While Silent Hill fans wait for more details on Silent Hill 2 Remake and Silent Hill: Townfall, Genvid’s Silent Hill: Ascension has received a new Inside Look. The idea of the upcoming interactive streaming series is for viewers to influence events, which become canon. Genvid wants to take the original Silent Hill’s mythology and “look at it across a broader lens,” per director of production Shiaw-Ling Lai.
It also explores a character’s trauma and how that may affect others around them. “We’re going to more global locations and looking deeper at how those relationships may be impacted by this trauma.
“So if I have unresolved trauma, how does that impact not only me but the people around me? How does it affect the community? And if it stays unresolved, how might it affect my descendants if I never actually face it?”
Creative director Martin Montgomery also said this Silent Hill is about “the idea of collective delusion. So this is not just localized to one person. An entire town is experiencing this shared delusion, so these things could be real. Things could be a figment of their imagination. They don’t know. And we’re playing with that idea within the narrative.”
Essentially, Genvid wants to look at how the various issues of characters in the games would manifest as “very real threats” and bring that into Ascension’s story. It wants the characters to be relatable so that “the audience cares about them and wants to see them redeemed,” says lead writer Shanon Ingles.
“When we’re doing character development… these are flawed, broken people. These are people who’ve been through trauma. These are people who’ve traumatized others, and they’re working through that. Audience members get a chance to help arc these characters.
“They have a chance to help redeem these characters or push them deeper into their trauma. And there’s something really powerful about that. To do that, we have to make the audience understand why they did the things they did.”
Silent Hill: Ascension airs later this year. For more details on the schedule and quick time events, head here. Interestingly, there will be mini-seasons afterwards exploring “What if” scenarios, where the audience can make new decisions and unlock different results.
