A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead Xbox Series X Review

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead Xbox Series X Review – Stealth and Survival, with Stumbles

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is based on the film franchise created by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, where almost indestructible aliens with super-sensitive hearing have invaded the Earth. Does this post-apocalyptic setting with its stealth-based gameplay succeed in creating atmosphere and suspense?

The prologue puts the player in charge of a young woman called Alex, spending time stalking animals in the forest. When her friend Martin rushes off into the undergrowth, Alex nervously follows. This introduces the player to the basic controls for crouching, climbing over obstacles with A (which are by default highlighted with yellow or white paint, a setting that can be turned off) and treading quietly by avoiding water and loud surfaces. When you make your way through a creepy abandoned hut, Martin surprises you – which triggers an asthma attack, causing Alex to faint.

The action then switches to Day 105 after the Arrival of the aliens, with Martin and Alex exploring the Red Ranch for supplies. A loud rain shower outside helps muffle the noise they make as they move, and Alex learns more movement tricks as she climbs through grates and unlocks doors. You must move doors and drawers slowly and carefully to reduce the noise; unscrewing the bolts on a grate or lifting the latch on a door are pleasingly physical to control. Spread around the ranch building are batteries (for your torch), pills and inhalers (to help Alex with her asthma) and various notes and drawings that can be examined. The notes help fill in the backstory and there is also environmental storytelling including messages scrawled on the walls; Alex’s diary fills with entries as the story progresses. As Alex gathers supplies from the infirmary, a major plot twist is revealed – Alex is now pregnant with Martin’s child. It is as you are leaving the ranch that the catastrophe happens – Alex makes a loud noise climbing over an obstacle, and Martin distracts the alien by running away and shouting.

The game proper starts on day 119 back at the hospital where Alex and her father have been staying. With the missing Martin’s mother Lauren unhappy and other survivors suspicious of each other, Alex gets locked in. She completes work on the Phonometer (to sense sound) and is helped to get out by her father – only for the aliens to breach the hospital. There follows a tense game of cat and mouse as Alex tries to escape, then goes in search of a nearby military camp that promises more supplies and fellow survivors. Getting through the forest leads to more locations, including a flashback to witness the Arrival of the aliens.

From the opening, this game is trying to mimic The Last Of Us with its combination of stealth and heart-wrenching emotional scenes. The truth is that it falls a long way short of that modern classic. The backstory of Alex loving to sing feels cribbed from Ellie. On Normal difficulty, the slow pace of movement needed to reduce noise makes every corridor an agonising slow traversal. This is made worse by the punishing game design, which places empty cans and other noisy objects on the most direct path and even on stairways. I found myself forced to turn down the difficulty to the easier Survivor Mode to get past the hospital. This mode also gives you the Focus ability, letting you see the location of the creature highlighted with a red glow. As you see more of the creatures, they lose their impact; the jump scares and repeated deaths will frustrate you as you see more survivors picked off. I also experienced severe technical problems, with “blocked” doorways preventing me from moving along a path and I had to reload the hospital section more than once.

In general, the graphical design is clever, but the reliance on dark scenes and moody lighting leaves you feeling claustrophobic and hemmed in – even in the forest scenes, where the small corridors funnel you in a particular direction. While you can get a reminder of your next target, this can be too vague to be helpful in certain situations. I found the controls for using and selecting objects to be confusing in the middle of the (slow) action. The asthma mechanic itself adds very little to the game, simply meaning you take longer to perform certain tasks and imposing the need to search locations to find more inhalers – which are often hidden in drawers or deliberately placed behind noisy objects into which you can walk. Constantly having to change your path to reach the notes and drawings also makes the pace drag. The sound design is infuriating too. Every door “creak” has a similar sound, and the game overdoes the use of rumble as feedback through the joypad (although this can be adjusted). The loud and harsh sting when you have caused too much noise starts to grate after a short while. The voice work is competent but hardly original. An almost pointless addition is the collectables, providing “credits” to unlock concept art and other behind-the-scenes material. The piecemeal Achievements are slowly fed to the player, making it feel like a chore even as you make small amounts of progress.

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead Xbox Series X Review Summary – A Quiet Path That Echoes with Frustration

As I have not seen the films this is based on, I feel unqualified to say whether it works as a tie-in. The real problem is that it doesn’t work fluidly as a game, forcing the player to move slowly and search everywhere. There are scary moments, and the grim setting has an atmosphere, but the frustrations and repetition of gameplay moments make it a below-par survival horror title that will not stay long in the memory.