A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead Review: Slowest Game Ever Made

There are plenty of red flags to look out for when considering a new video game, but relying on a film or TV license isn’t one of them, at least not anymore. Gone are the days of cheap tie-ins being produced for any movie with even a small amount of action, and instead most licensed games today are much more carefully crafted. They are also rarely direct adaptations, but are simply based on the same fictional universe.

Such is the case with The Road Ahead, which is supposed to be canon with the three existing Quiet Place films, but features a new set of characters. Since the trick in the movies is to avoid the monsters that are attracted to the sound, a game definitely has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, however, The Road Ahead raises a much more reliable red flag, as the publisher didn’t send review copies to anyone before its release.

Also, and despite being based on a well-known property, the game is strangely half the price of most other major titles. It is not surprising to find that this is not an act of charity towards the fans of the films. It’s also surprising that despite all the bad omens, the game is actually very interesting.

Unlike some movie tie-ins, you definitely don’t need to have seen the movies to understand The Road Ahead. The gist is that Earth has been invaded by blind, heavily armored aliens who hunt by sound and…that’s it. While this results in a very simple game setup, the obvious problem is that trying to be silent and not move isn’t necessarily the most exciting imperative, especially since the aliens are nearly impossible to kill.

And yet, in concept, it’s not that different from Alien Isolation and even has a similar first-person point of view. You play as a young asthmatic named Alex, whose breathing problems create an additional obstacle when trying to avoid monsters with super hearing. The plot is as simple as the concept, as Alex travels with her father, her boyfriend, and a host of other sad-looking survivors, as they travel to a supposedly safe haven.

On paper, this sounds exactly like Alien Isolation, which isn’t a bad thing, but in practice it’s very different. The xenomorph will detect you both visually and if you’re making too much noise, but its sense of hearing isn’t as good as the Angels of death from A Quiet Place. This means that in The Road Ahead you not only have to be careful about stepping on anything or knocking over objects, but you also have to do everything very slowly.

From opening a door to walking forward, if you move at a speed similar to normal speed when an angel is around, then you’ve had it. You can’t blame the game, or the developer (the same studio behind the underappreciated Remothered), for playing by the rules of the movies, but that can’t stop it from being an incredibly slow-paced game. However, the dedication to its premise ensures that it’s much more tense and interesting than it probably sounds right now.

Alex’s journey is filled with all the obstacles featured in the movies, as you try to avoid stepping on dry leaves and unnoticed paint cans, while dealing with creaking doors and rusted pipe valves.

Early in the game, Alex builds himself a sound meter, which shows how much noise he’s making and essentially gives him two or three chances before an angel changes in his presence. Although later in the game they start using a special ability that allows them to hear any noise you make, no matter what else is going on.

Adding to your woes is the fact that Alex also has a torch, so he doesn’t crash into things at night, but in what we can only assume is an homage to Doom 3, he can only hold one in the time As with many other things in the game, this feels very contrived, but it adds to the tension… and the difficulty.

As is typical of most stealth games, which it essentially is, you can also throw bricks and bottles to misdirect monsters, sometimes using them to clear your way, triggering traps or knocking down walls. Like in the movies, you can spread sand in front of you, to make sure you don’t make any noise; while there is a difficult QTE sequence that you must perform If Alex has an asthma attack, as a result of being too stressed or if he overexerts himself physically.

You can even enable an option where if the DualSense controller’s microphone picks up ambient noise in the real world, the monster is altered. But you’d have to be a real masochist to leave that.

The Road Ahead is roughly eight hours long, but even if you click along at its glacially slow pace, you start to run out of ideas before the end as the level of ingenuity continues to rise. Their wilderness areas, for example, look like they must have been popular fly-tipping spots before the invasion, given the amount of man-made detritus everywhere.

The way the story plays out is also highly predictable, especially if you’ve seen any of the movies, and it’s absolute misery for poor Alex. It’s not that bad for you as a gamer, but you’d have to really like the Quiet Place movies to drag yourself through the whole thing. Still, we can’t help but admire the game for sticking to its guns and trying to simulate the movies as accurately as possible.

We’re not sure we’ve ever had fun playing it, but it’s a tense and occasionally scary experience that, despite some frustrating bugs, brings out the full potential of the source material. So, if you like stealth games but want them to be even slower and more demanding, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is definitely the game for you.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (review), Xbox Series X/S and PC
Price: €24.99
Publisher: Saber Interactive
Developer: Stormind Games
Release date: October 17, 2024
Age rating: 16