Review: A Quiet Place-The Road Ahead
As with all video games out there, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead isn’t for everyone. It wouldn’t necessarily have been for me 20-30 years ago when I was playing Doom, Unreal Tournament and other such games which required quick reactions and were all “shooty shooty bang bang”.
However, age and slowing reactions (along with a lot more patience) has made me appreciate games more that force you to take things at a slower pace.
A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead puts you into the world of the “A Quiet Place” movies (well worth watching if you haven’t already) where aliens have invaded earth and hunt and kill their prey…which is basically anything that makes a noise.
Playing as Alex, a young woman doing her best to survive, you must try to survive in this hostile new world, made even harder due to the reveal at the beginning of the game that you are unexpectedly pregnant. Add to that an asthma problem which is irritated by dust (a lot of that floating around), stress (also a lot of that too), and any exertion inevitably means you’re going to need a puff on your inhaler to get your lungs working properly again.
You’re introduced to the main mechanics of the game through the early levels in an abandoned hospital, where you must quietly open doors, quietly open drawers, quietly climb through air ducts, quietly walk around slowly. Yes, you have to do most everything quietly AND slowly, for if you don’t you’ll gain the attention of a mean and nasty alien who will kill you within seconds. And hereby is what may put a lot of people off this game…its slow and meticulous gameplay, where a single bit of impatience by the player can result in near instant death. However, this very core of the games mechanics is what appeals to me, taking my time to slowly work my way through the world and try to get to safety.
You can distract the aliens by throwing certain objects, and gameplay settings allow you to customise how easy/difficult the experience is, with options to highlight the aliens in red for easier viewing, or to have a visible representation onscreen for if they can hear you or not…which also sits alongside a piece of equipment that is given to you early in the game which compares the noise you are making to the ambient noise around…make more noise than the ambient noise and get ready to be attacked.
Attacks unfortunately can be a little frustrating at times, as more often than I’d like I was creeping around and hiding and an alien would brush past me and suddenly attack…sending me back quite a way to repeat a part of the map I’d just spent ages creeping through.
The narrative is fairly thin and the gameplay somewhat repetitive, BUT if you do enjoy just creeping slowly around trying to survive, then this could be worth you investing around 10 hours or so to complete. COD addicts avoid at all costs as there is no running and most definitely no shooting.
Available on PC/PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
Review by Dave from an Xbox code kind supplied by Sabre Interactive.
