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

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead at a Glance

As a fan of the A Quiet Place series of movies, the idea of a video game based on the same premise had me cautiously optimistic. Sneaking around terrifying creatures without a single noise is dangerously enticing, but the novelty is risky – can it be done without feeling too tedious or getting too boring?

During my time with the title, I found that the idea does work as a game, but some odd design choices and other issues make it hard to truly recommend. Our full A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead review goes into why this one doesn’t make the cut as one of the best horror games in 2024.

The Death Angels are Here

Unlike the movies that A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is based on, this story set in the same world doesn’t follow the Abbot family from the main two films, nor does it follow Sam or Eric from the prequel film. Instead, The Road Ahead quietly blazes its own trail, setting the course for other spin-off narratives to be told.

In The Road Ahead, you play Alex, a survivor living in a hospital with a small community who – much like the rest of the remaining humanity – helps out by finding resources. Alongside her boyfriend, Martin, Alex is trying to help out as much as she can. But things take a turn for the worse when she discovers she’s pregnant, and her boyfriend dies in a spectacularly silly way, sacrificing himself for Alex in the opening moments.

A Quiet Place’s premise of blind monsters who find victims using sound is fairly simple and cliche, but the movies stand out thanks to the characters and their relationships. The Road Ahead is similarly character-driven, but the long stretches of tedious sneaking (more on that soon) drag out some of the better moments of the game.

Alex is also asthmatic, meaning she needs to regularly take pills or use inhalers to avoid attacks. As you get yourself in increasingly difficult situations, stress will cause Alex to grow ever closer to an asthma attack, so balancing silence over the risk of an attack is fairly interesting.

The A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead cast does a fairly excellent job of giving us a new perspective on the series, but it does feel a bit too familiar. Pregnancy in the apocalypse, untrustworthy figures, and difficult choices are all things the movies have done already, and rather than exploring other themes in a new format, A Quiet Place sticks rather close to the existing material.

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

Unsurprisingly, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead gameplay relies on stealth over combat. It’s not like the recent Silent Hill 2 remake’s focus on horror action to tell an engaging story. Instead, you’ll find yourself tiptoeing around areas and avoiding the Death Angels in order to survive.

The Road Ahead does this fairly well — so well that it sticks to it for the eight hours without much variation. Some interesting twists are introduced later on, like the ability to throw items to distract the monsters or a gas mask that limits your ability to use inhalers, but they’re not as engaging as I had hoped.

However, the biggest sin of The Road Ahead is the level design. A Quiet Place game needs to rely heavily on immersion over anything else, and random paint buckets right in the middle of paths or random shards of glass on floors with no windows around completely ruin the experience. It becomes laughably annoying, and while it makes sense from a game perspective, it doesn’t make sense in the world. Why would a group of survivors knowingly put things in places where it would come to bite them later on?

The Road Ahead struggles to strike a balance between immersion and being a video game. Strangely, A Quiet Place is one of the best examples of where a Telltale choices-matter story game would work best, and while I appreciate and respect the effort that has gone into a first-person horror, it doesn’t always go too well.

That’s not to say it’s a bad experience at all. In fact, I found the game to be fairly scary at times, and it’s a huge bonus that the developers implemented a microphone feature that makes the game even more realistic and challenging. I just hope that the developers get a second chance, where they can use more budget and development time to add more interesting ideas for the second installment.

Beautifully Quiet

Considering A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead’s price and the seemingly quick turnaround from announcement to release, I was very nervous the game would fall into the B-tier when it comes to looks. While some character models look fairly dated, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead does have great visuals, offering detailed environments and looking beautiful in the darkness. That does mean some people have had serious performance issues running the game, but I haven’t encountered any during my time with the game.

Of course, the sound design is also excellent, which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone interested in the series. Making slight noises will cause the Death Angels to do their signature clicks as they try to find their target, and in moments where you’re forced to quietly walk around them as they get into your face, it can be really intense. The visuals and the sound all help immerse you into that world, even if the cutaway death sequences are a bit silly and ridiculously clunky.

The Bottom Line

Despite my cautious optimism in the lead-up to the release of A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead, the first-person survival-horror game does deliver a decent character-driven narrative in the series while offering some excellent sound and visual design – even if the character models do look a little outdated.

However, the game’s stealth-focused approach doesn’t do enough interesting things to make the eight-hour experience more engaging over time, and while I hope that the developers get a shot at a sequel, I really hope they get more time to develop twists on the formula to rival some of the best stealth games on the market.

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead’s release date was October 17, 2024, and is available for $29.99 on the PlayStation and Xbox stores, as well as Steam for PC.

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