The story featured in A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead (from this point forward will be referred to as The Road Ahead) takes place after the first film in the A Quiet Place series. It follows the story of Alex and Martin as they attempt to navigate the city to get to a safe haven from the aliens that are now seemingly roaming the planet.
You play the game in a first person perspective with the game featuring primarily stealth gameplay with no ability to fight off the aliens you encounter. Instead of combat you have to avoid the aliens by being as quiet as you possibly can. The reason for this is that the aliens have a very good sense of hearing and are blind.
As you navigate your surroundings in an attempt to get to your destination, your objectives will be to find certain items and to get to the next area all while not being caught by an enemy. To aid you in your ultimate goal of getting to the safe haven, you have a flashlight that can run out of batteries, a auditory scanner that helps you to determine how much noise you’re making in comparison to the ambient noise around you, and medications that you must take to help prevent panic attacks and asthma attacks.
The items you need to obtain could be medication such as pills or inhalers to help with the attacks that may come on, items to help you clear a path as you make way to your ultimate goal, or they could be batteries for your flashlight.
One of the interesting things about this game is that it really does a great job of keeping you at the edge of your seat. You have a handheld monitor that helps you see how much noise you’re making compared to the noise around you. If you make too much noise or too loud of a noise, the creatures will come for you. This in turn will cause you as the character to have a panic attack. When left untreated, it develops into an asthma attack, which in turn makes you create more noise. So unless you have the medication to stop this from coming on, you best make sure that you’re as quiet as you can be as you navigate the world around you.
The flashlight that you have isn’t a necessity, but can help you find collectibles and help make navigating dark areas much easier. The last really good element to the game I wanted to touch on was the optional use of a microphone. You have the option to use a microphone while you play the game and this adds a really neat sense of immersion to the game. In addition to being quiet, if you talk to loud, sneeze, cough, etc too loudly, that will alert the alien creatures to your location and you’re done for.
The Road Ahead has some really awesome graphics. There was a lot of detail put into the world that you’re navigating around in. There are a lot of plants, grass, trees, garbage, cars, and buildings in the world around you. This gives a nice sense of realism to the game that works very well when it comes to an immersive experience. Every single object in the game, large or small, has so much detail and definition to it that it’s almost photo realistic, though not quite there.
The use of light and shadow are handled very well and make each location you explore that much more ominous and foreboding. When it comes to performance, there are two modes you can set the game to which are performance and quality. With performance, you’re going to get a very smooth rotation when turning the camera while navigating areas and looking for things in drawers, cabinets, etc. You’re also going to get a higher frame rate which I believe is right around 60 frames per second. The other mode you have is quality. With quality, everything is going to look much sharper and ever so slightly more realistic looking. But the catch is that you’re playing at about half the frames per second, and there is a slight stutter to the camera when moving around.
The Road Ahead really shines when it comes to the sound. As you’re moving around, you can hear your character breathing, you can hear creatures in the distance, the occasional scream from an NPC that one of the creatures has gotten a hold of, sounds of machines and lights humming when you’re close to them, and sounds of things moving about as you push through them or knock them over.
You can even hear your character gasp in surprise and horror if the act of you making noise either alerts a creature and it screams or the noise meter goes above the environmental noise around you. Because the game focuses so much on being quiet, there isn’t much in the way of music in the game, which is okay given the games style and what it’s based on.
The Road Ahead does a fantastic job giving you a very detailed world to explore and takes the idea of sound in video game to a whole new level. The attention to detail in this game when it comes to noise being generated, and noise in general is really quite spectacular to behold. The game does a great job of keeping you on the edge of your seat with every single step and action that you take.
If you’re a fan of the Quiet Place films or media, then you owe it to yourself to play this game. Even if you’re not a fan, this is still a game worth checking out! This game is easily one of the best stealth survival horror games I’ve ever played in years and I highly recommend playing it for yourself.
Disclaimer: A review key was provided
In addition to writing articles, Ryan Byers also creates content for his YouTube channel called "Obscure Games and Consoles", collects video games, and dabbles in video game development.