Published , by Timo Reinecke
Published , by Timo Reinecke
I have to admit I’m not a horror game person. While I enjoy Adam Wake’s love letter to Twin Peaks, Signalis, for being cryptic in all the right ways, and Resident Evil for being Resident Evil, I tend to stay away from the tried and true spooks in gaming. I do however love a good scare on the big screen. A Quiet Place already offered a fantastic premise for a video game set in a world where monsters jump at every peep, and it was only a matter of time before it would find its way to the humming of consoles and PCs.
Stromwind Games’ adaptation starts promising. A slow and deliberate intro had me agonizing over every crunch of shattered glass and squeal of an unoiled door hinge. The initial experience of looting an abandoned resort while being on edge, when every sound you make could be your last, makes for an incredibly tense experience. From the start, its world instills a sort of paranoia in the player that is shared with every person in that universe. Watch where you step and don't make a peep. The last time my eyes were glued to floor textures like that was when I played through Death Stranding. And A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead nails that particular aspect of the franchise so damn well despite me feeling all sorts of ways as the game concluded.
You play as Alex, a young woman with asthma trying to survive in a world that has fallen silent. Lifting heavy objects, climbing up and down walls, or standing near a monster will cause her sickness to flare up, and can only calmed by inhalers or medicine. Both of these are kept in just a small enough supply on the Normal difficulty to create some rather tense sneaking and puzzle-solving. Alex’s tale itself however isn’t much to write home about though. It's a treasure trove of post-apocalyptic writing prompts at best with a collection of left-behind notes and wall scribbling trying to make its world feel bigger. Which is a shame. The first two chapters set up character dynamics and interesting conflicts that end up going nowhere because the game spends so much time quietly sneaking around monsters.
That might be The Road Ahead’s one big failing. Its devotion to being A Quiet Place The Video Game. By putting the monsters and horror front and center it often takes away from its somber atmosphere and prevents it from carving out an identity of its own. The paranoia of stepping in a puddle or scaring away some birds is novel at first but ends up being a tense 10-hour-long crawl from one linear section to the next. I enjoyed the sections in which I was rummaging around, quietly fiddling with the lock of a door. It's at its best when you have to carefully nudge your mouse/controller's thumbsticks to pull out drawers or unscrew a vent cover. But when you’re forced into a stealth section with one or several monsters roaming about while you have to find and transport a ladder from A to B it just becomes frustrating. It wouldn’t be so annoying if there weren’t too many of these encounters and the monster AI didn’t have a talent for always casually strolling in my direction even if I didn’t make a peep.
For a game called A Quiet Place, there is also a surprising lack of actual silence. There is always dramatic music playing no matter what you’re up to, sometimes cueing you up for scares that never happen. It's a shame because one of the source material's defining features was the sound or rather the lack of it. While the crunching of gravel is both satisfying and terrifying, it's never left on its own. There is never any room for you to regret a floorboard screeching in total silence. The Road Ahead also lets you enable your microphone for added immersion. I tried the feature in the rare moments my household isn’t plagued by the idle snores of dogs and it seemed to work fine, but I can’t say it impacted my experience that much when I was playing alone. But when I was playing it with a friend, the hushed whispers and ducking away to sneeze into sofa cushions made it all the more immersive.
While A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead makes for a decent adaptation of the breakout horror franchise, it ends up falling short due to a slow, uninspired narrative and frustrating sneaking sections. That said, it's still an engaging, tense romp through the world of A Quiet Place and fans of the movie will get their fill here.
A copy of the Steam version was provided by the publisher for this review. A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is now available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.