A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead Review (PS5) – Keep Calm and Creep Along

A Quiet Place: The Road ahead may be one of the best examples of a video game committing wholeheartedly to the spirit and concept of an IP. If you were asked to imagine what a Quiet Place game would look like, The Road Ahead is almost identical to what the majority of people would have envisioned. A focus on story and characters, creeping through desolate locations and most importantly, staying as silent as humanly possible.

It’s most obvious contemporary it’ll be compared to is Alien: Isolation. It’s an unfair comparison, in a sense. Alien: Isolation is considered one of, if not the best, in terms of organic AI-driven horror. A masterpiece in design, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead faced an uphill task in emulating such a revered title. However, the question you need to keep in mind when considering this entry, is whether you want an idyllic recreation of the movies in video game form, or whether the frustration inherent in its slow-paced design will deter you from enjoying the game itself.

Hope you’ve got your crouching boots ready and your mouth sewn shut, as we’re about to venture into a rather Quiet Place.

Quietly Now

When I say A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead stays comprehensively true to the spirit of the movies, I mean it. Noise is everything in this game, which demonstrates how much Stormind Games understands the IP itself. The alien monstrosities are ever-present throughout the roughly 8-hour story, even in areas you can’t physically see them (or where they can’t seemingly access, interestingly). Make more than a fraction of decibels and it’s over, immediately.

On normal difficulty, you effectively get three strikes. The first triggers a warning sound cue, the second triggers the creature’s alert phase, and the third ends you with a pre-scripted cutscene. How does this translate into gameplay? It means crouching at almost all times, and almost never leaning on your analogue stick more than a touch. The pace of A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead would make a snail seem supersonic in comparison.

Tip-toeing through each level eats up the majority of your playtime, as a result. Now, if you’re a fan of the idea of a silent, hostile and ever-threatening world, this is the game for you. However, if patience and spending dozens of minutes skulking tepidly around an area – only to die because your big toe stumped onto a leaf too quickly – doesn’t appeal to you, you will likely hate this.

Don’t Drop The Mic

For about 80% of my playthrough, I was incredibly immersed in the glacier pace. I watched every step, nervously side-stepping never before feared hazards like stacks of leaves, shards of glass or the age-old tin can. Few games will make you actively look down and be wary of your traversal moment-to-moment, but A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead nails this aspect, for better and for worse.

You can measure your noise levels through Alex’s Phonometer – a device that handily tracks ambient noise alongside your own. In essence, it’s Alien: Isolation complete with a DIY M314 Motion Tracker. It’s also one of the most intense door and cupboard opening simulators I’ve ever played. Seriously, these things need some WD-40. It plays like you’re six years old and sneaking down to the kitchen in the night to steal a forbidden snack.

All of this is amplified if you’re willing to take the plunge of turning your microphone on. With this setting activated, any noise you, as the player, make, will be detected by the creatures. Boy, do these chaps not like the sound of human existence. Even on its lowest setting, the mic will capture the majority of noise, and it makes things 10x more suspenseful. Perfect for streamers and horror night groups, for sure.

One Sound Ahead

So far, so very Quiet Place, so what goes awry when separating this as a horror game from its IP? Mechanics. Each level features Alex attempting to get from point A to point B, often via a handful of obstacles. Each mission has its own gimmick so to speak. Using bottles for distractions, hitting TVs to create a noise surge, dumping sand to mask noise and the like.

While it’s solid, the campaign comprised of climbing over things, crouch walking and moving planks of wood or the odd environmental object like a valve. The alien AI pales in comparison to Alien: Isolation, owing to their pre-scripted appearances, patrol routes and your limited options in avoiding them. There’s no hiding, running, combat or basically anything except being quiet and moving exceptionally slowly.

For the early part of the game, this ratchets up the tension and makes everything feel very focused. After 8 hours of it though? It started to become more tedious, and by the last two levels, I was pretty done with the grinding speed. There’s a real frustration that arises when you spend half a dozen minutes carefully navigating an area, just to have a rogue bit of AI effectively rail-road the creature into your path, forcing you to re-do all of that traipsing again.

