A Quiet Place is faithfully recreated in this game, but almost too literally
Saber Interactive and Stormind’s new game based on the hit movie franchise aims to bring alien invasion horror to our screens, but it tends to be hampered by slow pacing that erases much of the tension.
I learned this about 5 minutes into the game, soon after the intro sequence: the way to stay alive and not get eaten by a monster is to stay quiet and walk. really. slow. Like, REALLY SLOW. I don’t know if it’s a bug or a hack or cheesing the game, but I was able to make it through the majority of my playthrough without really having much alien-infused tension. It’s less of a horror experience and more of a test of our wills. How long are we willing to crouch-walk through hotels or houses or warehouses at a snail’s pace?
The answer is quite long.
A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead isn’t a bad game, in fact there are genuine moments of satisfaction within it. The game is built on the idea that the alien menace landed just four months earlier and only now are humans coming to grips with how to survive. Humanity is in disarray and has had to drop their lives abruptly, leaving what I feel is a compelling world design full of history and artifacts. The environment is still alive, the buildings are still alive, and yet there’s an air of something missing. Where did the people go? Or are they still here? Or is something else here? It’s a timestamp in the routine lives of the denizens of this (now quiet) place. There are notes everywhere that feel like real notes someone would leave as a reminder, there are medicine bottles, there are tools in places where they fit knowing that peril could come at any moment. This is survival horror, with the compelling world doing the surviving.
But we’re not. At least, we’re not if we make too much noise. And so almost immediately we want to do our best to avoid making sounds; we’ve seen the movies, we know how this ends. We also know how game mechanics work, and how crouches and slow-walking are a fictional invincibility in digital worlds. Do we have to make it to the other side of the building? I can make it, it’ll just take a while to get there. That negates fear, which is the whole premise of this IP. There are moments where we can be loud — outside in the rain, in a noisy building — but those are deliberate. I know that if I want a breather I can just head back outside and run around to the other side of the house to try and pop in a different way; it may be a longer route but at least it’ll be faster.
The monster deaths sometimes feel instant and unfair, but when we hit some of the more scripted sections when the aliens are intentionally placed then we know the developers wanted us to be able to work our way out. THOSE are worth experiencing, because THOSE have real weight and tension behind them.
We’re often asked to fully explore a location and move all over it, with unique rooms and inner locales, and finding a tool that is beneficial for solving a puzzle later or one that we’ve passed earlier really evokes the feeling that everything has purpose and there is an end game. It’s not open world, it’s a story, with a beginning, middle and end. And we start to care for the lead character and how she aims to save her friends and her own life. There’s not a ton of emotional connection, but what is there does a decent enough job of giving us a main goal. Humans are becoming sparse, so we’d better try to be good to whomever is left.
If there’s a silver lining to the annoyingly slow pace it’s that it gives us time to see (and hear) everything. The game looks good; I plowed through it on my SteamDeck and it was a nice fit, and playing on a PC and bigger screen definitely showed well. The audio presentation is worthwhile, as the developers went out of their way to make sure that sound was IMPORTANT here. We need to hear floorboards cracking and water falling. There’s even a feature that links a microphone to the game, so that if we breathe too hard or start talking or gasp then the aliens can hear us easier and pounce earlier. It’s fine, I guess, but I tend to clear my throat a lot or eat while I’m playing, so having the mic in my face when I’m not talking to anyone leads to a lot of unnecessary alien attacks. It’s a gimmick, for a minute, but that’s about all once can really muster.
A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is the kind of game that tries REALLY HARD to recreate the experience of the films. It has interesting set pieces and moments that keep us engaged, and the visuals and audio draw us in. But because of this reliance on the IP it forces some choices that make it more of a slog than a project in fluid tension. I like long walks, but not ALL the time. At least there are plenty of things to look at when I’m walking.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It originally appeared on the October 29, 2024 episode of The SideQuest. Images and video courtesy the publisher.
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