Summary
A Quiet Place: The Road Aheadis a first-person stealth-horror game and therefore unsurprisingly and inevitably bears resemblance to others of its ilk. The first-person stealth-horror subgenre has been rampant for quite some time and each entry rarely seems substantially iterative or creative relative to the ones that came before it, particularly in a murky sea of indie horror. Interestingly,Alien: Isolationis one of the only first-person stealth-horror games managing to emerge from that crowd positively aside from titles such asAmnesia,Outlast, andLittle Nightmares.
No doubt its strong narrative and IP foundation assisted in that regard, butAlien: Isolationdemonstrated how tense stealth-horror gameplay could be while tethered to the larger IP canon and implementing all possible iconography to embellish it; players encounter xenomorphs, facehuggers, and androids, for example, all while not being able to fully rely on offensive combat and snaking their way through dimly lit, retro-futuristic spaceship corridors.A Quiet Place: The Road Aheadnow has a responsibility to not only honor its IP source material but also stretch the stealth-horror subgenre within that framework.
On paper,A Quiet Place: The Road AheadandAlien: Isolationcould be spiritual siblings.The Road Aheadeven has a directional sound-tracking device that bears an unmistakable resemblance toIsolation’s motion detector—an iconic item in multipleAlien-relatedgames.
However,The Road Aheadis also demonstratively a hodgepodge of other horror inspirations since it includes an asthma inhaler and an associable lungs icon in the top-left corner of the screen that players must micromanage, not unlike howOutlastforces players to refill the camera with batteries—whichThe Road Aheadalso features for its flashlight—orhowAmnesiaimplements a sanity meter.Alien: Isolationis thankfully fairly simple in this regard since Amanda Ripley doesn’t have much at her disposal beyond flashbangs, a flamethrower, a stun baton, and several other defensive items in her item wheel.
Players don’t get immensely creative with how they circumvent androids or xenomorphs, lending the game to many instances of ducking under desks or into cabinets as one of the few ways to avoid enemies, and any time an emergency registration point is discovered incites a sigh of relief. InA Quiet Place: The Road Ahead, however, there will hopefully be many opportunities for players to exploit environments and even take advantage of crafty traps and devices.
Inspired by the first two movies,The Road Aheadcould implement a variety of sound traps and environmental interactionsthat alert players when a creature is nearby or distract them so players can quietly flee. This is essential because the premise of being silent is the whole gimmick of the IP itself, and the creatures inA Quiet Placeare typically overpowered unless characters have some way to create an unbearably powerful frequency and stun them, much less get a shotgun blast off on one before it can leap across a room and eviscerate them at the slightest sound made.
Indeed, the creatures’ speed is a huge part of why they’re intimidating, and inThe Road Aheadthat will hopefully translate accordingly. That said, if players have opportune exploits in an environment that they could plan ahead to employ, it would be fantastic to see lights turn on when a creature appears or a way to activate a sound trap in another room that players need to put together and strategize beforehand.
Unfortunately, much of what’s been revealed so far forA Quiet Place: The Road Ahead’s gameplayonly emphasizes ordinary stealth with alarmingly loud footsteps, an inhaler that doesn’t instantly trigger an alien to attack even if it’s used directly in front of one, and door-opening being a prominent factor in getting around quietly. Either way, it’ll be interesting to see how much else contributes to makingThe Road Aheadunique as a horror game.
