Despite the notable failure of the idea of aliens with sensitive ears invading and instantly destroying human civilisation, the Quiet Place franchise is very popular – it even got its own game, which we will be talking about in this review.
Surprisingly, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is the first game based on the A Quiet Place universe. But the original film was released six years ago and, it seems, provided the perfect concept for an exemplary stealth horror game in the spirit of Alien: Isolation. Or does it just seem that way?
Released in 2018, the film revealed a largely unique setting. The invasion of amazing alien creatures has caused the post-apocalypse here: they can’t see, but they have such phenomenal hearing that they can react to the slightest sound, whether it’s the creak of glass someone’s stepped on or a word spoken hundreds of meters away. And that’s it – the creature, in leopard mode, rushes to the source of the sound and kills it, well, or, in a rage, slashes open the car in which the alarm has been triggered.
As a result, the few frightened survivors in the film have to remain silent for most of the time (the first words spoken by the film’s characters are at the 38th minute, and only at the waterfall, which muffles their speech), communicate mostly by gestures, walk barefoot and mostly on the previously sandy paths.
The film A Quiet Place. Day One (2023) is more of a disaster film than a horror film. Its ratings are lower than those of the previous installments, but I liked it almost more – it is a more complex, metaphorical, and artistic film. The inconsistencies inherent in the first two installments and the setting are not as glaring here. The very concept of blind ‘listeners’ who attack any source of sound, even if it’s a crumpled leaf, and mute people who give birth at the most inopportune moment is very effective but also very vulnerable to any critical analysis.
Thankfully, in A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead, no one gives birth in front of a monster or carries the baby in a closed box with an oxygen tank, but the protagonist, a girl named Alex, is also pregnant and suffers from asthma.
Most importantly, there are a lot of tragic deaths here, just like in the film. At the very beginning, the father of her child dies in front of Alex. And she’s pretty much left alone with her dad, and then she spends the whole time trying to get to a boat to get to safety because the creatures that can hear can’t swim. But then, unfortunately, it all comes down to hiding with the creatures all the time. And while this is refreshing at the beginning and even in the middle of the game, it becomes frankly boring towards the end. Furthermore, everything happens very slowly. If the first two films could ironically be described as a bare feet show (they were on screen almost more often than the characters’ faces), this game is a simulator of standing in place and waiting for the monster to pass and go.
It is a path littered with tears, despair and fear. The scriptwriters have come up with their own original story, showing the conflict not between the main characters and the degenerating survivors, as in the second part, but between people close to each other. Alex, according to the classics of the genre, clearly had no relationship with her mother-in-law, the mother of her dead young man.
In the first third of the game, the authors alternate between the present and the past with great skill, showing the background and development of this conflict. In general, they use flashbacks, notes, and cutscenes to tell us about Alex’s life and feelings, how other people lived, and what they did. At the same time, the game is full of subtle references to the films – the notes tell us about the poetess, for example, and Sam from Day One also wrote poetry.
Comparisons with Alien: Isolation is inevitable. In both games, the heroines must constantly hide from an unkillable monster with phenomenal hearing (and the alien can also see perfectly). Both use a special device: in Alex’s case, it’s not a motion sensor, but a phonometer that compares the level of noise she makes with the sounds around her – you have to make sure that the former doesn’t exceed the latter, otherwise the creature will be alerted immediately. And if the alarm goes off twice, it will run out looking for us – and most likely find us.
Alex can also throw bottles and stones to distract the enemy. There’s no need to hide in lockers. The puzzles are simple and pretty much the same – moving objects, looking for keys and codes to locks, turning valves, changing fuses, and the like. But in Isolation, there were not only puzzles and hiding but also action and crafting.
Here, everything is reduced to hide-and-seek, which always follows the same scenario: to avoid the creature with the big ears, you have to move slowly, very slowly, sometimes literally one centimeter per second, trying not to accidentally hit a glass, not to step on the glass and so on; open doors slowly, trying not to make them creak; throw stones and bottles.
Yes, new details in the mechanics are gradually being added – dragging planks to cross a crack, dropping sand under your feet to walk silently, freezing like a stump when a creature focuses. In some situations, you have to throw rocks at traps. This adds a bit of variety, but not for long.
On the other hand, we have to admit that the adrenaline and atmosphere in such hide-and-seek games are exaggerated, especially at the beginning. The creature really inspires a kind of metaphysical horror, and in this respect, it is a little inferior to Alien. Even on easy difficulty, it can hear perfectly and kills often and quickly. Let’s talk about the survival mode, where all the clues are turned off, including the interface and the monster can appear behind you completely unexpectedly.
To make matters worse, even the simplest tasks – such as moving planks or barrels to clear a passageway – put Alex under constant stress. Even more so when the creature makes its nightmarish face right in front of her, or when there is a lot of dust around, the higher the stress level, the more likely the girl is to have an asthma attack – this can be prevented for a while by winning the mini-game, but otherwise, Alex will start coughing, which usually means imminent death.
