A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead Review

Horror has always been about the atmosphere created by eerie silences and the noises that break those up. Be it from the character, trying to be as quiet as they can to avoid alerting the big bad to where they are, or in some cases, the noises that the big bad makes as you know it’s coming towards you. How else would you be able to identify the scariest horror monster ever without the distinctive sound of it on the tarmac? Though it must be said, A Quiet Place, led by the incomparable Emily Blunt and John Krasinski, also knew how to create that atmosphere. A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead looks to recreate that in game form.

Let me start by saying I didn’t use one of A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead’s touted features, microphone detection. Well, I should say that I simply flicked the mic on my headset to off mode because as much as it may add to the game, having to hold your breath or breathe lightly, my cats didn’t get that memo. Also, I’ve seen A Quiet Place: Day One; the cat survived – spoiler alert –  so the creatures shouldn’t be killing me because my cats decided they wanted to get involved.

If that breaks this review for you, then off you pop because the reality is that the feature isn’t something new or anything that adds to the game. If anything, it detracts from it because I don’t live in that world. I want to immerse myself, but barricading myself in a sound and cat-proof room isn’t reasonable or feasible. For those of you who are left and want to hear about the game, its mechanics, story and everything else, let’s carry on.

We’ll carry on with sound. Naturally, the whole world of A Quiet Place revolves around sound, and as Alex, you’re going to want to make as little sound as possible, with five different forms of movement – walking and crouching, both fast and slow, and sprinting. For most of the game, you will do the fast crouch because that’s the optimal approach; it’s quicker and quieter than the slow walk. You only need to go into a slow crouch over particularly noisy ground, such as broken glass or puddles.

This is the game’s key selling point, though the mileage you get from it will vary. It does try to play around with it a little. At different points, you will find bags of sand, which you can pour out to create paths of silence. You can also find bricks and bottles to throw and distract the aliens, and towards the end of the game, you can give the alien a headache by triggering a feedback loop on the TV. Another thing that links to noise is using a tool to detect the sound you’re making compared to the ambient sound.

I said “towards the end of the game” for the TV thing. This is my first criticism: A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is too short for the mechanics it introduces. I get the feeling that this was meant to be a longer game than it was, with more puzzles about getting around the monster, but something happened. It was initially announced as being developed by Illogika and Ep1t0me, so the move to Stormwind games may explain this feeling, or I could be completely wrong. However, I’m not wrong about how the mechanics feel rushed and underutilised, except for one.

That one is doors. I’m unsure who made all the hinges in America, but they are atrocious, and the whole country needs a refund. The game’s setting is only four months after the arrival of the aliens, and while I understand there are power issues, that roads will be littered with wrecked cars, and so on. What I don’t understand is how every single door in the game squeaks like a mouse on meth. I get that it’s the game mechanic; you have to slowly – and manually – open the door like that of Amnesia: The Dark Descent and avoid making noise, but it takes me out of the game, becoming tedious and having outstayed its welcome after the first twelve-million doors you’ve gone through

It also annoys me that the level layouts are absurd and just too “designed,” for lack of a better word. A good level should feel like it could exist in the world you are in, not that somebody has created set twists and turns that would only impede people, not creatures. Far too often, you are sent to crawl through a vent to find a key and open a door locked from the inside just to open another door. Nothing in the game is an actual “puzzle” in any sense, and when you have to get around one of the monsters, the paths are minimal, as in there are two – towards the monster or take the path around it.

One of the most annoying aspects of the sound and level design is that it doesn’t make sense when you die. If you hit the game’s arbitrary “too much noise” level, a cutscene starts, and you die. It doesn’t matter if you’re behind five walls, in a small corridor, or a patch of grass in a field; the creature just appears out of the ether. Not once did I feel that the creature was this threat, simply because there was no agency once the noise threshold was met. You couldn’t run away, you couldn’t hide, you couldn’t try to trick it by throwing a bottle; you had already lost because you hit the sound cap.

If there is one positive to bring from this, there is some success in level design in how Stormind games have laid things out. You do have to think about the path you take in the sense that there is glass on the floor, or do you walk over twigs or through a puddle? Can you sneak around the red cans that just happen to be inconveniently placed where you would need to walk in the middle of a forest? This part makes you think.

One thing I haven’t mentioned yet is the other key noise-creator: asthma. Alex, the protagonist, has asthma. Also, she’s pregnant, but the game ignores this apart from cheap “look, guys, she has a parasite growing in her” pulls. As you exert yourself by carrying extremely light wood planks, climbing up ledges, or going through places the game has deemed dusty, her asthma will start playing up. Once the level reaches its limit, you can either succeed in a quick-time event, or Alex will have an asthma attack, and you’ll encounter the cutscene.

Fortunately, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead isn’t stingy about giving you inhalers or leaving pills around for you to reduce your asthma meter. I found myself on my last inhaler only once or twice, more often than not, at the cap of five. Early on, the other usable items were batteries, which ran out more often if you weren’t careful with your torch usage. I can’t complain much about that since I imagine I would have used more if I weren’t as willing to snail my way through the game.

To be honest, I didn’t like A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead. The films range from excellent to decent, but the game doesn’t manage to capture that same sense of dread. Due to the convoluted level design, choices like a random rail-shooter section, and the ending, which quite literally becomes “press X to not die,” it feels patchwork. The creature is annoying and not threatening because there is no threat from the creature except for a few patrol areas where you can get yourself cornered.

I couldn’t also class it as threatening because it wasn’t smart. As mentioned, you could get yourself cornered, where the creature would be right in front of you, but it won’t know you’re there until you make a sound or the somewhat vague hit-box collides with you (after passing through an object or two), and the cutscene starts. Despite knowing the inevitable outcome, those moments were the only time I felt tense in that game. Beyond that, the creature had no real direction; it would flit around randomly, though it still always happened to be following you when you got past it.

Again, it felt too forced, too convoluted. I tend to find a horror game—or any game—works best when it is organic. I want it to rest on me like a blood, vomit, and faeces-soaked shroud, and I want to feel like the game presented could exist in the world before us. Instead, I felt like this was a set of designed levels with precise routes and actions to take at set times, and the way to get through it was to do it all slowly, even when it comes to the easter-eggs and collectables, like the space ship from the first film, or cassette tapes.

Maybe the hidden message of the game is “patience is a virtue”, but I don’t need five to six hours of trudging through extremely littered forests and streets telling me that. Maybe you will like A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead, but I sadly didn’t.

PC version reviewed. Copy provided by the publisher.

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is a game with interesting ideas, looking to build on the success of the films, but falls flat with level design and certain mechanics breaking, rather than enhancing, immersion. With clear signs of what could have been really good, a few slips hold the game back.