A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead Review

ign.com:

For most of us, the biggest penalty for making too much noise might be a scolding shush from the movie theater seat behind you, but in A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead you’re only ever one creaky floorboard away from getting snuffed out by an alien threat that’s always listening out for you like it’s the most sinister form of Siri. This instant fail stealth-heavy horror story does a pretty convincing job of recreating the breath-holding tension of the films, in addition to borrowing heavily from the likes of Alien: Isolation in the way it casts you as the reluctant rodent trapped in a deadly game of cat and mouse. The result is a consistently stressful undertaking from start to finish, even though my careful creep down The Road Ahead moved at a relentlessly glacial pace and occasionally snagged on some slightly curious design decisions.

A standalone story mostly set around four months after the alien invasion seen in A Quiet Place: Day One, The Road Ahead casts us as college student Alex Taylor and follows her attempts to flee her abandoned hospital hideout in order to make a silent and steady pilgrimage towards an off-shore safe haven isolated from the threat of the monsters, known as Death Angels. It’s a straightforward setup, but tender early moments spent with her likable boyfriend Martin and kindhearted father Kenneth were enough to get me invested in Alex’s cause before inevitable alien-inflicted tragedy spurs her escape plan into action. It’s a bit of a letdown that, in spite of its strong start, the payoff for The Road Ahead’s plot in its dying hours is all too predictable, and its overall story comes up noticeably lacking in impact – particularly in the wake of the far more emotionally resonant tale found in Day One earlier this year.

Still, there’s no shortage of affecting human artifacts to comb through along the way. Outside of the story’s opening chapters and the odd flashback, Alex is alone with her own thoughts – which are appropriately represented via