Silent Hill: Ascension fails to impress with greedy monetisation and cluttered UI
Spend £20 for a trauma emote.
Silent Hill: Ascension aired its first episode yesterday, but players are lambasting the game for its monetisation options and overwhelming UI.
Despite my personal apprehensions about Ascension, I thought I would keep an open mind about it. This morning, when I read discussions within the Silent Hill community on the game, I couldn't quite believe what fans were reporting until I tried the game for myself.
Despite developer Genvid claiming players can get involved for free, there's a pay-to-win model (as much as an interactive livestream can be pay-to-win) implemented here. A £20/$20 Founder's Pack will get you the season pass (which is also priced at £20/$20 as listed on the game's Apple App Store page), unlock all puzzles in the game, and exclusive emotes with throwbacks to older Silent Hill references. And an exclusive emote which says "It's trauma!" in rainbow colouring.
I wish I was joking, but I'm not. Someone has even gone and ripped the trauma emote from the game and uploaded it as a nice transparent PNG file for all your memeing needs.
Despite Genvid's constant assurance Ascension is a free game, it's relentless in reminding you of the premium features you can only access if you spend money. Decisions are made by the community and voting costs an in-game currency called influence points. Influence points can be accrued through usual live service tactics like logging in daily, but doing that doesn't net you a lot. Alternatively, you can spend up to £20/$20 to buy 26,400 points and sway the game towards your preferred actions.
Influence points can also be earned by playing puzzles. However, at the moment only one puzzle is available for those who are playing for free. Buying the season pass unlocks three other puzzles, shovelling in pay-to-play here too. After creating an account and going through the game's introduction, the first thing I'm shown is not a cutscene from the game or a puzzle, but a pop-up for the £20 Founder's Pack.
The game obviously hasn't gone down well with Silent Hill fans. On Reddit, there's plenty of posts discussing its disastrous launch last night, in which the game was inaccessible for a couple of hours as it went down for "maintenance", to the monetisation.
The only potentially commendable thing that's come out of Silent Hill: Ascension is its constant global live chat. It runs all the time, even when a new episode isn't airing, and is essentially a 24/7 Twitch chat at the side of the screen. Needless to say, people are having their fun with it.
Silent Hill: Ascension is set to continue over the next 16 weeks, with new content every day and an episode summarising the results of community voting at the end of each week.