Good horror is about tension. You may know the outcome of a character's fate, but the thrill comes from when the kill will happen and how the end came to be more so than the goriness of the kill itself. On paper, making a game adaptation of A Quiet Place seems like it would revel in the idea of tension because almost everything can be a catalyst for a character's demise. In practice, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead perhaps indulges in this too much for a video game adaptation.

The game takes place only a few months after the alien invasion that caused the world to go silent for the sake of survival. You play the role of Alex, a musician who suffers from a severe case of asthma and just found out that she's pregnant. After seeing her baby's father die, she's blamed for causing his death by the man's father, who seems to have hated you since the invasion started. Feeling like a prisoner, you decide to escape and make your way to a harbor with the promise of a boat that'll take you to safety, since the creatures cannot swim.

Your feelings about the story are going to depend on whether you are a fan of the movie series. The characters fill the typical roles of any horror movie, and you pretty much know their outcomes long before it happens. The game has a few flashbacks to give you more background on some characters before the invasion, but they don't do a great job of explaining why one of the game's antagonists thinks you're the reason their loved ones perished. No one makes outright dumb decisions, but the string of unlucky events that befall you reach laughable proportions. Compared to the films, this is passable, but those who aren't invested in the film series won't be motivated to see the movies.

The gameplay can be best classified as a first-person stealth game, since you sneak around from area to area while trying to open doors and passageways to reach the next area. You'll only face one kind of enemy, but you can't kill them, so you're forced to find ways to distract them with bottles and bricks to stay safe. Since the creatures are sensitive to sounds, you'll have to pay extra attention to where you walk; simply running on the ground is enough for a creature to figure out your location and kill you.

The importance of sound in the stealth journey is implemented pretty nicely. You need to be conscious about what you do. Walking on broken glass, dead leaves or water puddles is enough to get a creature to hunt you down. Doors need to be opened slowly, and even opening or closing a valve comes with great risk if you aren't doing it carefully. It helps that the controls for these actions are accurate with a gamepad, so you don't lose control over how much movement you want applied to swing open a cabinet door. You can use a homemade phonometer to measure how much sound you're making versus the environment, so you know how much leeway you have before you're in trouble. It doesn't take long before you find yourself abandoning it in favor of using your instincts.

Your character's asthma also plays as important a factor in the stealth. At times of stress, your asthma gets triggered. The same thing happens when you enter dusty environments or use something that produces smoke, such as flares. No matter the cause, you won't get coughing fits right away, but a lung meter will appear when agitated, and your vision will get blurred when things get fairly bad. Get it to a high enough level without treatment, and you'll be given a chance to stabilize it either a bit or fully by hitting a button at the right moment during a quick time event (QTE). Fail and you'll cough, but you can still treat it with inhalers, which you can also use before the attack occurs.

Asthma is treated as a gameplay mechanic to make the whole situation even more tense, but you will have some misgivings about how it's implemented. For example, carrying anything seems to trigger your asthma, so moving wooden planks, barrels, or even an empty box will get you stressed. You are limited to how many inhalers you can carry, and each one seems to be single use only, which is very strange. You can also use nausea pills that bring down the asthma conditions a little, but you can't stash them in your inventory because those are taken immediately; it also feels strange to use nausea pills to treat this condition. Overall, those things add some drama to the proceedings, but expect to be slowed down greatly because of it.

The asthma issues aren't the only thing that can put a damper on the gameplay. The game absolutely slathers every interactable object it can in yellow paint. If you find a brick or a ledge that isn't covered in yellow or blinking blue, you cannot mess with it despite it being a viable thing to do. You have the option to disable the paint, but it is still laughable to see that color being so prominent. The environments are absolutely littered with random cans and red barrels and other objects that are meant to create noise when you bump into them. You can reduce the noise you make with sand, but that's only available in certain scripted areas.

The creatures may suddenly change their patrol routes or destroy a door or gate on command. The creatures break stuff often in the game's back half, and you need to see them do this because trying to skip it creates a bug where they're invisible. While they're invisible, they can't harm you, and you can do whatever you please, but reach the exit of a room or a place where any sort of transition happens, and you'll get a surprise death cut scene when you know that the creature was nowhere near you. The checkpoints are generous enough that you won't lose much progress when this happens, but it remains annoying to have to do this just because you didn't watch a scripted event unfold.

