Silent Hill: Ascension could feature your character, but its season pass sounds like a nightmare

Silent Hill: Ascension is finally launching today, and developer Genvid Entertainment has finally explained how it plans to make money from the thing.

Before I go ahead with explaining how Silent Hill: Ascension actually works, let me just preface this by saying I have never been more stunned by a blatant cash grab using a classic IP in my life before as I have with this game. Earlier today, Genvid Entertainment released a trailer covering “The Essentials” of Silent Hill: Ascension, which are clearly so essential you didn’t need to know about them until the game, or glorified livestream, was hours out from launching.

For starters, there’s the voting system. We already knew that you could vote to make it so that certain scenes can unfold in certain ways, but today’s trailer has revealed you do so with a resource called IP. While Genvid CEO Jacob Navok says it isn’t just pay to win, you can just buy IP directly using real money, and the more IP you have, the more you can spend to influence certain decisions, so, not really sure what Navok means there.

There are other ways to earn IP. You can do so for free by completing daily puzzles, which judging from the trailer look incredibly rudimentary, and you can also earn IP by participating in Endurance Scenes, which are real-time quick time events that can only be done live. Did I mention that news episodes always premiere at 9pm EST, which is midnight UK time, and that this whole thing will be running for 16 weeks? So good luck earning IP that way if you’re in Europe.

Then, there’s the $20 Founder’s Pack, which includes a season pass that lets you unlock cosmetics, icons, stickers, and the like for your profile. While Silent Hill: Ascension is running for 16 weeks, the season pass apparently covers six months of content, but who knows how that works. These cosmetics are for your character, which if you’re lucky enough to win a contest, can actually appear in-game, exactly as you’ve customised them to look. To enter these contests, you have to buy tickets using IP, which means the more money you spend, the more tickets you can buy, the more likely you are to appear in-game. The Founder’s Pack is available until November 14, and has exclusive cosmetics apparently too.

I think that just about covers “the essentials,” but, just, I’ve never been so taken aback before. None of the monsters even look like they could remotely be set in the same universe that has iconic designs like Pyramid Head! This really is just looking like some generic horror game with the Silent Hill IP slapped on because someone bought the licence for it. But hey, this thing will affect Silent Hill canon forever, I guess, so we’re stuck with it.