In the actual game, you have to do almost the same things: unscrew the screws on the ventilation grate, open the latches on the doors, and open the doors themselves. You have to do all this very quietly so as not to hear the monsters. You have a device that Alex has made, a sort of noise meter that shows you the noise level around you. Just walk so that the noise level does not exceed the yellow zone on the device. It’s called a phonograph in the game, but to be honest it’s almost useless. Just don’t run where you can’t, and avoid obstacles in the form of water, broken glass, and scattered cans and canisters.
Again, as in The Last of Us, you will have to carry sticks across the pit to overcome the obstacle. Only here, the longer you carry, the more out of breath you get. Asthma can be treated with pills, which help for a short time, or with an inhaler, which relieves the attack completely. There are not many of these on the medium difficulty level, and they are lying around, usually on desks, in cupboards, and in desk drawers.
In the game, you will need to collect a number of resources: the main ones are inhalers and pills, as well as batteries for the torch, but the torch is not that useful. There are also all sorts of items in the form of bottles and bricks that you can throw to distract the monsters.
The whole game is made up of quite a lot of cutscenes, which you can skip, but then it becomes uninteresting to play. Of course, the subtitles are not very convenient to read all the time, as the Russian localization is only for text. The locations are quite varied and not boring. It’s a shame that there’s almost no interaction with objects. But just observing what is on the table is interesting. Almost all the puzzles consist of finding a board, opening a door or turning a valve.
Finally, if your adrenaline is running low, you can turn on the microphone – then the creature will pick up the sounds you, your girlfriend, or your cat make in the room. This is a really powerful experience – you should have seen the look on my cat’s face when he jumped up on the table at the most inopportune moment, and something meowed. You just have to adjust the sensitivity of the microphone, otherwise the monster just ‘hears’ the game from your console.
But after a while, all these situations played out in the same way and, as slowly as possible, started to get tiresome. And here it all depends on the player – a fan of Quiet Place and this kind of hide-and-seek with monsters will be satisfied, but the rest will most likely give up.
The game tells a surprisingly grounded story. There’s no need to save the world or even fight aliens, and the main conflict is built around a family drama: some flashbacks will reveal the events that led to a complicated relationship between Alex and the head of the asylum, the mother of her boyfriend. Although the main action takes place more than three months after the invasion, we are shown the first day of the attack and the chaos that followed, and we can learn the stories of the survivors from the notes scattered around the world.
The atmosphere is quite well recreated, and the locations are quite varied and detailed, so you can get deep enough into the universe to want to see the game through to the end. As you move towards your goal, you will see many expressive mini-scenes: cars abandoned in the middle of the road, a train with bloody drips in the carriages, and the body of a poor man who failed to escape from a ruthless creature. The picture is pleasant, although most of the scenes take place in twilight or at night.
However, Alex can’t be called as unlucky. Despite her problems, the girl is able to survive, even if she finds herself face-to-face with a monster. The inhaler will help to cope with breathing difficulties and rapid heartbeat – you can find spare inhalers by carefully exploring the environment. A handheld phonometer, invented by the heroine, shows the volume of the environment and the volume of sounds emitted by the character – just make sure that the latter parameter does not exceed the former, stay close to the sources of background noise if possible and do not bump into the cans and barrels placed everywhere. A sandbag can help disguise your footsteps, and a bottle thrown to the side can distract the creature for a minute.
A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is reminiscent of many stealth horror games such as Alien: Isolation or Outlast. However, unlike those games, this one allows you to ‘get in front’ of the enemy: you can walk freely in front of them without fear of being seen. All you have to do is keep quiet, and that’s easier than you think.
However, this single condition quickly exhausts the game’s potential so that from the beginning to the end of the adventure, instead of encountering different gameplay situations, you are forced to move at the speed of a turtle and occasionally solve simple puzzles, such as finding a plank to build an improvised bridge or turning valves to empty the pool.
Not that the forced slowness is tiring, as the need to not give yourself away in front of the monster is part of the gameplay and forces you to be very attentive, but in the second half of the game, it gets boring, and you want to finish the story as soon as possible. You can add to the challenge by turning on microphone support in the settings so that the game can pick up the sounds around you and aggravate the monster if you scratch or cough loudly. Still, you will probably want to turn this off soon as it has little effect on the gameplay but only increases the risk of defeat, and not always for reasons beyond your control.
A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is, first and foremost, a game for fans of the franchise. Horror fans can also give it a try and even get some emotions and challenges, but I’m afraid they won’t live to see the end credits and will quietly leave to find another place to tickle their nerves.
The plot is relatively simple, but it has its place. At first, it’s interesting to play in stealth mode, but by the end of the game, it all gets boring, as do the old mechanics. The game goes by pretty quickly, and I would call it a disposable horror game. I started playing it in the morning and finished it the next day. I’d call it short, but I think if it lasted 15-20 hours, I’d probably quit because the monotony gets annoying, and the story isn’t that interesting.
All in all, it’s not a bad horror game with stealth elements and some dynamic scenes and shootouts. The game will certainly appeal to those who liked One of Us. These games are similar in terms of game dynamics, corridors, similar puzzles, and the same mechanics. The only difference is basically the story. The Last of Us had a much more interesting story.
