A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead Review

The Death Angels have landed on Earth — terrifying creatures that hunt through sound alone — and in order to survive, you'll need to follow the one rule: don't make a sound. But can you suppress your instinct to scream and flee?

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is the videogame adaptation of the John Krasinski-directed movie (yes, Jim Halpert from The Office). Developed by Stormind Games and published by Saber Interactive, you'll be thrown into a horror sphere that's all too familiar... and yet, eerily distinct from everything else that you may have experienced thus far.

The A Quiet Place franchise has been a unique take on the horror genre similar to Birdbox: remove a basic sense from the survivors and see how they fare against the creatures. In this post-Death-Angel world, you'll have to survive without making too much sound, as the slightest mishap — a squeal, a misstep, a sneeze — will spell your undoing. Staying true to this gimmick, The Road Ahead mimics the feeling of helplessness as you face the first of many Death Angels that you'll encounter on your road, and without your usual tools of fleeing or fighting back, sometimes the only option you have is standing still.

This horror experience manages to nail the elements I most love about the franchise overall: a deep-seated sense of helplessness. Without being able to run or fight back, you'llbe forced to play as quietly as possible, sometimes being forced to stand still right in front of your very hunter, as trying to flee runs the risk of making noise and dying. To make it through the world, you'll have to manage the sound that you make (which you can take literally with a microphone listening to you to make sure you feel the true horror), and this comes into play throughout numerous gameplay elements and environments, as Stormind Games plays freely with this feature and seek to innovate upon it.

From opening doors slowly to watching where you step, sound is a problem that you'll inevitably face. Crunchy gravel and puddles of water are plentiful on the road to survival, and taking a wrong step or doing a wrong turn could lead to your quick demise. The developer plays freely with this possibility, and you can tell the fun the team had questioning which floor would be the most perilous — crunchy leaves, roof tiles, or glass shards. There's a deep sense of mischief coming from the way the game was built as if the environment is actively trying to kill you, and it adds to the feeling that you're constantly being hunted by what is otherwise an apex predator.

Sound management feels great, as you're sent on spirals to ensure that you're not making a mistake on your path. Exploration comes at the risk of making too much noise, but you need batteries, inhalers (the protagonist has asthma — more on that later), and collectibles to find for completionists. Entering a room might lead to the very item that you need, but you'll have to manoeuvre the floor or scattered cans or empty metal barrels that you could easily tip over, and this would all lead to death.

It's a bittersweet feeling to go through the trouble of doing something only to find that it's an item you have too many of or — gods forbid — nothing. It makes for an immersive adventure that weighs risk versus reward in a more serious and perilous environment, but whether it makes a great gameplay experience will be entirely up to the player, and this is where The Road Ahead gets a bit more complex than it might seem at first.

You see, Stormind Games nailed exactly what I loved about the franchise; it feels immersive, and truly like if you're living through the events of A Quiet Place. Yet, this fact is simultaneously a blessing and a curse, as it restricts The Road Ahead into a genre that doesn't delve into horror too much; it feels more like a simulation title.

When playing through the game, you'll be forced to open doors extremely slowly so that the environment covers the noise you're making. You'll spend actual minutes of your life opening drawers gradually to ensure that they don't creak and call a Death Angel unto you. You'll slowly walk and crawl across vast environments so you don't step on that one glass shard that'll get you killed. Unlike traditional horror, where you flee and hide or you fight back in survival horrors, your only option is to be extremely careful, move incredibly slow, and make absolutely no noise. There are few experiences that force you to stay still when facing the very monster that hunts you down, but it puts The Road Ahead in a niche that feels a bit removed from traditional titles in the genre.

If you like the idea of how that sounds, then read no further: get The Road Ahead. It feels like a genuine one-to-one recreation of the horrors in the movie, and you live the terror of fighting a Death Angel. But if it sounds like sneaking around, walking slowly, and opening drawers for (sometimes) no gratification might be grating, then it might very well get to that point. Sitting at about 10 hours per playthrough, most of the time, you're not even facing the Death Angels, as you're instead analysing the floor and trying to decipher what would possibly get you killed less: a harmless puddle of water or a harmless pile of leaves.

It's a fantastic recreation of the decision-making that familiarises you with the environment and has you thinking about things other horrors haven't even touched on. But the caveat is that this is uncharted waters, and the gameplay is liable to become monotonous and repetitive: walk slowly, avoid the loud surface, and get out. It feels exactly like when you were a teenager, it's 3 AM, and you really want a sandwich, but your parents are asleep... just that cranked up to 1,000... and the repercussion for failure is death.

What you get is a unique experience where Stormind Games experiments with different mechanics to make you paranoid. Loud floors turns into bear traps which turn into sand management to walk on loud surfaces, and every new level has a gimmick to keep it interesting. The mechanics stay around long enough to let you familiarise yourself with them, yet they don't overstay their welcome, which makes for a nice change of pace to break the monotony of being quiet, but at the same time, it runs the risk of becoming gimmicky and contrived.

