Will this game vanish with zero fanfare or is it worth making some noise about?
A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is a first person stealth horror game created by Stormind Games and published by Sabre Interactive who have a track record for creating games based on other media and if you’ve some how missed them, the game is based on the movie franchise of the same name.
A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is billed as a multi-media event which if I’m entirely honest I read as ‘Low quality move tie in’. I’m from a time when awful movie tie in games were released along side hit movies and more often than not they were absolutely awful. I wasn’t expecting much from A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead but it didn’t take long for my misgivings to be silenced.
During A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead you’ll take on the role of Alex, she was a college student and musician before the creatures arrived. In case you’re unsure the creatures in question are nearly indestructible with exceptionally acute hearing, hearing they use to hunt and kill, meaning silence is golden, something you’ll have to adapt to swiftly or see many game over screens.
As the game begins a storm rages outside and the noise affords you some level of protection, upon gaining entry a slip of paper discard on the ground reads “shh, quiet time”…okay, tension levels up, let’s get silent. A few moments later and thunder cracks and I about left my skin. As first impressions go The road ahead was off to amazing start as I explored this lodge as Alex with her partner Martin hunting supplies. This stage essentially acts as the tutorial letting you get to grips with the games mechanics. This tutorial ends with a revelation, Alex is pregnant, complicated at the best of times, but in this post apocalyptic world it’s likely to get everyone killed, but then you’ll need to survive long enough for the birth to be an issue. The narrative is fairly simple but survival and sacrifice are not less poignant for their simplicity.
The environments in A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead are built to promote caution and induce anxiety. The layout of such levels may be a tad convoluted at times but it’s all in aid of the overall experience. As you navigate the road ahead you’ll need to be aware of your surroundings to a degree unlike any other horror game you’ve played. You’ll have to watch where you place your feet, the audible difference between a step onto a concrete slab compared to one covered in fallen leaves may be all it takes to bring a creature and your doom. You’ll encounter creatures, in fact at times they are unavoidable, doing so will increase your heart rate, not just yours as the player but Alexs’ also, Alex has asthma and if her stress levels get to high, and asthma attack will trigger. A quick button prompt will flash on the screen as your vision blurs, buying you valuable moments to take your inhaler, but inhalers aren’t inexhaustible, you’ll run out and have to find more scattered in the remnants of the world. Environmental factors can also set off asthma attacks so planning your routes through areas is essential. You have some tools to aid in your journey to safety, a torch, flares items to throw as distractions but the most essential and useful is the noise detector, it displays the levels of background noise as well as how much sound you’re making, stay below the limit and your sounds will be masked, cross that threshold and attract unwanted attention.
The majority of the game takes place 119 days from the initial appearance of the creatures with the occasional flash back to day 1, and I have to be honest, it does a better job of portraying those events than the third movie in the franchise. You’ll get to blast creatures off the van your escaping the disaster but you’re doing little more than shooting their hands to make them lose grip. Combat is not an option in A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead, much like similar games it’s your utter powerlessness that brings the tension. In my experience and my time with A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead there are two things that ruin the tension, one is as your play you start to become comfortable with the game and it’s mechanics and your confidence grows, the second is repetition due to failure.
A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead does a perfect job of dealing with one of these issues and that is keeping you off balance. As the game progress you’ll find new tasks that need to be completed such as disarming sound traps or having to move heavy planks from A to B to progress through areas. These might not sound like much but they are introduced at such a perfect pace that it stopped me relaxing into a groove and nullifying the terror, in fact rather the opposite, losing your light source and eventual having to use a wind up gyro light, the very winding of which causes a sound the creatures may hear hand me stumbling around in the darkness, often into features of the environment that generated more noise, getting me killed in the process.
This is where the A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead fails to deal with the second issue, repetition. The games checkpoints can be frustratingly placed often forcing you to repeat narrative safe sections, it may be something as benial as moving through as safe room but doing so over and over again was frustrating. Naturally you’ll get caught by the creatures from time to time depending on the difficulty you’re playing on (more on that later) and repeating 90% of an environment only to get caught in the last 10% multiple times became tedious. Now, one solution to this would be to “qit good” and just not get caught and a lot of that will depend on your gameplay settings.
I completed the game on hard, I play the majority of my games on hard as for the most part it feels more rewarding. A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is no exception and I’d advise you to do the same, due to my choice of difficulty my HUD was essentially empty and the game was all the more immersive because of it, not to mention the immersion generated by the fact the mic in my control pad was active and any noise generated by me would impact the game. More than once did I just sneak past a creature and breath a heavy sigh of relief or vocalise frustration as I stepped on shattered glass (in game) and find myself dead at the claws of the alien fiends. To return briefly to the games HUD, the easier difficulties give you so much information it’s a wonder how the game would be enjoyable at all. From stress indicators so you can avoid asthma attacks, to a variety of other tools that let you know how aware the creatures are of you. These would have entirely ruined the experience for me, being alone in this world with just the inbuilt tools Alex has access to to elevates the experience from an average sneak and hide romp to a horror master class that would leave me all to aware of the sounds I was making after each play session.
