A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead Review

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A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is a first-person survival horror game based off the movie franchise of the same name. The game tells its own self-contained story but it all happens in the same world as the movies. The Road Ahead is an overall faithful recreation of the movies in a video game form. It’s incredibly immersive, but sometimes its mechanics get in the way of its overall enjoyment.

Players take on the role of Alex as we live out various days of her overall survival. Just like the second movie, the game skips around a bunch and its overall very slow from the beginning. If you’ve seen the first movie, the game starts out around the same. It world builds and introduces characters for quite a while before anything actually starts happening. It’s got an overall good story though. The overall narrative and cutscenes can be just as brutal as the movies. Characters die without much warning at times and there is always a sense of danger.

The game closely resembles Alien Isolation in its overall feel. You have to reduce noise as much as you can while working your way through environments. Before long, you get a device that measures the amount of noise that you are making and must keep your sounds as low as possible. Covering up your sounds includes moving slow (ducking and moving), opening doors slow and many other forms of maintaining silence. You have to be aware of what type of ground you are stepping across since all different types of ground will make different sounds – such as stepping through noisy water or gravel.

As you create noise, you’ll get sound cues that let you know that you are approaching the limit. If you continue to make noise, more sound cues start going off (creature yells, etc.) and eventually you die by a creature killing you. Sometimes creatures will actually come to your location and sometimes you will instantly die. There are points where creatures are in the actual environment with you and you can lure them to different areas by creating noise (tossing a bottle or a brick). The creatures have a certain amount of awareness based on the noise you have created. The actual awareness is shown on your device but limited to only easy mode. In normal and hard mode, you have to take a guess as to the creature’s awareness.

The main character suffers from asthma and you must constantly use inhalers to keep her from coughing. She has a lung meter that shows her condition. All forms of platforming (climbing, dropping, etc.) will take away from the meter. Sometimes environments have dust or some other complication that will reduce your lung meter as well. You can find inhalers and pills in the environment to reduce the problem. Inhalers will actually give you immunity for a few seconds before you go back to normal status.

When you get super low in your lung meter, the character’s sight will start to turn gray and you’ll have much more limited vision. If you don’t find an inhaler or pill, you’ll have to play a minigame in order to deal with your asthma and, basically, self-heal by a bit. Fail the minigame and you’ll die. The main character’s condition leads to some majorly stressful and scary gameplay at times. To make her condition even worse, when she is near one of the creatures, your lung gauge will constantly go down. There is quite a bit of inhalers and other consumables in the game’s environments, but it’s so very easy to use them up quickly when the creatures are in the area.

The overall look of the game is pretty good. It’s noticeable that the character models aren’t up to par with newer games, but they aren’t anything awful. The overall sound to this game is really immersive. For the most part, the game is quiet, but it has some background music at times. The character’s breathing and worrying are very well done as well. If you play this game with headphones, it’s quite engaging thanks to its overall sound design.

From the very beginning, I could already see the faults with this game and it carried over to the remainder of the game as well. You must do EVERYTHING with caution, thereby doing it all super slow. This includes opening doors and drawers. Drawers aren’t that big of a problem since you don’t find all that many. Having to open the NUMEROUS amounts of doors slowly can really kill the enjoyment in the game. The game uses the familiar “hold a button then press the thumbstick in a direction” type of control to open a door. For nearly every door in the game, you have to SLOWLY open it. This gets old FAST. About halfway through, I was already rolling my eyes while having to open a door super slow to avoid making noise. There are times where you’ll open a door (at a snail’s pace) then it will close behind you and then you have to open it again on the way out of a room!

You also have to sneak around a bunch by ducking while moving in order to make minimal noise. The sneaking didn’t bother me as much, but the door opening really got to me. The game also has inconsistent noise making. Sometimes, you’ll be as quiet as possible but still raise an alert, but other times, you can be really loud and nothing happens. There are some parts where the game “excuses” your loud noises in order to get to a certain area. For instance, there was one part where I went fast across a noisy board to get to the other side of a gap and the creature directly below the board couldn’t hear it.

One really good part about the overall pacing of the game is that it is constantly introducing new mechanics to you. There are some areas where you can spread sand across the ground so that you can walk on it quietly. There is also one actiony chapter, which is a fantastic break from the usual gameplay. There are many other new mechanics that the game introduces, that I won’t spoil for you, and it’s all quite pleasing. Sadly, there is not much in the way of replay value. There are collectibles and four difficulties. The achievements have a bunch of speed run trials if that is your thing. It was highly noticeable that the achievement for beating this game on normal difficulty was a “rare” achievement on Xbox, and the achievement for beating the game on easy difficulty was “common”, which goes to show how frustrating just the default normal difficulty can be.

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is a decent game to try out for fans of the movies and survival horror fans. If you can look past some of its problems, the game is quite well made and unique. Fans of Alien Isolation will most likely find something to enjoy with this game. It’s not perfect, but there are definitely moments of greatness here and there.

The Good:
+ Nails the feel of the movies for the most part
+ Good story – feels like an actual side story to the movies
+ Overall great sound
+ Very immersive game – this is both good and bad at times

The Bad:
- At times, the gameplay gets too slow and feels too confined from fear of making too much noise
- Some of the noise-making is inconsistent