“A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead” Wastes Potentially Rich Idea

It seems like TV shows based on video games have turned a corner with titles like “The Last of Us” and “Fallout,” after years of all adaptations in the direction of film or television being generally disastrous. You know a path that still struggles? Film to video game. For years, it was little more than a cheap tie-in. Trust me, I played a game version of “Monsters vs. Aliens” and that awful Wii version of Pixar’s “Up.” It was dire. And it still kinda is outside of the occasional “Star Wars” title that exceeds expectations. Yet I still get excited when a universe I like in film makes the jump, especially one as rich as “A Quiet Place.” The franchise has had a good year too with the success of “A Quiet Place: Day One.” Sadly, “A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead” is a miss, a game with truly clunky, repetitive mechanics, a manipulative protagonist, and downright glitchy stealth dynamics.

In “The Road Ahead,” you play Alex Taylor (voiced by Anairis Quinones) from a first-person POV. It opens well enough into the invasion captured in John Krasinski’s hit film that Alex and her boyfriend Martin know to stay quiet as they search for food and supplies in the game’s prologue. Here’s where we learn the two defining traits of Alex Taylor: She’s asthmatic and pregnant. Yep. It’s cheap storytelling designed to give us a weakened protagonist to heighten the stakes. The asthma even has a gameplay function wherein you have to use an inhaler to stave off attacks. And, yes, even a puff can be noisy enough to cause trouble. I hated everything about it, turning a character’s health into a gameplay weakness.

After Martin dies in the prologue, the game jumps forward to Day 119 after the attack when Alex is staying at a hospital with other survivors, including her mother and father. When dad learns of the pregnancy, it sets things in motion for an attack—yes, another example of a woman’s body being a weakness in a game that uses devices like this cheaply—and the game’s first real centerpiece unfolds.

As Alex, you navigate the abandoned hospital looking for supplies and trying to make as little noise as possible. “The Road Ahead” is billed as survival horror, but it’s primarily stealth. You have to move slowly, often with a device in your left hand that will gauge how much noise you’re making. Go too high on the meter and one of those “Alien” rip-offs will leap from nowhere and kill you. And, of course, there are objects in the environment to make it harder. For only video game reasons, there are cans that can be kicked in the middle of a hospital hall or barrels that can be knocked off. For the majority of the game, you are crouching and barely moving around these obstacles. Over and over again.

Stealth games are tough to keep engaging, but it’s much worse than the player feels like the mechanics are inconsistent. Hiding from the creatures has little rhyme or reason. Sometimes they will walk right by you if you don’t move; sometimes you will die with no alien in sight and have absolutely no idea why. Barely moving through a darkened parking garage to try to find the right path to avoid making enough noise for the system to bounce you back to a checkpoint isn’t engrossing, it’s enraging. (I will say that the one cool added mechanic here from most stealth games is that you can turn your mic on and the game will pick up noise in your environment at home. Baby cries while you’re playing and you’re dead.)

The biggest problem is that the developers don’t mix up the storytelling or gameplay enough. I escaped the interminable hospital scene only to do the same thing in a parking garage and then in the woods outside. The experience just lacks variety. Sure, they add little things like needing to find planks to escape over a hole or the ability to cut traps that would otherwise make noise, but it’s not enough to break the monotony, or the sense that almost no story is being told here. There’s no world-building and far too little character development.

“A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead” seeks to replicate the tension that fans have felt over three films and counting, but it fails to really understand what made those movies work. The people in those stories matter more than the monsters. I have the feeling that “A Quiet Place” is going to be around in some form for many years to come. There will probably be a few more movies, maybe a TV show. And that means there might be another game to erase the memory of this misfire. Even if there isn’t, it seems destined to be the unheard story of this universe.

The Publisher provided a review copy of this title. It’s available for Windows, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

from Roger Ebert https://ift.tt/MCAjbL1