Perhaps the biggest issue some players may have with The Road Ahead is its pacing. The whole nature of the game asks that you move carefully and do everything slowly in order not to get caught, and the game mechanics challenge you to do all of this despite having you traverse areas littered with hazards. However, the game asks you to do this for long stretches of time. The flashback acts as a break from the constant stealth, but the reward is an attempt to flesh out characters. The safehouses are supposed to also act as areas where you can finally have free movement instead of being careful all the time, but you're never given an indication that you're in an actual safehouse until you take a chance and move something at a normal speed. The areas are also small and have nothing to do, so you may only realize you're in a safehouse after you leave it. Unless you're playing the game in short bursts, the whole play session will feel like one long stealth mission that gets tiresome because of how long it takes to do anything.

Speaking of relentless tension, The Road Ahead has an optional mode to allow microphones to be operational. With a headset or mic plugged in, the game takes the feedback and translates it as noise that your character is actually making in the game. We've seen this concept in Manhunt, so it isn't a completely new thing, and while it is a neat idea, the fact that noise often means instant death means that you'd need to turn down your mic sensitivity if you can't play the game in an absolutely quiet environment. Unless you plan on streaming the game or want to play on the absolute hardest settings, you're better off leaving off this option.

There isn't much to look forward to once the end credits start rolling. Aside from going after some Achievements, you can deviate from the normal path to find toy space shuttles. These are then converted into currency, so you can buy the game's concept art and 3D models, but around half of the models aren't seen in the game. Otherwise, this can be considered a one-and-done game.

For a game whose theme is focused on silence, the audio part of the presentation is mostly good. The music is fine, but you'll only care about it when it starts playing since it means you're about to die. The various sound effects are also good; that's helpful since the game is dominated by silence. This is certainly the case in the second-to-last level, where the wind and ocean sound effects play in areas where they aren't supposed to, breaking the soundscape immersion that had been good up to that point.

There is one mistake that the audio commits often: the overuse of the sound stinger to let you know that the creatures are aware. The sharp sound effect is effective, but it also plays very often anytime you make any transgression, even if it was played just a moment ago. It plays so often that it stops scaring you and simply becomes an annoyance, especially when it happens in conjunction with the bug where a creature can disappear before mysteriously killing you when you exit the area.

Graphically, The Road Ahead looks very good when you consider that the focus is more on environments than anything else. The game sports some clean textures — relatively speaking, compared to the grimy nature of the world — with no sign of pop-up. The creature looks hideous in a good way, while the human characters look fine. The only thing to look out for is the game's use of ray tracing, as it's actually fine in indoor environments and at night; once daylight hits, the frame rate takes a big and noticeable hit. The game sports every form of upscaling possible, so that should help for some mid-range rigs trying to run the game at higher-than-expected settings. Ultrawide support is also available, but it doesn't play well with the Extras menu because you can't fully see the 3D models at a 21:9 aspect ratio.

The game runs on the Steam Deck, but that feels more like a technicality rather than a declaration of an enjoyable experience. The game runs on the device's native 1280x800 resolution, and the options sport a specific Steam Deck option that you can't change. You also can't see exactly what each individual graphical setting is set to. You can see that FSR is active and set to Performance mode, though. During gameplay, the game is quite blurry, but the performance is pretty poor. The game averages a little less than 20fps in any outdoor areas, while it fares a tad better in darker indoor areas. Battery life is under two hours on the Steam Deck LCD version. In short, the game can be played on the go, but you'll either opt for any of the Windows handhelds with a newer chipset to do this or simply not bother to take the game on the go.

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is a decent horror experience. The story is fine if you're a fan of the situation instead of the characters that don't give you much material to sympathize with them. The gameplay is authentic to the movies, but it can also feel ridiculous with the amount of debris that you need to be aware of. The game nails the tension necessary for a horror game, but it is also laid on so thick that it can feel tiring if you're playing in long sessions. In the end, while it could've been a tighter experience, it is still a game worth checking out if you're a fan of horror games where you can forgive some questionable game design decisions.

Score: 6.5/10