A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead Review (Xbox Series X|S)

The A Quiet Place films have burst onto the scene in recent times to form a new horror franchise - with three entries spanning the last six years or so in the movie world. As the name suggests, this series centres around humans having to stay deadly quiet to survive, as an alien species threatens to wipe them out at even the slightest of sound. This all seems like a good recipe for a video game adaptation... right? Well Saber Interactive and Stormind Games have teamed up to deliver just that with A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead - and they've done a good job at recreating the feeling of the films, at the expense of a little bit of variety.

The premise of The Road Ahead is a fairly simple one - early on in the game you find out you're pregnant and subsequently embark on a mission to protect yourself and the baby from these otherworldly beasts. The game follows a pretty similar format to all of the movies, with elements of each making their way into The Road Ahead. In video game terms, you'll do lots of sneaking and skulking through various environments as you desperately scramble to survive. This is a tense video game, with almost anything above a slow crawl guaranteed to bring you unwanted attention.

Oh, and the other thing? You don't really have anything to fight back with. The Road Ahead gives you lots of tools for distracting enemies, and plenty of options for helping you stay calm and recover after encountering them, but taking these things on is rarely a viable option. Again, this is true to the films in a lot of ways - A Quiet Place is about avoiding conflict rather than engaging in it, which can be tough when you have to be so bloody quiet all the time.

One way that The Road Ahead emphasises this is by actually measuring movement input in-game. Rather than just crouch, walk and sprint, this game really takes into account subtle stick movements. You'll have to weigh up your every move, because a little bit too much speed could easily result in an instant death if you're heard too clearly. This even extends to things like slowly opening doors and switch panels - the name of the game here is to take your time and make sure to create as little noise as possible.

During the early hours of the game we really liked this approach, especially because The Road Ahead initially does a good job of mixing in well-acted cutscenes, flashback levels, and tense early-game encounters with the enemy - to good effect. However, as the game progresses, it does start to run out of ideas a bit, and we did feel the odd eyeroll slip out when we had to sneak through yet another empty warehouse at about an inch an hour. There's no doubt that this approach to sneaking adds lots of tension - we just preferred how the first half of the game worked with this, as opposed to the later stages where it becomes the sole focus of the experience.

Having said that, we have to give credit to the developer for making these enemies pretty damn terrifying. There are shades of Alien: Isolation in the way that The Road Ahead's creepy crawly beasts stalk around after you - you have to have your wits about you to stay alive, for sure. It's usually just one beast at a time you're dealing with as well, and we did find ourselves developing a special level of hatred for them as we regularly played cat and mouse through the woods and abandoned train yards. This A Quiet Place adaptation succeeds in making its enemies scary in pretty much every scenario.

Part of that comes down to the game's audio as well. The squeals and shrieks that these things make can be ear-piercing, and that certainly adds even more tension as you're being actively stalked. Put it this way, if you don't want to be utterly spooked by this game you can always turn the volume down - or you can crank it up in your headset like we did and play until the wee hours of the morning. What else is a horror game without playing alone and jumping out of your skin at the tiniest of in-game movements?! We did give the game's Kinect-like microphone mechanic a quick try too, and it worked well - one cough got us absolutely obliterated when the mic picked up the noise. Ahh, just the way it's meant to be!

On Xbox Series X, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead gives us a quality and a performance mode, and as usual, we stuck to the 60FPS performance option here. To be fair, with how slow this game is you could easily go for 30FPS and be fine, so it's probably worth messing with those options to see what best suits you. The 60 mode still looked mostly good, aside from a bit of muddiness from what we expect to be a lower internal resolution.