A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead Review (PS5): Hitting You With Loud Noises and Repetitive Gameplay

I like a good horror experience when one arises mainly because I like jumping out of my seat when something is truly terrifying. When I heard about A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead, my initial reaction was excitement due to my enjoyment of the world’s concept of monsters with hyper-sensitive hearing and how humans adapt to a new life. Unfortunately, while I enjoyed the game at first, it quickly got boring and I soon found myself getting disassociated with the main character and their situation.

Earsplittingly loud

The point of A Quiet Place: A Road Ahead, is to be extremely quiet. There is even a feature that allows the game to read your headset and any noise that you make is made by the character in the game. This is an amazing concept as it immediately puts you on edge and forces you to try your best to be quiet. Multiple times I died because of background noise in my studio – a cat jumping on my desk, or just a general sigh of relief. That is not a criticism, as it connected me more to the game’s world in a unique way. I genuinely enjoyed that aspect of the game and think that more horror games should add sound elements to enhance the experience in the same way that A Quiet Place does.

The developers did a great job incorporating sound into the game in such a way that you need to be extremely careful about how your character moves, what surface they are walking on, and what items you interact with and when. This heightened the intensity for me and made me nervous to even take a step at times. 

While many of the sound aspects of the game are great, I have a lot of issues with how the developers presented the Death Angel. This apex predator that hunts you down via sound makes so much noise that it feels like it should overshadow your character but it doesn’t. Every footstep that it made and all of its facial movements felt extremely loud to the point where it hurt my ears. On top of that, any time the monster was startled by anything, which happened more often than you may think, the same obnoxious, overused high-pitched horror tone from every movie and game ever made would play. This sound played nearly 30 to 40 times during a level, frustrating me more than my cat meowing in my face while I played.

A long road with little to experience

The intense, slow-moving, methodical gameplay is riveting at first but the developers added very little in terms of anything substantial to the game’s level designs to make them entertaining for the entire six to nine-hour playthrough. The first few levels such as escaping the hospital and coming face-to-face with the Death Angel for the first time were exciting. Shortly after that, going through the woods and needing to deal with evading the creature while throwing bottles and solving fairly easy puzzles kept the momentum going. Unfortunately, each level after this felt like a constant repeat of your character getting into some situation where the monster appears, needing to avoid it, escaping, traveling a bit farther, and then repeating the process.

After climbing through a home and needing to avoid the monster as I made my way through the backyard collecting a board locked behind a fence, I felt bored with the same old gameplay and wished it would get switched up in some substantial way. To my dismay, this never happened. This is coupled with characters that feel strong at first but fizzle out early in the campaign. By the time I reached the end, I didn’t care too much for the main protagonist and just felt relieved that I had completed the game to be done with it rather than feel a sense of accomplishment.

On a positive note, while I have seen many complain about the handicap of asthma that the character is given, I personally enjoyed it and felt that it meshed well with the sound aspect of the game. Needing to manage how I approached obstacles and watch how close I got to the monster at times increased the pressure and made it more enjoyable. Again, though, this was a mechanic that did get old. Not because I didn’t like it but because it became too easy to manage after a few levels. I got through most levels using maybe two inhalers and almost always having a stockpile to fall back on should I need them.

Final verdict

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is a fairly decent horror experience that does stay true to the media it is based on. The sound aspects of the game, while annoyingly loud at times, did keep me on my toes and increase the pressure I felt during the campaign. Unfortunately, the repetitive level design and lack of strong characters made the game feel rather boring by the end of it. More unique mechanics and stronger characters would have made this game stand out much more than it did.

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead was reviewed on PlayStation 5 with a code provided by Saber Interactive. It is also available for PC and Xbox Series X.

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