silent Hill 2 mapped out the town’s lore: It can sometimes draw people with dark pasts in, and then “punish” them accordingly. Yeesh.
However, I’ve never heard of a show that’s directly impacted by viewers as the show goes on—at the very least, not a show like this, with a plot and sense of narrative direction. (You could technically count reality TV shows in this way, but it’s like apples to oranges). I don’t know how they’ll possibly manage this without sacrificing some element of quality, or the team’s quality of life, so it’ll definitely be an interesting project to keep an eye on. Polygon spoke to Genvid CEO Jacob Navok to get some more specific details, but his answers may just leave you with more questions.
(featured image: Genvid)
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Madeline Carpou
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