The Haunted Hoard: A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead (PS5)
The horror film franchise A Quiet Place is set in a world where a single loud noise could mean your death. One day, eyeless monsters appeared across the country indiscriminately slaying anything they can hear, this premise not only primed for a lot of easy moments of tension when everyone freezes up at the slightest sound that could give them away, but it is fascinating to see how the films think through the different ways humans can adjust in order to survive under these conditions. The concept also feels perfect for a stealth horror video game where you’d need to be the one carefully managing every sound you make so you aren’t hunted down and quickly killed, and A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead attempts to bring that to life. However, a bit like the films, the clever ideas can come with some headscratchers, because if you don’t invent reasons to force some sound into a story, you’ll just get people cowering in soundproof rooms for the rest of their lives.
An original story set in the world of the films but starring all new characters, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is Alex Taylor’s story, the young woman managing to hole up in a hospital with some of her family on the day the monsters appeared. As resources dwindled and tensions flared though, soon the hospital became the hunting grounds for the unnamed beasts as their position is given away, Alex forced to flee not only to protect herself, but her unborn child as well as she’s just learned she’s pregnant. Certain points of the story will flick away from the present and back to the first day the monsters attacked, giving us a little time to see what Alex was like in normal times and better help us understand the dynamics between her and the few other members of the small cast. Laura, the mother of Alex’s boyfriend, is so fiercely protective she almost hunts down Alex for the purpose of protecting her but in a stifling way likely to doom them all through paranoid inaction, but a lot of the potential of the plot is pushed into the background as a greater focus is put instead on trying to find a National Guard camp as the only hope of some safe place in this dangerous world. You get to tiptoe through some interesting areas because of it like the remains of a trainwreck, a summer camp, and a once busy harbor town, but the deeper into danger you go, the less the personal stakes feel present save for the occasional reminder that Alex’s pregnancy complicates things a bit.
However, where A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead does truly shine though is in the notes and details you can find around the world. A Quiet Place usually allows its characters to at least lightly whisper or shuffle at a slow pace so it’s not a need for absolute silence, and while this does allow the cutscenes where Laura and Alex can communicate easily, the notes you often find in horror games are done particularly well because they fit into the setting so seamlessly. You do not need to ask why someone decided to write their thoughts down, because they are doing it to be quiet and communicate with someone else, the player even finding full written conversations between people who have to remain silent to survive. Perhaps the best case of it though is early in the game when you are investigating an abandoned ranch. As you walk through the place, noticing where the monsters had knocked things over and slashed the place in their hunt for humans to kill, you’ll also notice on the walls messages in white paint. They feel a little odd at first, things along the lines of “Dad will get the medicine” feeling like a potential on the nose clue to you about the nearby room with the medicine you need… but as you look around you realize these were notes written during the attack by desperate hiding people who had no other way to speak to each other.
A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead has a lot of small but excellent little stories to uncover this way, like how you find an active water pumping station later and get to read the musings of the two men who keep the place running because it’s all they think they can do in this apocalyptic scenario, keep that water on a bit longer for the other survivors out there. You can stumble across a house with a small story about a family rescuing a young girl and struggling with their lingering sadness over their own dead daughter, and sometimes you find the unfortunate end of another tale elsewhere as you realize the person whose corpse you found was someone you had read about earlier. You can also get glimmers of hope in these written tales, but they do add a lot more life to the setting by having these quick and often well told tales, although it is a shame the game then puts far less thought into the art you find around locations. You might come across pictures drawn by children and think how strange it is the lines are drawn so straight and colored in so perfectly before you realize they are AI generated images, this also holding true for things like posters and even greeting cards. These are such minor parts of the overall experience it feels weird there would be cheap corner cutting there, but it also feels like it betrays the thoughtful placement of details in places like the ranch by having something made with almost no care slapped onto collectibles.
To survive in A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead you will almost always have to be managing how much sound you make, and thankfully Alex is a smart enough girl to put together a phonometer early on. The phonometer measures the ambient volume in the area as well as the amount of sound you’re making, and while its value means a good deal of your time playing this first-person horror game will be spent with it held up in your left hand, it also helps you avoid walking too fast and giving yourself away. There are times when the blind creatures will be actively prowling an area and others where they’re nowhere in sight, but besides a few soundproof rooms, you will have to move carefully always. If you keep making loud noises when out in the middle of nowhere, a monster will suddenly appear and kill you, this instant death really more a punishment for knowingly ignoring the noise you’re making rather than something that will get you when you’re just trying to move carefully around. When the monsters are currently stalking around the space you’re in though, too loud a noise will send them running to your current position, giving you some wiggle room to slink away but the blind fiends can also get dangerously close to you while still being unaware. This can lead to those kind of nervous moments where the monster is just inches from spotting you, the player hoping it will turn the other way and let them safely move again, and this is certainly where the stealth game can feel at its most exciting and terrifying.
