Launching on Halloween 2023, Silent Hill: Ascension brings a new way of playing online games with multiple outcomes. The game is still fresh, which means setting up a sound strategy can help you get the best possible start.
The ultimate goal of this guide is to set you up properly for maximum enjoyment and game participation. Let’s get into the subject!
What is Silent Hill: Ascension?
Silent Hill: Ascension allows players to make decisions that dynamically change the story moving forward. However, it’s not the same model as, for instance, Star Trek: Resurgence. Instead, the game’s decisions are crowdsourced.
This means you don’t change the course of the game for yourself. All players participate in the same storyline and influence what happens next through a voting system. Decisions are implemented via the daily episodes, released regularly at 6pm PST or 9pm ET.
The story itself takes you on a journey through various world locations, with early episodes taking place in Pennsylvania and Norway. There, we get to know the character cast whose faiths we are impacting throughout the game.
Episodes represent the core of Silent Hill: Ascension, but the game has more to offer than these interactive shorts. Next, we delve into the mechanism of influencing decisions in the game and boosting your voting power.
A strategy guide through Silent Hill: Ascension
Making decisions in Silent Hill: Ascension is the foundation of the game. The entire storyline is influenced by the players voting on how particular moments turn out. Thus, knowing how to vote will be crucial for your game experience, as will the other aspect of the game—earning the in-game currency that makes your votes more potent.
How to influence decisions in Silent Hill: Ascension
You can impact decisions in Silent Hill: Ascension every day during the live shows.
To participate in this game aspect, you need to go to the Decisions tab at the bottom of your screen. There, you will have three options to choose from, with each option roughly corresponding to Paragon/Neutral/Renegade variants from similar decision-making games.
However, this being Silent Hill, you don’t actually get a true Neutral option. Instead, the available choices will inflict a certain amount of Redemption, Suffering, or Damnation. We’d say the names of these options are pretty self-explanatory.
The Decisions page is broken down into two tabs: Active and Past. Naturally, the Active tab contains decisions you can still influence, while Past is reserved for choices that were already made by the community.
The Past tab is worth checking out, because it gives you more insight into what your decisions mean and how they work. In particular, when you go to that tab, you can see three buttons: Decision, Outcome, and Context.
Tapping on Decision shows you a breakdown of votes. Under Outcome, you can view which choice came on top and by how many bids. Finally, Context gives you—surprise, surprise—the context behind the decision, helping you understand the circumstances leading to the defining moment.
Another important element found in the Decisions tab is the labels found at the upper left. While in Active tab, the first label you see is usually New, informing you that the decision you’re looking at is the last one to come up.
Besides that, you will see a label with a particular color and name of a metal. This label explains how impactful the decision will be for the character in question. For instance, a Gold label will have a medium effect, while a Platinum label indicates a potentially massive impact on the story.
Lastly, the Fate label means the choice you make will have an effect on the character’s Fate. This is a mechanic that makes characters more or less likely to survive certain encounters. As you may conclude, more Fate ups their chances, while less Fate brings them closer to doom.
Earning Influence Points
Rather than regular voting, Silent Hill: Ascension depends on the players bidding so-called Influence Points (IP). The more points you bid, the more you can affect how the story unravels.
Of course, this mechanic makes Influence Points crucial, and that is why the game gives you several ways of earning them. You can find the available IP-earning venues on the home screen, specifically under Goals, Store, and Arcane Library.
The Goals section contains Daily and Weekly goals. These are basically milestones that you hit through regular gameplay. Both offer IP and XP rewards, with Weekly Goals being more generous.
The Store is where you can purchase packs and Influence Points. Purchases are done directly for real-life money, and there are usually three IP pack offers that differ in IP amount.
Finally, the Arcane Library is the most interesting aspect of the game. The page has two tabs, Arcane and Mindfulness, with the Arcane tab being more relevant for our purposes. Here, you can earn IP by solving daily puzzles.
The Mindfulness tab houses special puzzles that don’t award IP but boost Hope for featured characters. Notably, these puzzles aren’t purely single-player, as the results of the entire community affect the final score. In any case, the Mindfulness puzzles aren’t related to IP, so we’ll look at them in another article.
Building a new Silent Hill canon
The promise of Silent Hill: Ascension is that players will be able to build the Silent Hill canon with their decisions. This could be an exciting prospect, as the community around the game chooses how the universe moves forward. Of course, the game itself is still in early days, so we need to wait and see how this plan pans out.
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Silent Hill: Ascension Strategy Guide: Tips, Cheats and More