Steam Deck Status Unknown!Welcome to my review of A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead. This game is brought to us by Stormind Games (Batora: Lost Haven) and Saber Interactive (Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II, Teardown). It is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam for a price of £24.99. For the purpose of this review, I was kindly given a Steam key.
If you hadn’t already figured it out, this game is based on the movie franchise A Quiet Place from Paramount Pictures. Experience the creatures take over the world and survive the horrors, without making a sound. The creatures are being called Death Angels around the Internet, due to a newspaper clipping on a wall in one of the movies. But, I’m not sure if that’s canon or not so I am just going to call them “creatures”, for now.
The Game
To get started I want to point out that I was very sceptical about this game. I saw some trailers and heard about some features and thought “Here we go again, another run of the mill horror game”. It was also stated that this is first game to have a microphone detection feature.
If you’re unaware of what that is, basically if you enable it and have a microphone, the creatures can hear you if you cough/sneeze/scream in real life… Then of course, they come for you in the game. I believe that some indie horror games have used a microphone detection feature. But, I could be very wrong with that.
Therefore, whilst other games have similar features to this, such as Phasmophobia using it to talk to the ghosts in-game, it is the first to use it against you.
Either way, my scepticism was quickly blown away. A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is absolutely class. The graphics, the lighting, the atmosphere, the audio… All of it is very well put together. Even the microphone feature is really good. I had to give it a try and it works very well… Just not in my favour, of course.
So, the basic premise of the game is that it’s a survival horror in which you must stay as quiet as possible, otherwise you’ll be found and brutally slaughtered by the alien creatures that have landed on Earth. We play as Alex, a woman who suffers from Asthma. Because of course she does. In a game where you have to be quiet you have someone who has the lungs of a dead pigeon. However, there are ways and means around this. Around the game world you will find pills and inhalers. These help keep Alex’s Asthma at bay.
You Better Stay Quiet!
However, should you not find any pills or inhalers, every move could lead to an Asthma attack. There is an indicator for this on the top left of the screen. It’s a picture of some lungs, the closer to an attack you are, the more red they become. The best is blue, which turns to white, then yellow, orange, red. So you have a fair warning before an attack kicks in. Should an attack kick in, you’ll have to press the indicated button on screen in time to stop it. If you land on an orange ring, it’ll prevent it but not heal you at all, so another attack will happen very soon. If you land in the green ring, it’ll heal you somewhat and give you another chance to survive.
The inhaler and pills are not the only useful things in the game. You also have a useful tool that Alex has created called the Phonometer. This tool allows you to monitor the volume of the surrounding area vs the volume of the noise you’re making. It is a very good tool and I recommend you make as much use of it as you can.
There are no weapons in the game, only bricks and glass bottles to help you distract the creatures, more on this below.
As mentioned above, I found that the graphics and audio were brilliant in this game. As you can see in the screenshot above, the attention to detail on the creatures is phenomenal.
The game has an ok length of play time considering it’s a first-person survival horror. It will last you anywhere from 7-10 hours depending how long you hang around in areas. I feel that if it was any longer, I would have stopped playing it due to boredom. But that’s just me.
But, that’s not all.
There’s many obstacles in the game that try to stop you in your path whilst you try to find another route. For example, broken glass next to a window, you can get through the window but can you keep it as quiet as possible without alerting the creatures? Or, there may be an unlocked door nearby that you could use instead. This isn’t always the case but keep your eyes open for other options.
You can also use some of these obstacles as distractions should there be a creature nearby. For example, if you pick up a brick and throw it through a window, that will of course make a very loud noise. In turn this alerts the creatures and they then run to the area of the noise. This could be just enough space to allow you to creep passed them to continue your journey for survival.
Conclusions
Whilst the story isn’t anything ground breaking and pretty predictable throughout, it’s a good game from start to finish. However, I did feel toward the end I got a little bored of the game. But that’s probably just me and my lack of long term attention.
I haven’t said much about this on the Steam Deck as I haven’t actually played it on Deck. I’ve only played it on my PC.
I give A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead a score of 8/10.
To learn more about this game, please visit the official site. You can also read our previous reviews.
A code was kindly provided for us to review this.