Panic! At The (Quiet) Disco

In terms of equipment, Alex has access to a flashlight which I never needed at any point. You can additionally find flares, bottles and bricks to use, though again, there’s little use for the flares. More importantly, you need to scour the areas for asthma-managing tablets and inhalers. Being in dusty areas, clambering over furniture or being near the creatures will impact Alex’s lungs, eventually triggering an asthma or panic attack.

When this happens, you must either complete a QTE or use an inhaler, or get caught and die. For the most part, the management of this is relatively forgiving. You can repeat the QTE multiple times and bar the very last level, I was always fully stocked on inhalers. It’s an interesting wrinkle of gameplay but it probably needed a little more depth to make it an engaging system to be concerned about.

When you boil down A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead’s gameplay loop, you’re left with a lot of crouch walking, time spent standing still and not a whole lot of engaging systems. Once again, it’s a pitch-perfect representation of the world and universe, but whether that makes for an entertaining horror experience will depend a lot on your patience and tolerance for repetition and being slow.

Alex Marks The Spot

As mentioned at the start of this review, however, the story of A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is relatively good, barring some missteps. The narrative feels like an offshoot of one of the movies. We take on the role of Alex surviving roughly three months after the cataclysmic event that brought doom upon humanity’s noise. Alex is a well-written and interesting character, who finds herself in the rather difficult scenario of having to keep moving forward when everything around her falls apart.

Alex and the other cast are decently voiced and the characters around her are engaging, particularly her father and partner. Unfortunately, the wider group of characters have little to no time to really make an impact and often they disappear from the story as quickly as they appear. When A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead attempts some of the more dramatic, emotive moments like in the films, it falls short with a loud thump.

One antagonist set up early on is dropped literally in the next level. Another thread leads to a seismic shift in Alex’s world, only for it to be side-stepped until the very end of the game. There are plenty of interesting hooks here, but they feel underbaked and like they’re whispering when they could be shouting. I will say the flashback scenes to day 1 do a semi-decent job of setting up context, even if one revelation falls pretty flat.

Visuals Speak Louder Than Words

What does help sell A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead’s universe is the way Stormind Games has captured the feel of the world. Simple everyday locations are transformed into dilapidated, shredded locations of silent terror. Whether it be a fire station, hospital, trainwreck or electronic store, the concept artists have done a wonderful job of recreating the vibe of a normal world gone to hell, and devoid of the life created by laughter, chatter and song.

The majority of the game is silent, with the odd bits of background music or ambient sound cues. Its superb audio work goes a long way in communicating to the player when things are safe, or more often, every time it’s not. The initial warning sound cue for detection can be a crutch at times, particularly in areas where there are no creatures, but the game will simply trigger the death scene if you break the rule. It’s a little immersion breaking at times, but likely a budgetary sacrifice.

Graphically, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead holds up pretty well for the price point it’s being marketed for. The creatures themselves are just as horrifying here as they are in the movies. Though, their AI is prone to bugging out every now and then. Twice the alien detected me, sauntered over and then promptly sat on top of Alex, only to not trigger the kill animation. It was funny, but slightly undercuts the tension.

A Road Slowly Travelled

In all then, I can safely say that A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is a wonderful recreation of the atmosphere and spirit of the movies and wider IP. If you, for some wild reason, dreamed of a Quiet Place video game complete with the silence, isolation, despair and loneliness of a planet stripped of its voice, you’re going to adore this game. For that exact reason, I respect so much of what the developers have done, and their dedication to the source material.

Having said that, the glacial pace will put off more than a few players and quickly descend into an agonisingly boring affair for others. By the time I reached the end, I’d had my time with the game, and any further playthrough would likely have soured it altogether. Even though there are collectibles in notes, mixtapes and toys to obtain, I’d struggle to repeat it myself. Unless you’re a streamer or you want to view others suffer the silence, then it has plenty of replay value.

Which leaves A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead in quite a conflicting spot. It’s probably the best Quiet Place video game we ever could have gotten. It’s simultaneously eclipsed in its actual horror gameplay design by a title released 10 years ago that mechanically is much better. While I wouldn’t be shouting from the rooftops about it, I think A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is worth the dangerous, stolen whispers.

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is available now on PlayStation 5 (review platform), PC and Xbox Series S/X.

Developer: Stormind Games
Publisher: Saber Interactive

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy from the publisher.

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