Back in 2018, couple John Krasinski and Emily Blunt took the horror world by storm with a movie about monsters that hunt based on sound. Titled A Quiet Place, it’s gone on to spawn a sequel, a prequel and now even a video game. One they call A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead.
A stand-alone story set in the same universe as the films — in which blind creatures have crash landed on earth, and kill anything they hear make a sound — The Road Ahead is the tale of a young woman named Alex. Part of a group of survivors who’ve taken up residence inside an abandoned hospital, she finds herself on the run from former friends.
The game begins as Alex and her boyfriend are out scavenging. Things don’t go as planned, and the man sacrifices himself to save her. She soon finds out that she’s pregnant, and is now trying to survive for two as opposed to one, not to mention the father’s memory.
After things go poorly at the hospital, following her return, our protagonist sets out on a sneaky adventure from inner land to the sea. There, she hopes to find and commandeer a boat, thinking that’s the safest bet. She’s being hunted though, and not just by these creatures who quietly stalk each environment and pounce on anything that makes even a little bit of sound.
So, how does one make a video game based on horror movies where the characters cannot make a sound? Well, Milano, Italy’s Stormind Games decided to use the formula that Alien: Isolation made famous.
Presented in a first-person viewpoint, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead tasks you with navigating different environments, like forests, compounds, mine shafts, and interior locations such as a pumping facility and a firehouse. Its challenge comes in finding the best route, and attempting to get by without making much noise. This means looking at the ground, to see if there’s gravel or broken glass, or even water. Going over those makes more noise than normal ground, and it’s possible to alert the monsters by doing so. They’ll quickly come after you, and gruesomely kill you in choreographed cutscenes.
Each location has its own puzzles, of sorts, but it usually boils down to using sandbags to cover loud ground, throwing bottles or bricks to lead the monsters away and/or using wooden planks to get across to other areas. Later on, you will also be tasked with finding and using fuses to replace blown ones.
The player will also find themselves unlocking a lot of bolted doors, breaking windows and opening and closing both drawers and said doors. The key is to do so slowly and quietly, inch by inch, just like you crawl through the environments. Keep an eye out for traps, too, because other humans have set up the odd noise trap that must be dismantled.
Like Alien: Isolation before it, this is a game where you can’t really fight back against the enemy. However, that isn’t always true. There is one level wherein you’re in the back of a fleeing ambulance, and must use a shotgun to blow away any monsters who grab onto the back of the vehicle. The shooting mechanics are basic, but mostly fine. Said shotgun shows up at one other point.
That particular stage is one of the couple parts of this game where you revisit the beginning of this chaos. The first is a nice lakeside birthday party, where the story is advanced and exploration isn’t limited to sneaking.
Those who go off the beaten path are rewarded with news articles, hidden/collectible mix tapes (in this era!?) and locked briefcases. The latter require finding combinations in the nearby area, and give you articles, puffers and more.
Speaking of puffers, it’s important to note that Alex has asthma. When the monsters are skulking nearby, her airways constrict. The same occurs when she’s in a dusty area. The key to fixing this is to use inhalers, which you can store five of, but it sometimes seemed like the aliens could hear me using them. It was hard to tell though, because the AI is honestly inconsistent. Sometimes, I’d be killed when I made very little noise. At other times, I got away with a shocking amount. Then again, I imagine that it’s tough to perfect such an AI.
You can also pick up and use flares, along with the distracting and thrown bricks and bottles. Plus, if you have a headset, it’s possible to turn on a feature where the game monitors your microphone. Make a noise (cough, sneeze, etc.) and you’ll be heard. These features are then joined by a ‘windable’ flashlight and a noise meter that I hardly used.
It took me a while to finish A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead due to health problems and the fact that I ran into a bit of a bug. At least, something that the developers didn’t expect.
During the pump station stage, I got to a point where I had to break a window, open a door and then use a plank to get across to a vent. The first time, I opened an extra gate and went through it. However, I must have always carried the plank through the other door, dropped it and picked it up outside, through a small hole in the wall. The game didn’t like that, because it wouldn’t register that I’d gone across to, and opened, the vent. I’d crawl through it, get to the next security room and not be able to open the escape door.
I tried and tried to get past this point. I reloaded old saves, and I even restarted from the beginning of the ambulance stage that preceded it. That way, the pump station would load anew. However, that didn’t work.
After sending video to the developers, I was told that I had to open the gate and bring the plank through it to trigger the next checkpoint. When I was able to get back to the game, I tried that and was able to progress through to the end of this approximately ten hour long game. I wasted a lot of time though!
Visually, The Road Ahead is a pretty good looking affair. For a licensed budget game, it looks surprisingly solid. It also ran well on Xbox Series X. It’s far from the best looking game out there, but I was pleasantly surprised.
The same is true of the sound. Everything sounded pretty good coming out of my new Turtle Beach headset. The voice acting was also pretty solid for what kind of a game this is.
Overall, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is a pretty good Alien: Isolation clone that does a good job of translating its source material to interactive form. You’d think that such an experience would be boring, but I enjoyed myself. It’s rough around the edges, repetitive and a bit buggy, but it’s a decent game. Surprisingly decent, given that it’s a budget priced licensed game based on a horror movie, and not one that comes from a big name developer.
This review is based on the Xbox Series X version of the game, which we were provided with.