On the other hand though, the constant need to manage the sound you’re making does lead to one inevitable reality of this experience. Most everywhere you go will be done while slowly crouch-walking forward. You do need to make sure you don’t tip the control stick too much since walking quickly does make a noise, so you’re left trudging along everywhere you go whether or not there’s an active threat to add tension to the experience. Ideas like slowly opening doors or drawers do a decent job injecting that constant caution for avoiding sound, but the slow walk does really weaken moments where there isn’t much else going on. A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead does try to complicate movement in quite a few ways to avoid travel becoming an endless dull and quiet march. Many areas have objects scattered about, the player needing to carefully move past tin cans or tiptoe through water or across shattered glass. You can find objects like bottles to throw to trick the monsters into heading to a different spot, but there are also important tasks to be done like turning water valves or placing wooden planks to cross gaps that are going to be a bit noisy if you don’t do them with the proper delicate touch. Usually there are also extras to look for like the collectibles toys to unlock art and character models and those brief little moments where you have to more actively manage your sound to breathe a little life into the regular walking around, but while disarming noise traps and the like give you a bit more to do, the pace of movement and how minor these actions are means some sections certainly drag.
Since the monsters can kill you immediately once they’ve found you, there is no health in A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead, but instead a different element but be managed: your breath. Alex is asthmatic, which means the sometimes demanding physical activities will wear her down if you don’t find some medicine or inhalers to help her pull herself together some. Monsters being near you make her breathing grow faster as she gets scared and there are even a few dusty areas likely to make it flare up, but the only thing you really need to fear is what happens when her asthma gets too bad. She’ll begin coughing and reveal herself if you can’t complete a quick little recovery minigame. A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead also has an optional feature where you can have the PS5 controller’s microphone track the sound you make, any noise of yours that tips things over alerting the monsters as well. Both of these features feel like they make some sense, but if you’re not the kind of player to scream at scary games, it’s more likely your air conditioning or a sudden text message will do you in than some immersive element. The asthma though just adds onto that constant need to be taking things far too slow, moments spent letting Alex cool down a clear way to add more danger to those segments where you’re being hunted but your recourse is just waiting in a game with plenty of that already. The asthma isn’t necessarily a bad way to add a cost to performing certain actions so sneaking isn’t too easy, but it’s a bit overly sensitive and not likely to produce those effective terrifying moments of being nearly caught and instead the frustrating kind where Alex nearly faints because she held a wooden plank for too long.
THE VERDICT: A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead has some strong ideas on how to realize a setting where a single loud sound can mean your death, but having to devote itself to that idea also leads to its duller stretches. The environments you explore and notes you read can do great work with adding depth to this world thanks to how they consider not just how people would react to the monsters but how their relationships might change with each other, but then you spend so much time crouch-walking around to avoid making any noise that you start losing interest in that world. Some little impediments here or there can keep the regular navigation decent enough and the moments the monsters are in the same area and you really have to be careful lead to those scary survival moments you’d want from this idea, but some unfortunate realities somewhat undermine the creative work put into trying to make A Quiet Place into a stealth horror game.
And so, I give A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead for PlayStation 5…
An OKAY rating. A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead runs into the boring reality of the post-apocalyptic setting it is adapting, but it does try to avoid letting that completely bog the experience down. The crouch-walking really does slow the game’s pace down considerably and not always to interesting effect like when you’re tiptoeing past a monster or navigating an area where noisy objects threaten you if you get sloppy in how you move. However, there aren’t too many moments where you are just left to walk forward without doing something, there usually at least a plank to move around or a little weaving through the environment to be done even if it’s not exactly an exciting activity you’re engaged in. Your asthma concerns do add a bit too much to your movement considerations though, having to stop and waiting for Alex to calm down a bit before moving objects around usually a weak source of tension and a far more frustrating one since it feels more out of your hands than how much sound you’re making. The monsters, thankfully, mostly play fair. They do “teleport” to you if you’re getting too noisy, but it’s a reasonable guard rail against exploits or desperate dashes that could have been hard to program around otherwise. Usually you will know why you died if a “teleport” happens, and while having to hold the control stick just so for so much of the adventure will wear on you, there are a good deal of moments where you do get that thrill of delicately navigating around and outsmarting the blind creatures. Even the checkpoints are usually on your side so that a slip up will only set you back to the start of the current activity rather than really losing a good degree of progress, but the fact the stealth almost never can be turned off is both what holds the gameplay back and a required feature of the setting. A 2 hour movie doesn’t have to include all the walking from place to place, but at least you have some nice notes to find and environmental storytelling to perk you up a bit during the trudges.
The premise of A Quiet Place has always been on slightly shaky ground, there are moments in the films you might question if they feel true to the concept, and that feels equally applicable to this video game set in the same world. However, usually you can look past the little moments in favor of the story or exciting moments, and A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead also can hit on that to some degree. The interactivity just gets a bit tedious over the course of the adventure because, as one might imagine, having to be near silent is not really an exciting task. This game will push through that limitation at times though and give you enough to work with that it can be said to have found some of what works about this particular setting.