The road ahead in Quiet Place could be another Alien story: isolation, but should it be so?

Highlights

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead must forge its own path in the saturated genre of first-person stealth horror.
The game must not only rely on its intellectual property rights, but must also introduce innovative mechanics such as sound traps and interactions with the environment.
The Road Ahead bears many similarities to Alien: Isolation in its early attempts and needs to go beyond the typical stealth mechanics to really stand out.

A quiet place: The road ahead is a first-person stealth horror game and thus, unsurprisingly and inevitably, bears similarities to others of its ilk. The first-person stealth horror subgenre has been around for some time and each entry rarely seems to be significantly iterative or creative compared to its predecessors, especially in a murky sea of indie horror. Interestingly, Alien: Isolation is one of the few first-person stealth horror games that stands out from the crowd, apart from titles like amnesia, SurviveAnd Little nightmares.

Undoubtedly, the strong narrative and intellectual foundation helped, but Alien: Isolation demonstrated how engaging stealth horror gameplay can be when tied to the larger IP canon and implementing every iconography imaginable to embellish it; players encounter xenomorphs, facehuggers, and androids, for example, but cannot rely entirely on offensive combat and wind their way through dimly lit, retro-futuristic spaceship corridors. A quiet place: The road ahead now has a responsibility to not only honor the intellectual property of the source material, but also to expand the subgenre of stealth horror within this framework.

the best horror games for PS4 and Xbox One

10 Horror Games You Should Play If You Liked Alien: Isolation

If you liked what Alien: Isolation had to offer, you should give these games a try.

A quiet place: The path ahead must be more than the sum of its parts

On paper, A quiet place: The road ahead And Alien: Isolation could be spiritual siblings. Along the road even has a directional sound tracking device that bears an unmistakable resemblance to insulationMotion detector – a cult object in many extraterrestrial-related games.

However, Along the road is also demonstratively a hodgepodge of other horror inspirations, as it features an asthma inhaler and an associated lung icon in the top left corner of the screen that players must manage in detail, similar to Survive forces the player to charge the camera batteries, which Along the road also functions for his flashlight – or how amnesia implements a rational measurement. Alien: Isolation is fortunately fairly simple in this regard, as Amanda Ripley doesn’t have much at her disposal other than flash grenades, a flamethrower, a stun gun, and several other defensive items in her item wheel.

Players aren’t particularly creative when it comes to getting around androids or xenomorphs, so hiding under desks or in closets is often one of the few ways to avoid enemies in the game. And there’s a sigh of relief every time an emergency registration point is discovered. A quiet place: The road aheadhowever, there will hopefully be plenty of opportunities for players to exploit environments and even use clever traps and devices to their advantage.

How A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead’s gameplay holds its own in stealth horror

Inspired by the first two films, Along the road could implement a variety of sound traps and environmental interactions that alert players when a creature is nearby or distract them so players can escape quietly. This is important because the premise of silence is the whole gimmick of the IP itself and the creatures in A quiet place are typically overpowered unless the characters have a way to generate an unbearably strong frequency and stun them, let alone fire a shotgun blast at them before they can leap across the room and maul them at the slightest noise.

In fact, the speed of the creatures is a big part of why they are intimidating, and in Along the road hopefully that will translate accordingly. That is, if players have favorable options in an environment that they can plan ahead to use, it would be fantastic if lights turned on when a creature appeared, or if there was a way to activate a sonic trap in another room that players had to put together and strategize ahead of time.

Unfortunately, much of what has been revealed so far is A quiet place: The road aheadThe gameplay of only emphasizes normal stealth with alarmingly loud footsteps, an inhaler that doesn’t immediately cause an alien to attack even if used right in front of you, and opening doors being an important factor in moving around quietly. Either way, it will be interesting to see how much else contributes to Along the road unique as a horror game.