Summary
A Quiet Place: The Road Aheadis an exciting avenue for the traditionally big-screen, live-action-exclusive franchise to explore. On paper,A Quiet Place’s brand of sensory horror should adapt naturally to games as there are myriad examples now of similarly themed experiences. Interestingly,A Quiet Place: The Road Aheadwon’t integrate actual player sounds via a microphone accessory, but there’s always room for a future game to take a stab at such features. WhatA Quiet Place: The Road Aheaddoes lean on, though, is a handful of icons in the UI HUD that pertain to the anxiety-inducing management of survival systems and how quiet Alex Taylor is at any given moment.
This includes a tiny portrait of lungs players monitor throughout thegame representing Alex’s asthma. The protagonist having a chronic inflammatory disease ensures that the player will need to routinely use the character’s inhaler and thus it’s a brilliant feature to add to the game since players making noise will be virtually unavoidable. Unfortunately, a lengthy piece of gameplay footage forA Quiet Place: The Road Aheadshowcased that using the inhaler feet away from a creature does alert it, but not to players directly.
It’s dicey enough for characters toremain quiet when they need to inA Quiet Place, but layer that with a deaf character like Regan Abbott and there is suddenly a whole new challenge to consider when circumnavigating blind aliens. The same should be said of Alex, too, and yet her asthma isn’t proving to be as big of a gameplay obstacle to players’ survival in the wake of an alien invasion.
The fact that the alien doesn’t instantly whisk the player away to a swift death—at least not in a10-minute segment ofA Quiet Place: The Road Aheadgameplay—is contradictory to what theQuiet Placemovies have taught viewers until now.
Sounds supposedly trigger the aliens’ acute hearing and they come barreling toward whatever caused it, often from far away. The firstQuiet Placemovie demonstrates this succinctly via the tragic loss of Lee and Evelyn Abbott’s late son, where Lee had enough time to sprint along a trail of sand and nearly reach him before an alien came along.
It’s unknown how far that particular alien was from the boy before it heard the sound and came racing at him, yet for Alex to audibly use an inhaler not miles away from an alien but face-to-face with one inThe Road Aheadand not be killed half a second later seems absurd—not to mention the alien is apparently incapable of discerning where a sound that close to it came from. Instead, it behaves like an alerted enemy in anyother first-person stealth-horror gamethat begins patrolling to search for the player thereafter.
Of course, if using the inhaler at all was loud enough to summon a horde of aliens atop the player in seconds there would be no viable way to interpret that into actual gameplay. But if players knew they had to briskly flee from their position whenever they did use the inhaler, understanding that an alien would indeed come thrashing at their last location, that could make for some arresting moments in gameplay with players never feeling safe where they are and always needing to be on the move.
Instead, if players are aware that they can liberally use the inhaler at any given time with no dire repercussions and are able to exploit that,The Road Aheadmight miss out on a big part of what could’ve made it incessantly suspenseful. Regardless, even if the inhaler was integrated immersively enough to have a solely positive impact onThe Road Ahead, the game will need to fire on all cylinders to capture what makes a lot ofPOV horror gamesfrightening and that means also ensuring the protagonist’s footsteps aren’t making an enormous amount of sound all the time as well.
