A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead Review – Say It Quietly

Movie tie-in games are something of a dying art. During the heyday of the sixth generation of consoles practically every film got a flashy video game adaption, but consistent misfires mean we rarely get to explore our favorite cinematic worlds in interactive forms in the modern era.

As such, I was quietly excited for A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead. Rather than a direct movie adaption, it takes place within the first few months of the alien invasion that forms the franchise’s key complicating action. What follows over the next six hours is a taut but predictable stealth horror game, with its inspirations clearly on display, but never quite reaching those heights.

Image Source: Stormind Games via Twinfinite

You play as Alex, an asthma-riddled survivor who has lost almost everything since the invasion. We meet her on day 120 after the dystopia began, with frequent flashes back to her life before and immediately after the spindly, noise-sensitive aliens first arrived. Taking place over just a few days, it charts her quest to find solace, escaping to an area where the monsters can’t get her.

To do so, you’ll trawl through this disheveled world alone, dodging monsters and environmental peril to find permanent shelter. As you’d expect from the films, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is an incredibly slow-paced game, without many bombastic set pieces or action sequences. Instead, the bread and butter of the gameplay loop is sneaking around, making as little noise as possible.

If you’ve played Alien: Isolation, you’ll instantly feel at home with The Road Ahead’s gameplay. In one hand you hold a noise sensor, telling you how much environmental noise there is and how much noise you’re making as you sneak around. This is exacerbated by opening doors too quickly, stepping on glass, or taking puffs on your inhaler. Yes, the player character Alex requires frequent bursts of medication to stave off asthma attacks, which are brought on by too much physical exertion or being too close to the aliens.

Image Source: Stormind Games via Twinfinite

Speaking of which, the monsters in A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead don’t exactly match up to the xenomorph in Alien: Isolation. While the fundamental encounters feel similar in structure, the AI is much more regimented and predictable, but also less fair in their detection abilities. Sometimes you’ll be far away from any monsters but get grabbed regardless, while other times you can sneak right alongside it and be totally fine. The game doesn’t offer much else other than these stealthy encounters where you have to get through a large labyrinth or puzzle area with a monster stuck in with you, and it gets tiresome by the end of the six-hour campaign.

That said, it’s a novel enough execution of the franchise’s key gimmick that it starts off entertainingly, if a little hand-holdy as you plod through plenty of storytelling beforehand. It’s genuinely nerve-wracking the first few times you accidentally step on a shard of glass, hearing the monster detect you and desperately scramble to get away silently.

The issue is that there isn’t enough meaningful development of this mechanic for it to retain that level of tension by the time you reach the tenth or eleventh encounter of this kind. There are efforts to do so, such as adding sandbags to pour out and make your path silent, and flares that light the way but produce a latent noise that can teeter you over into a monster’s detection zone, but it’s never more than a brief diversion from the tried-and-true sneak method you’ll now be used to.

Image Source: Stormind Games via Twinfinite

When your strategy ultimately boils down to crouching and holding the left stick just gently enough to keep you quiet on your noise sensor, it soon gets frustrating when you’re caught out and have to replay an entire section – or face another massive warehouse to get through just after completing one. A Quiet Place works as a movie franchise because the films find the sweet spot between optimizing their premise and milking them, but due to its increased length, this game doesn’t have that luxury.

Even though it gets tiresome in its latter stages, there’s still enough in A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead to warrant fans of the series giving it a try. While there isn’t too much to tie it closely to the movies, the environments look absolutely stunning and the first few hours of survival gameplay are really engaging. It’s a surprisingly interesting, character-driven narrative too, one that inevitably takes a back seat when the focus goes on upping the ante and careening towards the game’s high-octane conclusion.

If you’re after a taut, tension-laden survival horror game based on a hit movie franchise, you’ll be better served by Alien: Isolation than A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead. There’s just not enough substance to its central gameplay arc to keep it fresh as you approach the latter hours, leaving you fed up by the premise of another encounter instead of intimidated by it. Franchise fans will definitely find some value in its execution of the series’ conceit, but far better alternatives are out there already.

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