Few things are scarier than silence, and A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead uses that silence to create a unique survival horror experience. Based on the A Quiet Place film series, Stormind Games has crafted an intense world that leaves you on edge with every step. But does it hit the mark, or does it end up as a slow crawl through the dark? Let’s dive in.
Setting the stage: Asthma, aliens, and an apocalypse
The A Quiet Place game tells a new story set in the film universe, following Alex Taylor, a college student and survivor who’s trying to navigate a post-apocalyptic world filled with “Death Angels”—those blind, hyper-sensitive aliens who can hear the drop of a pin from miles away. As if that’s not bad enough, Alex is severely asthmatic, and she’s pregnant to boot. It’s a setup that feels appropriately intense, but the game’s heavy-handed asthma mechanic nearly turns survival horror into a survival annoyance.
You have an inhaler (or at least several) and stress tablets to help Alex manage her asthma, and at first, this adds a cool layer of tension to the game. But the game throws asthma triggers at you constantly, from simply climbing boxes to minor disturbances. I get it—having aliens around would be a stressful situation for anyone, but does even opening a door too loudly have to be a potential asthma attack? It borders on ridiculous.
Gameplay: The creeping dread… and just the creeping
A Quiet Place encourages you to be quiet, naturally, and employs clever microphone mechanics that track your sound levels. You can even switch on a setting that allows your own mic to be used so that any noise you make also appears as if it was in the game. Not helpful when you have cats crying at you because they haven’t been given any food or belly rubs for five whole minutes.
It’s genuinely tense the first few hours, tiptoeing around, crouching slowly, and listening for even the tiniest creak that could send a Death Angel barreling in your direction. Unfortunately, this mechanic that initially feels brilliant slowly starts to wear on you. The game takes about 8-10 hours to complete, but it only drags on because of how excruciatingly slow your character moves.
Adding to the mix, you have a few basic tools—a torch, which feels nearly useless, and a sound detector to measure your noise against ambient sound levels. Move above the environment noise, and you’re in trouble. Stay below it, and you’re golden. But after the novelty of stealth wears off, it becomes a slow crawl rather than a tense journey.
Frustrations and inconsistencies
In survival horror, mechanics should make you feel on edge, not frustrated. In A Quiet Place, the line between tension and irritation is razor-thin. The sound design and Death Angel AI are inconsistent. For instance, navigating across planks gives off so much sound that creatures show up even if they’re nowhere near you. And let’s talk about throwing items as distractions—why does this become available halfway through the game when it would’ve been useful from the start?
And when it finally is available, it’s riddled with bugs. More often than not, throwing an item will glitch a Death Angel, leaving it trapped, which should be good news—until the game inexplicably decides to kill you anyway as you progress through the level. Immersive? Not quite.
The sandbags, which let you quiet your steps in areas, also feel odd. You can empty an unlimited amount from a single bag, meaning you don’t even need to think twice about sound. Sure, survival shouldn’t be easy, but handing you a bottomless bag of sand does take away the “survival” aspect a bit. It’s all these little inconsistencies that add up, transforming what could have been a horror masterpiece into something that feels unfinished. *Turns out this was another bug, as I went back to replay and finish collecting mixtapes and low and behold, the sandbags ran out this second time around.
Somehow even the collectables in A Quiet Place cause frustration. You can find pictures, letters, and even mix tapes strewn around the world. And while it adds a nice little collection feature, and forces you to explore more, the order they are listed in when you check your progress has no rhyme or reason. The first item could be 14th out of a list of 36. Why not just have them in the order they should be found? That way at least, you can pinpoint where you may have missed them if you wanted to go back and 100% the game again later. Instead, you’re left scratching your head at where it could’ve been.
Visuals and voice acting: Atmosphere nailed, emotions absent
Graphically, A Quiet Place does a brilliant job. The world feels lived-in and terrifyingly empty, with crumbling walls and debris-strewn streets bringing the sense of a world truly ravaged by these alien creatures. But here’s where another immersion break happens—Alex’s facial animations. While Anairis Quiñones does a stellar job voicing Alex, her in-game model barely changes expression, which, for a horror game that relies heavily on character tension, really misses the mark.
It’s only in short glimpses that you see her face, usually when she is checking her compact mirror in a moment of self-reflection. But instead of showing emotion, she comes across as Jason Statham, the man, who I love by the way, but would have the same face whether you told him he’d won the lottery or that someone kicked his pet dog.
Overall thoughts on A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead
A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead aims to take you on a journey of survival, but instead, you find yourself bogged down by clunky mechanics and inconsistent AI. The game has its moments—the voice acting is solid, the sound design is decent, and the concept of sound-based survival is brilliant in theory. But in execution, it becomes more frustrating than frightening.
I appreciate that A Quiet Place has taken a daring approach to horror with its focus on sound and silence, but a combination of tedious mechanics and technical inconsistencies turn what could have been a standout experience into a flawed journey. The potential is there, but it falls just short.
A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead was developed by Stormind Games and published by Saber Interactive. It’s available to play now on PC via Steam, PS5, and Xbox Series S/X. You can find more details about the game and where to buy it on the official website and find more reviews of new releases in our games reviews section.
*A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead review updated 26/10/2024.