A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead Review – The Sounds of Silence

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead Review

Games based on movies have a spotty history. At best, they take familiar stories and characters to new places. At worst, they’re pale imitations that remind us how good the originals were. Like its characters in the game, A Quiet Place: the Road Ahead wisely sidesteps some obvious traps. It’s not a literal retelling of the 2018 film or its sequel, but an original story set in the same universe. Best of all, it recognizes its limitations and maybe only slightly overstays its welcome.

What’s That Sound?

The foundation of both films is essentially the classic game of hide-and-seek, mixed with Elmer Fudd’s warning to be vewy, vewy quiet. In this case, the goal is not to surprise the unwitting Bugs Bunny but to avoid evisceration by sightless aliens called Death Angels. A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead doesn’t reprise characters from either film. It tells a much simpler story, focusing on a college-age young woman, Alex Taylor, her boyfriend, and a few other ensemble characters. Alex’s goal is to sneaky-sneak through the countryside long enough to reach the safety of a survivor enclave. Although there are a few flashbacks, most of the game’s action is focused on Alex in the present. There are some spoiler-level reasons for Alex’s survival stakes to be higher than just, you know, not dying.

Stealth games or stealth levels are a staple video game genre. A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead replaces being spotted with being heard. Still, anyone who doesn’t enjoy stealth in games might not vibe with this game’s reliance on moving very deliberately and often just standing still while the threat passes. There are a few odd design decisions, but if you buy into the premise and story, the game can be exceptionally tense as Alex creeps towards her goal. 

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead does a pretty good job of logically introducing its mechanics. Some surfaces like sand and environmental sounds like rain mask Alex’s footsteps. The faster she moves the louder she becomes. Alex has a cobbled-together phonometer that displays both ambient sounds and the noise she makes. You’ll spend a lot of time attending to both the phonometer and whatever’s in the environment.

Almost Insta-Death

Aside from moving quietly through the debris-strewn derelict world, Alex has to contend with having asthma. Moving through dusty environments or too much exertion can trigger an attack and its accompanying noise. So part of Alex’s task is to find and stay well stocked with single-use-only inhalers. It’s not usually a problem. As the game progresses and Alex explores new areas, the game introduces additional consumables, tools, and items she can use to distract the monsters or explore the world. However, aside from stealth, awareness, and figuring out optimal routes past the Death Angels, Alex has no actual combat tools or ways to fight.

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead’s post-alien-apocalypse world is well imagined. Everything has an appropriately beat-down, abandoned look with a heavy coating of lost hope layered on top. The game makes excellent use of environmental storytelling and the presence of notes, graffiti, and other detritus makes more logical sense than in most adventure games. The alien design comes right from the films and they’re as terrifying as you’d expect.

Naturally, sound design is at the forefront of the game’s presentation. What music there is is subtle, tense, and very understated. The environmental audio is exceptionally well done, and the game’s small cast of voice actors does a good job with a pretty well-written script. I’ve sort of minimized talking about the game’s narrative, but the story and most of the characters feel well connected to the world of the films, if not literally from them.

A Room Full of Noise

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead has one optional trick up its digital sleeve. Turn on your microphone and the game reacts to the sounds in your environment as well as Alex’s. I tried it. It’s a cool idea, but mostly what I noticed was how much freaking noise there is all around me all the time. Still, maybe the ideal way to play the game is wearing headphones and with the mic set to a relatively low sensitivity.

The Quiet Place films had a remarkably simple but very effective narrative hook. A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is a pitch-perfect, authentic recreation of the movies’ tone and tension. What holds it back is the lack of variety in player input stretched over the game’s running time of eight or so hours. It’s definitely not a great game for fidgety, impatient players. For fans of the films and/or stealth-focused adventure horror games, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead effectively checks a lot of boxes.

***PS5 code provided by the publisher for review***