Developer: Stormind Games
Publisher: Saber Interactive
Platform: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S
Tested on: PC
A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead – Review
If you’ve been into horror in the last decade, you’ve certainly heard of A Quiet Place. This alien invasion movie became instantly iconic with its unique premise: a world where the aliens that land on Earth are blind and hunt solely based on sound. This forces the human survivors to adapt to a new, noiseless way of life. After the release of three successful movies, it’s not surprising that a video game joins the roster. A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is a single-player survival horror game with a unique story set within the same universe as the movies. The game is developed by Stormwind Games, who already have some experience under their belt after developing the Remothered series. Time to see how our stealth holds up against these creepy crawlers.
Story
The game has a completely unique narrative and characters, so no knowledge of the movie franchise is required to enjoy it. We play the game as Alex, a young woman who has been surviving the alien invasion alongside her boyfriend Martin, a few family members, and a bunch of other survivors currently taking refuge in a hospital. Alex has asthma, which can pose a problem, as physical activities or panic make her hyperventilate. Despite this, she tries to carry her weight in the group. Together with Martin, she heads to a ranch in search of food. While there, Alex finds a pregnancy test and takes it because she has been experiencing nausea, discovering she’s pregnant with Martin’s child. To further complicate matters, things completely go sideways on the ranch, kickstarting a domino effect that threatens the hospital’s safety and eventually leads to Alex fleeing to find a new, more permanent safe haven for her and her unborn child.
Most of the story is told through gorgeous, cinematic cutscenes, though there are plenty of optional notes and easter eggs to discover if you love exploring. Some of these are allusions to the characters or events of the movies, and some are original lore.
Graphics
Despite not being a triple-A title, we really enjoyed the graphics of A Quiet Place: The Road Home. The hyperrealism works without being uncanny like it can be in some other games, with the character models looking really good. There are nice environments to explore, and it recreates some locations from the movies. You have to pay extra attention since environmental clues will also often tell you how to avoid making noise, such as the type of ground you’re walking on. As has become the norm in first-person games of this style, yellow paint on items or buildings will guide you where to go or what to interact with. And of course, there are the alien designs, which were already great in the movie, and thus they look nicely creepy when confronting you in the game.
Sound
The game does not have a ton of music to speak of. We’ve noticed narrative-driven horror titles often keep the soundtrack very simple to not distract from other things, though in this case there’s the legitimate excuse of noise playing an important role in the gameplay. Everything you do makes noise, and you have to keep that in mind to avoid drawing attention. To this end, you have a small device that shows how much noise you’re making and how much ambient noise there is. The game also has some very good voice acting.
Gameplay
A Quiet Place: The Road Home is a pretty typical survival horror game in terms of the mechanics. The game knits its cinematic cutscenes together with gameplay segments where you are thrust into a location that you can explore, with simple puzzles you need to solve to find a way forward into the next area. The puzzles are never really complicated but avoiding the aliens can be quite tricky. As mentioned above, you have to be very mindful of how much noise you’re making to not draw their attention, because being attacked by one will be an instakill. Running away is also not an option unless you have a hiding spot you can get to before they catch up, and the aliens are not slow by any means. To survive, distract them by throwing rocks and making ambient noise, or sneaking around. You can use various tricks to make stealth easier.
In a pinch, you can use a gun for self-defense, but only in some specific parts of the game. Most of the time you are defenseless, which greatly enhances the tense atmosphere. You also need to manage your character’s asthma by finding inhaler medication, since strain and fear make her hyperventilate in a panic. We never had much issue with this mechanic, though sneaking was more of a trial-and-error ordeal. Sometimes, we did feel as if the monster could hear our footsteps or small noises to a ridiculous degree, even if we were using ways to circumvent it such as sprinkling sand on the ground. There were a few parts of the game that felt straight-up unfair.
Overall, we can definitely say that A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead doesn’t have bad gameplay but also doesn’t really do anything interesting or new with the mechanics. This made the almost seven-hour runtime feel more like a boring slog by the end of it, which we were mostly pushing through because we wanted to see the end of the story.
Conclusion
A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is not the first and won’t be the last horror movie that gets a game tie-in. Compared to other first-person survival horror games, it’s nothing innovative, with an engaging if somewhat cliché plot and mechanics that fail to stay entertaining the entire way. The game certainly looks and sounds great though, and the atmosphere itself will be enough to please most horror fans.
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