‘A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead’ squanders its potential

Video games based on films used to be predetermined flops; lifeless cash grabs aiming to profit off summer blockbusters. Now, instead of shoddily adapting a film, video games inspired by movie franchises try to take what makes a film work and adapt it in an original way, a la Alien: Isolation or Mad Max. Stormind Games aims to do just this with A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead, albeit to less-than-stellar results. It somewhat emulates the tension of the film franchise while telling a personal story that falls flat.

Just as in the films, alien monsters have upended civilization, launching themselves to attack the faintest of sounds. Whether it’s due to uninspired visual design or uninteresting AI, the monsters in The Road ahead just don’t have very much bite. Often they’re off-screen, clicking away. When they are hunting you down, they feel more annoying than frightening, hindering obstacles on your way to exiting the level.

If you can avoid making any loud noises and getting in the monsters’ way, you’ll progress through the linear levels without too much hassle. Easier said than done, however, as paint cans are inexplicably littered everywhere throughout the game. I began to wonder if the developers ran out of ideas on how to put a variety of noisy obstacles in the player’s path and defaulted to empty paint cans. You’ll find them in the middle of a hospital staircase – which is home to a handful of other characters early in the game, none of who apparently see the danger a paint-can-littered darkened stairway poses. You’ll stumble upon them in the middle of the woods, because every path through a forest is lined with empty paint cans, obviously. You’ll fiendishly kick them without even realizing, inviting certain death.

I harp on the paint cans because as interesting of a premise The Road Ahead might present with its gameplay, it often falters. The Road Ahead largely lacks inventiveness. To avoid making noises, you simply just play the game…slowly. You’ll open doors slowly. You’ll put the faintest of pressure on your thumbstick so protagonist Alex moves slowly over puddles or twigs or glass. You’ll lower air duct gates and planks slowly. These scenarios present interesting challenges that aren’t executed well in-game. I’d even welcome some QTEs or minigames to have me play out movement sequences so I felt a semblance of cautious control as opposed to just adjusting my pressure on the left thumbstick.

A unique idea A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead introduces is using your controller’s mic to pick up on sounds while you play, ensuring that you the player need to keep calm, just like Alex. Any whimper of fright will trigger a (loudly distracting) sound cue in-game, indicating a monster heard you. Its default setting is rather sensitive – unfortunately too sensitive for my New York City as every car horn or siren was picked up, leading me to have to turn it off. Nonetheless, I still tried to stay as steady and silent as the characters through the A Quiet Place franchise.

I also found Alex’s asthma to represent an interesting challenge. In the top left of the screen is an indicator showing how strained her lungs are due to physical strain, dust, or fear due to the proximity of an alien. You’ll have to use inhalers scattered around levels to keep her from having an asthma attack – but be careful, as the sound of the inhaler can attract an alien. I liked this idea on the surface, but thought it was vastly underutilized. Alex never has to rapidly recover her breath or fend off a coughing fit. She doesn’t loudly wheeze or deal with frightfully shallow breaths. Instead, her asthma is relegated to being a gameplay gimmick; another meter to keep track of while you try not to die.

My biggest annoyance with The Road Ahead’s gameplay is how it treats its levels like automatic-fail stealth missions. If you make a too-loud noise as Alex that an off- or on-screen monster can hear, it’s lights out for you. An uncontrollable animation will play of Alex standing frozen, attempting to cover her quivering mouth, before a monster attacks. You don’t get the option of stealthily trying to find cover, creating a distraction, or loudly running to safety. There’s a couple sequences where you can use a shotgun or run away, but they’re scripted sections and not options during the natural course of a level. It’s disappointing, because we often see in the films that characters can be detected by the monsters and still come out alive, like in an exhilarating sequence in A Quiet Place: Day One where the two leads flee under the cover of blaring car alarms or swim through a flooded train tunnel with an alien hot on their heels.

I could potentially forgive all my complaints about A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead’s gameplay if its stories and characters were gripping. Unfortunately, they don’t cover any new ground the films haven’t already gone tread. Alex’s boyfriend Martin dies in a similar way to John Krasinski’s Lee in the first film. Alex learns she’s pregnant early on, which draws obvious comparisons to Emily Blunt’s Evelyn. Unfortunately, her pregnancy feels unnecessary. As she’s so early, it poses no danger in the game. Conversely, if the game featured a farther along pregnant protagonist, it would simply be copying the first film. Ultimately, it’s a lose-lose.

A large chunk of the conflict in the game revolves around Alex and Laura, Martin’s mother. Laura blames Alex for the death of her husband and once the flashback sequence plays, showing how he died on Day 1, the conflict falls flat. I didn’t fully buy Laura’s resentment toward Alex, making the conflict feel artificial and poorly done.

The game tries to flesh out Alex, but for the most part she’s a very surface level protagonist. She has an interesting inner conflict; Alex wants to make music, but lives in a world where sound is death. But this is only brought up a couple times and not fully explored as the bulk of the game centers around Alex searching for safety with little character development. Alex experiences more loss outside of Martin, but barely gets to react to it; for the most part, she is silently moving through linear levels with no way to explore grief or her character arc.

As a fan of all three A Quiet Place movies, I really wanted to enjoy the franchise’s first step into the world of survival horror games, but couldn’t. The more time I spent with The Road Ahead, the more I was ready for it to end (perhaps there’s a reason the films don’t run over 100 minutes). It’s a frustratingly limiting game with monsters that annoy more than they frighten and a story that says nothing new. You’d be better off spending your evening with a A Quiet Place movie marathon than with The Road Ahead.