The Morning After: The Silent Hill universe is expanding, with help from J.J. Abrams

Konami today dropped a ton of news about the future of its iconic horror franchise. Aside from confirming that , the studio revealed three new games. Townfall comes from Annapurna Interactive and No Code, a Glasgow studio known for strong narrative titles like  and Stories Untold. The short teaser for Townfall looks to be the most traditional Silent Hill game of the trio.

Ascension, due out in 2023, is the least game-like installment, but it will feature the influence of J.J. Abrams. It’s an interactive streaming series with the tagline: Face Your Trauma Together. Ascension comes from Abrams’ studio, Bad Robot, and Genvid, a company that produces interactive live shows.

And then there’s Silent Hill f, coming from Ryūkishi07, a creator known for crafting acclaimed visual novels with psychological horror and supernatural mysteries at their core. The teaser for f is incredibly gruesome, featuring a young woman as she’s consumed from the inside-out by the tentacles of a flesh-eating plant. A YouTube description for the teaser says the game is “set in 1960s Japan featuring a beautiful, yet horrifying world.” There’s no word yet on a release date.

Oh, and of course, there’s a , too. Happy Halloween, everyone.

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by .

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There are good options in each price range.

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Featuring lots of young stars.

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It currently translates between English and Hokkien.

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CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained: “We leveraged Mandarin as an intermediate language to build pseudo-labels, where we first translated English (or Hokkien) speech to Mandarin text, and we then translated to Hokkien (or English) and added it to training data.” Currently, the system allows for someone who speaks Hokkien to converse with someone who speaks English, stiltedly.

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Gmail, Maps and other apps are now in closer reach.

Google’s new iOS 16 widgets give you at-a-glance info and shortcuts for some of the company’s core apps. Gmail shows your new message counts, and Maps provides links to your favorite trips (like your commute home). The widgets run the gamut of Google apps, though with diminishing usefulness: Google News shows the latest headlines, while Drive takes you to suggested and starred cloud files. YouTube and YouTube Music also have home screen widgets, so you can jump to your video subscriptions or search for a song on YouTube Music.

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