The one thing you'll be dealing with throughout the entire story is Alex's asthma. You'll need to manage your character's stress levels and capability to manage heavy duty, which means that neglecting her illness too long will lead to an attack where she cannot breath, and unless you successfully avoid it via a Quick-time Event, you'll be facing a long stun that will, for the most part, lead to certain death.

It's not too bad — I played in Normal difficulty (I was too much of a coward to go Hard) and there are enough Inhalers to get you through the worst of it. I felt perhaps Stormind Games was tackling too much in their first A Quiet Place videogame adaptation, as you're already facing innovative idea on top of innovative idea, which meant that adding asthma and stress management on top felt like a bit much.

It's not difficult to manage, and quite frankly, it barely affected my gameplay, having only faced about one asthma attack that really hindered my progression. Elsewise, it was oftentimes a stopper to my advancements, as it discouraged me from standing too close to the Death Angels because her stress levels would skyrocket (not like mine weren't) and then she'd have a panic attack. It takes away from the only weakness that our predator has, as instead, I was encouraged to be as far away from them as possible, and it was impossible to recover it, even if you found a safe place to stand around and catch your breath.

Everything in the game feels scripted, which was a minor nitpick I had. Encounters with the Death Angels, for the most part, happen because someone did something stupid (usually our protagonist, Alex) and called the lethal aliens. Now, you must sneak around a specific section to do a puzzle and make it out alive... only for it to happen again.

...and again. There's definitely a sense of over-exposure to the Death Angels that can be a bit desensitising for the fear aspect, though it never fails to feel eerie and terrifying throughout most of it, even when you've faced them for several chapters at a time. The alternative to over-exposure would have, instead, been underexposure, which I would have felt robbed for: I wanted The Road Ahead to face Death Angels, and with a predator that hunts through sound, the only way for you to constantly face them is by either you doing something stupid or other characters doing something stupid. This feels scripted but is preferable to the alternative of facing them too little. 

I enjoyed The Road Ahead through short bursts because — despite having nerves of steel — the jitters and stress would get to me, to the point in which I had to stop. Death Angels and keeping quiet at all times is definitely a Cortisol factory, and I loved feeling that stress in a way that few other horror titles have been able to replicate, and fewer — if any — will ever be able to.

The gameplay and mechanics are great, though this leads me to my biggest complaint of it all: the narrative. I'm going to avoid spoilers as best I can, but the main problem is that the plot is pretty simple and all of our characters have little to no progression and advancements. The cliché moments from our otherwise dull protagonist aren't the worst offender, as instead the typical narrative falls victim to its own stereotype plotlines. The boring characters do little to make you care for them, and their impact on the plot is pretty insignificant, if not laughable at best.

There are moments when the narrative picks up, but for the most part, it continues downhill after the first two chapters. Though the narrative isn't what you should be playing The Road Ahead for, I definitely wish that more thought had been put into the overall progression. I find that one of the most important aspects of a horror experience is to have a likeable protagonist that you want to survive, but Alex failed to check that box. And after there was no one I cared for because of rampant death, there was little reason to press onward aside from gameplay purposes (which really speaks wonders of how gripping the gameplay can be).

But that all comes full circle — though the narrative felt like the worst aspect of it all, it was the one that least impacted my overall experience. If you want a well-thought-out story with evolving characters and interconnecting plotlines, then you have the other A Quiet Place movies to watch. Instead, Stormind Games focuses its budget on the aspects that matter most for this particular title: graphics and innovation.

The world is jaw-droppingly gorgeous, with environments that made me wish we didn’t head out in the dead of night so often (not that I blame them — it’s a horror game, after all). The realistic setting helps immerse yourself in a way that lesser graphical focus would have, and I loved the way the world and designs felt. Likewise, the innovative elements leave nothing to the imagination: you play with bear traps and sound traps, you play near waterfalls, you play with flares. There are a lot of gameplay elements and mechanics that let you experience The Road Ahead as a videogame. There are few scenarios that I wish I had had the opportunity to experience against Death Angels because Stormind Games explored most situations at some length, and it gives you the capability to gamify A Quiet Place. The good narrative and story are reserved for the movies, and I’m glad that less of the budget went into this element and was instead focused on the gameplay.

As a fan of the movies, I really enjoyed A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead. Yeah, there are issues and inconsistencies with the way the AI works in contrast to typical Death Angel behaviour, but sacrifices had to be made along the way to get a livable apocalypse that you could play through. I appreciated being hunted and followed rather than instantly trampled and killed. My mind races at the idea of Stormind Games turning this into a videogame franchise, as the unique creativity from the team and the already established IP makes for such an exhilarating attempt, and yet, I hope for a sequel that fixes some of the complaints that I had with this one.

Priced at just £24.99, this is a beautiful world with AAA graphics that constantly left my jaw agape with unique innovations and mechanics that are missing all too much from modern gaming. It's a unique direction in the horror genre that we haven't gotten the chance to experience too much of, and if this sounds like something you'll enjoy, then it's likely a no-brainer at this price point.