A Quiet Place has quickly grown into one of the better horror franchises of the past decade. Three movies deep, the creature features have explored a fascinating world in which blind aliens use a highly keen sense of hearing to hunt humans desperate not to make a single peep. Translating that incredibly slow and silent story universe to a video game makes for a novel project, and I can see why A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead has launched so quietly itself. It’s a strange mission to assign players, but it’s one I’m glad to have experienced—despite a host of issues.
A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is a first-person stealth-horror game starring a cast of characters new to the series but similarly seeking to find safety from the swarm of aliens who have commandeered Earth by force. As Alex—an asthmatic college-aged woman with a boyfriend, a dad, and a range of other perpetually silent allies—players embark on a road trip that will test her ability to crouch-walk pretty much forever.
That design direction could easily make for a frustrating video game. In games that allow me to upgrade my crouched movement speed, I’ve always unlocked it as soon as I can—I like stealth games a lot and so I tend to want to improve that facet of such a game. So it’s notable to me that The Road Ahead doesn’t just demand you crouch-walk through almost every moment of its 7-to-10-hour story, but forces you to do it very slowly, usually barely pushing on the left stick, because the aliens in the game behave unpredictably like Alien: Isolation’s Xenomorph and tend to hear even a crouched footstep performed at full speed.