In A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead, an alien threat who is constantly watching over you like the most evil version of Siri is just one creaky floorboard away from snuffing you out. For most of us, the worst punishment for making too much noise might be a reprimanded shush from the movie theater seat behind you. In addition to closely referencing films like Alien: Isolation in its portrayal of the hesitant rodent caught in a lethal game of cat and mouse, this immediate fail, stealth-heavy horror narrative does a pretty good job of re-creating the suspenseful tension of the flicks. Despite my cautious advance along The Road Ahead moving at a continuously glacial pace and occasionally snagging on some rather weird design decisions, the end result is a consistently stressful effort from start to finish.
We follow college student Alex Taylor as she attempts to escape her abandoned hospital hideout in order to make a silent and steady pilgrimage toward an offshore safe haven isolated from the threat of the monsters, known as Death Angels. The Road Ahead is a stand-alone story that is primarily set four months after the alien invasion seen in A Quiet Place: Day One. The plot is simple, but Alex’s endearing early moments with her likable lover Martin and her generous father Kenneth were enough to pique my interest in her cause before an unavoidable alien-caused tragedy prompted her to carry out her escape plan. It is a bit disappointing that, despite its impressive beginning, The Road Ahead’s plot’s resolution in its final moments is incredibly predictable, and the film’s overall narrative lacks impact, especially after Day One’s much more emotionally stirring tale earlier this year.
There are still plenty of significant human artifacts to sort through, though. Alex spends most of The Road Ahead alone with her thoughts, which are suitably depicted by onscreen text because any spoken sentence is only ever followed by a death sentence, except the story’s introductory chapters and the occasional flashback. Instead of interacting with other survivors, I gained a strong sense of the history of each place I shuffle-stepped through by looking at the poignant family portraits made with a child’s crayon and tacked to the wall of a safehouse that had been abandoned, or the amusing note that a store owner in a seaside shopping strip left about a toilet paper-related riot. The Road Ahead has many excellent world-building elements like this, and because I navigated the game in slow motion and made a valiant effort to make every movement muted, I had plenty of time to examine every small detail.
Creeping with the Enemy
The Road Ahead may be a first-person adventure with virtually no violence, but it is not a “walking simulator”—rather, it is a balking simulator. Because even the slightest squeak of a door hinge or the crunch of trampled gravel can instantly alert an alien hunter to your location and put a stop to your slow journey to safety, every action you take is a reluctant one. So, I mostly used my controller’s thumbstick to make tiny movements to advance through Alex’s journey through deserted homes, campgrounds, and trainyards. I tiptoed through rooms at a snail’s pace, tilted forward to slowly open doors, and carefully pulled back to slowly open desk drawers to search through. In this case, your significant half is a spindly-limbed alien who wants to tear your insides out instead of just asking you to sleep on the couch. It was similar to returning home late from a night out and attempting to find your way to bed without waking them. In The Road Ahead, practically every setting you explore is designed to challenge your fine motor and coordination abilities. There are a lot of beast-stirring booby traps in the crowded, packed rooms, and if you are not careful, just sweeping past hollow barrels or hastily opening an air vent cover might quickly lead to your downfall. Fortunately, early on, Alex is given a homemade phonometer that, when held in her left hand, shows the decibel level that her motions produce about the volume of the surrounding ambient sounds.
Almost every environment you encounter in The Road Ahead is intended to test your coordination and fine motor skills. The dense, packed hallways are full of beast-stirring booby traps, and if you are not careful, you could be destroyed in a flash by just sweeping past hollow barrels or hurriedly opening an air vent cover. Thankfully, Alex is given a homemade phonometer early on, which, when held in her left hand, indicates the decibel level that her movements generate about the volume of ambient noises in the environment.
However, some of the ways that The Road Ahead evokes a crunch or clang that may end a life do seem a bit forced. Shards of broken glass lining the paths next to the shattered windows of an overturned train carriage makes perfect sense, but the sheer number of abandoned paint cans on isolated forest hiking trails seems a little too unlikely, like emerging from beneath the Simpsons family car and discovering a parking lot that is strangely packed with garden rakes to walk on. Although I was able to suspend my imagination and follow the developers’ noisy obstacle course, I do wish they had been able to cover up their monster-rousing gaffes a bit more naturally.
But Alex faces dangers from both inside and outside of herself that could reveal her secret. Since Alex has asthma, overexertion behaviors like pulling herself up onto ledges or carrying heavy planks to use as makeshift bridges, as well as stressful situations like being near one of the alien stalkers, can cause her to go into a state of noisy hyperventilation, which serves as a red flag to any nearby monsters. Even while it seems a little absurd that the inhalers are single-use only as if their previous owners huffed them all up to the limit, this presents the pleasant task of figuring out when to utilize the inhalers that can be acquired along the way.
Quiet Riot
Along with the phonometer, you are given a few other essential tools to ward off the perceptive assassins. The Road Ahead is not just about lurking around in silence like some kind of survival-horror street mime. Some items have two uses, such as hand flares that can be sparked to light up darker areas or thrown away to confuse your petal-faced pursuers with their crackling hiss. Bricks and bottles can be picked up and thrown to momentarily distract them in a fairly standard stealth-game fashion. However, the fact that certain of the items in Alex’s inventory are limited to specific users does seem a little arbitrary. Being forced to choose between using Alex’s torch to light the way ahead and the phonometer to measure sound, for instance, because both can only be used in her left hand, may add a layer of stress, but it barely makes sense. Where did you buy this flashlight—at Ned Flanders’ Leftorium?
I would sometimes find myself in close quarters with a monster and without any tools to make noise. This left me in a precarious situation where I could either try to flee and get slashed in the back, or I could stand motionless and the blind beast would bump into my nose and hit me without warning. Sticking or twisting did not seem to matter because I would end up stuck and twisted in any case. Although the somewhat scripted feel of its enemy encounters means that The Road Ahead is never as overtly terrifying as Alien: Isolation, it is at least more forgiving and less likely to frustrate because you could not reach a manual save point. Fortunately, The Road Ahead’s generous auto-save system meant that I was rarely penalized too heavily each time I perished.
Verdict
Even while its strategies for maintaining tension occasionally come across as a little too obviously manufactured, A Quiet Place: Road Ahead does a fantastic job of taking a distinctively silent horror film series and turning it into an interactive adventure. My frequent instant deaths were never a cause of annoyance thanks to the reliable auto-save and the many thoughtfully designed human touches that made its deserted areas so vivid. A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead may have a consistently tense atmosphere throughout, but it lacks any major plot twists or substantial changes to its straightforward stealth-based gameplay to make for an unforgettable experience.
