LUNG TRANSPLANT NEEDED, STAT! Ahhh...A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is ALMOST a good game (notice I said good, not great). Some of the mechanics in this extended session of hide-n-seek are actually thoughtful (slowly opening doors, drawers, and grates manually to reduce noise; avoiding crunchy piles of shattered glass and clanky, empty soup cans strewn in your way; pouring sand to create quiet walking paths; the handheld phonometer gadget to gauge how much noise you're making against background environmental sounds). You can even activate your headset mic to pick up room noise that you (or your irritating friends) make to further complicate your play through. (Yes, I immediately disabled this feature; I hate dumb, Youtube-fodder gimmicks of all kinds.) And the main character has debilitating asthma that requires constant (and I do mean CONSTANT) maintenance in the form of inhalers and pills found along the way. Her wheezing (exacerbated through exertion of all kinds) can give her location away to the blind creatures immediately. Also, in a weak attempt to pull a few heartstrings, the devs made her a singer--who will never be able to warble again since that's a pretty loud activity. Boo hoo! Oh, and she's pregnant--she discovers that vomiting (due to morning sickness) is also a pretty loud activity. Anyway, it's what you'd expect from a game set in a universe populated with eviscerating Death Angels (which look cool enough and are animated sufficiently). But then you realize not only are many of the game's mechanics extremely finicky (like, this girl needs a damn lung transplant), a good deal of them are smoke and mirrors. For example, I stopped using the phonometer--without really even realizing it--a few hours in (wearing headphones while playing was good enough for me to determine how loud I was being--which, honestly, is a hat tip to the excellent sound design). And just for giggles, I decided to start opening doors by slamming my stick down and not caring about the speed--and, no surprise, most of the time the rusty hinges seem to make the same amount of creaking noise regardless. Pouring soft sand walkways seemed to work well enough (and it changed up game play right when things starting getting a little stale), and I crouch-walked my way through the entire title even when I didn't need to. But the flashlight--which burns through batteries like I burn through Reese's Peanut Butter Cups--is completely unnecessary. I could see fine most of the time even in the darkest environments and didn't bother with battery collecting at all. And, about halfway through, that's when it hit me: All of these finicky mechanics are designed to create tension--but they don't. They just create work. As other reviewers have pointed out, once you understand that the game is NOT Alien: Isolation (since it doesn't really give you any chance to hide, dodge, or save yourself once you've triggered a sound that is too loud--instead, A Quiet Place essentially shows you a pre-baked cutscene letting you know that you've reached "Game Over"), any tension is sucked right out of the game. So you end up with a finicky game that employs finicky mechanics on top of dull binary situation: Make some sound and die, or stay quiet and you get to keep crouch-walking. Meh. So, why the thumbs up instead of down? Well, it's all okay. Honestly, overall the game is much better than I expected Stormind Games to produce. (I'm not busting their chops--I played the first Remothered game, and I thought that dime-store Clarice Starling punched above her weight...though barely.) When the Quiet Place game was announced, I worried that it would be another in a long line of atrocious movie tie-in "products," as I call them. (How about just one example: Anyone remember Terminator: Salvation from 2009? It was a perfectly serviceable--maybe even fun--third-person shooter tied to the movie of the same name, but it was like 3 hours long...at full price. A travesty.) But unlike so many other terrible "movie games" before it, I get a clear sense that Stormind Games was actually trying to create a "real" game here (with a mostly normal running time), which is admirable. There are actual characters (paper-thin, sure), but they share some complex relationships: A teenage couple who've known each other since they were very young children and only started dating after being separated while attending different colleges; the parents of the young man, the father who is a medical doctor, and the mother who is a shotgun-obsessed wildlife management professional; and the father of the female protagonist who is also a doctor but who is generally miserable because he couldn't save his wife (the protagonist's mother) from an illness which occurred before the game begins. The lives of these two families have been entwined for a few decades by the time we meet them. Good enough for me. And to its credit, the story these characters are wrapped up in also doesn't play out linearly--we start in medias res with the Death Angels already on the hunt, and then work our way through flashbacks periodically to fill in the narrative gaps and why the relationships between all these folks is so strained (besides being stalked mercilessly by blind alien monsters, that is). In fact, in one flashback we get to see the Death Angel meteors falling from the sky on Day 1, a nice callback. Also, the environments you encounter throughout are varied--a ranch, hospital, forest, train yard, etc., all of them properly wrecked and littered with dead bodies caused by the marauding, meteorite-riding creatures. As a bonus, the game does a commendable job building this dangerous, desolate world mostly through evocative notes left behind by survivors in safe rooms; some of them are actually a good read. Again, fine enough for me. When you look carefully, you can see the good bones of a game here. But since, in this universe, the creatures are a one-hit death sentence, you can't really have a health meter. It wouldn't make sense. However, for it to be an actual horror game, you must have some mechanic to maintain tension. Similarly, in this universe, using loud firearms would only mean an avalanche of creatures descending on you instantly--and bullets are mostly ineffective against their outer armor anyway. No pop guns allowed here. In fact, there's no fighting back whatsoever in this game (which, since that's lore appropriate, I'm not complaining about). So...if you consider those two (rather large) constraints, what sort of game do you end up with? Well, we get a young asthmatic pregnant woman (with incredibly strong knees) who chucks glass bottles to cause distractions. Yeah, that's about it. And boy howdy, as I mentioned, the devs sure do lean heavily into that asthma angle. After all, what else could they do? I mean, I don't want to call this game an asthma simulator, but...hey wait, maybe I DO want to call it an asthma simulator. Okay, maybe that's a cheap shot. But eventually, the need to REPEATEDLY stop doing EVERYTHING--stop climbing, stop walking, stop crouching, stop throwing bottles, stop grabbing sand bags, OVER AND OVER--just to suck on an inhaler and get your breathing under control...well, it gets to be a tad distracting. There's a persistent lung icon on screen (which is, for all intents and purposes, your health bar) that wibbles and wobbles, it shakes and rattles, changing colors from white to blue to brown to bright red when your character is under physical (or even mental!) stress, and...well, it gets a bit silly, irritating, tiring. By the end of the game, I was ignoring it altogether and wishing I could disable it. Like I said, it doesn't entirely ruin the game, but the mechanic is overly finicky. And instead of creating tension, it (eventually) has the opposite effect and starts to feel like nagging work. I mean really: Lung transplant needed, stat!
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