A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead Review

It is harder than it sounds to create a good stealth game. Even the best ones struggle to capture large audiences, as demonstrated by the extended breaks in both the Thief and Splinter Cell franchises. A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is a new stealth game by Stormind, based on the horror movie franchise of the same name. But unlike most stealth games that rely on visual acquisition, it focuses on sound detection, making it similar to The Last of Us or Maid of Sker. Priced at a budget-friendly $30 USD, it is unfortunately inconsistent due to finicky mechanics, but it does have some good parts that may encourage some to take a closer look.

For those unfamiliar with the movie franchise, the lore is simple. Fireballs rain down from the sky, primitive alien creatures emerge, and they attack mercilessly. The creatures are big, fast, armored, and completely blind, but they have exceptional hearing. The Road Ahead is set roughly four months after the invasion, and you play as Alex, a young woman who is staying at a hospital with other survivors. Alex has asthma, and her breathing gets more difficult under stress or activity. Players will manage this by puffing on an inhaler, although there are a limited number of those in this post-apocalyptic world.

While on a supply run to a nearby ranch, Alex finds a test that confirms she’s pregnant. But things get worse when her boyfriend, Martin, is tragically killed in an encounter with one of the creatures. Martin’s mother, Laura, dislikes Alex because of something that happened at the start of the invasion, which is eventually revealed through well-placed but clumsy flashbacks. Laura wants to keep Alex imprisoned to ensure the baby survives. This predictably angers Alex who decides to leave with her father, after learning that the National Guard might be at a nearby camp.

After a strong start, the narrative loses momentum. The drama involving Laura and Alex is over the top, especially once the flashbacks reveal the cause. Laura pursues Alex for much of the game, although you only see her briefly a few times. There is very little direct story in the back half, and while Martin accompanies Alex during the good opening mission, this is not representative of the game. Alex is essentially alone for the whole adventure, and the story badly needed another companion or two. While Alex does visit a few safe houses, they’re always empty, with typical notes left by survivors.

Aside from short breaks inside safe rooms, Alex must remain extremely quiet at all times. Many surfaces and small obstructions produce sound, including gravel, glass, leaves, loose cans, and puddles. Opening doors is a manual process, like in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and they make more noise when swung too quickly. Slow and steady interactions are crucial, so it can take a lot of time to move a short distance and perform basic tasks, which some might find tedious but it suits the franchise.

Objectives are simple, including carrying planks to create bridges, turning off valves, finding keys, and switching on the power. There are sadly no deep survival mechanics, with only flashlight batteries, flares, and inhalers to store, and no crafting or healing. Players can at least pour sand to make pathways, which mutes footsteps in spots where there is minor backtracking to find collectibles. After the hospital, players will visit a forest, train-bridge, fire station, harbor, and a few other urban locales. While these are packed with sound hazards to tiptoe around, it never feels like the navigational puzzle that it should, which is partly because it is quite linear.

Alex has a phonometer that displays the ambient sound level and how much noise she is currently making. Keep the noise below ambient and everything is golden. Go above and there will be a useful audible warning, perhaps via a horror movie sound flourish or a tree rustling in the distance. Keep it up, or make one very loud sound, and you are dead. This is not a game like Outlast where you can run and hide. After you reach the preset sound threshold, the creature spawns out of thin air and kills you from behind via a canned execution animation. This makes no logical sense when you’re in a tiny room or vent. You will also die if you throw a bottle into a puddle, despite hiding behind a rock. There is a huge magical leap between a creature being somewhere out of view and you getting killed because you were one decibel too loud for a microsecond.

Some areas have the creature roaming in plain sight. It also kills you when you reach the sound barrier, after sprinting to your location, but its proximity raises stress and it reacts to environmental sounds. This works better and generates more natural, immediate horror. However, the game spaces are super cramped and the creature often collides with Alex, resulting in annoying instant deaths. The creature’s AI also mimics the Xenomorph in Alien: Isolation in certain places, hanging around the player like a bad smell, but with less subtlety. It seems to know where you are and where you need to go. You can distract it, by tossing bricks and flares, but these are temporary diversions. Dying is common but the game saves often so you only ever have to repeat a few minutes. The gameplay might have been improved if the developers borrowed ideas from other stealth games. If the creature entered the levels after the player made enough noise, to search around, and then left after a long period of silence, it would reward the consistent and patient. Allowing players to run and hide would have also created more gameplay depth and dynamic encounters.

The game also needed to better exploit its coolest feature: sound masking. As mentioned, the phonometer shows the ambient noise level. The meter reading barely changes throughout the whole game. But there are rare situations when it spikes helpfully, like in the pump house chapter. You can sneakily break a window when water gushes through a nearby pipe—somewhat like in the Sniper Elite games. And you can take respite under a flowing sprinkler, to manually recharge a flashlight. Sadly many sound-masking scenarios involve the creatures using their super-hearing scan regularly, which unfortunately forces the player to remain stationary for a short time. Given the basic sound-masking implementation, there are many missed opportunities here to take the stealth to the next level.

An optional part of all of this stealth is the chance to turn on your microphone as part of the detection process, to increase the challenge and enhance immersion. Sensitivity and threshold can be adjusted, but since microphones can pick up distant sounds, it really only makes sense to use this late at night. Even then, loud cars and sirens outside your window might set it off. And you can forget about eating or drinking while playing. While this microphone option is neat, for stealth purists and die-hard movie fans, it will not be practical for many. It also makes the inconsistent stealth even more unpredictable, which is enough reason to leave it disabled.

The Road Ahead requires rather a beefy machine to run at max settings and it does not always justify the performance hit. It runs okay at mostly high, but with typical upscaling tech that adds blur. The environments look fine, and at times it crafts a really creepy post-apocalyptic atmosphere that is not afraid to be silent. There is also some adequate detail on ground surfaces, which is nice because you will be crouch-walking for much of the eight hour adventure. But the game does not always look consistently good, with a few plain areas, and framerate drops can appear out of the blue. At least the creatures look and move like their film counterparts, although they do unfortunately clip through many objects.

There is enough in A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead to justify exploring the universe further in a future game. When the stealth and sound masking come together, there is something quite special about crawling through a post-apocalyptic world slowly and avoiding the deadly creatures. Sadly the good parts are more of the exception, with the player usually striving to stay under a volume trigger, or avoiding collisions in claustrophobic spaces. With a thin and forced story that fades, and a lack of survival elements, it does not make the best of its post-apocalyptic setting. Still, fans of stealth games might find just enough here to enjoy at a low price, while they wait to hear from the bigger franchises.