As a streamer, I leverage Zach Bussey’s weekly newsletter where he shares streamer news and game keys. I applied for A Quiet Place game key since I love the movies and I was, thankfully, fortunate enough to be gifted one, which I streamed November 1st, 2024. I’ve dropped some screenshots and my stream playthrough below, though fair warning I didn’t really enjoy the game. I’ve avoided spoilers to the best of my ability.

The short version is that it felt extremely repetitive for a longer game, and I was playing on easy! There were minimal puzzles and majority of the time was barely touching my controller’s joystick to “creep” around and hopefully not die.

Full Review

Long story… The game introduces a handful of characters which are pretty interesting. But, the game is too short to really care much about them. It felt as though it was pulling on cliche tropes to draw the player in, rather than giving reasonable backstory for the player to actually care about. It was bad enough that one re-occurring character was hard for me to identify during cutscenes.

There are definitely parallels between the game and the movies. The nice part is being able to see the aliens up close and personal. Bad part is that generally results in death because if the aliens touch you then you instantly die. Unlike similar games (think Alien: Isolation) there is nothing you can do to fight off the bad guys. You’re pretty much creeping around and the moment you make too much noise you reset to an old checkpoint. Makes much of the game tedious and uninteresting.

I ended up getting stuck at the very first part of the game because the notification to creep along the wall never showed up. Much of the game was like this, where you had to stand or aim the “exact” right position or you couldn’t do a task. This includes the puzzles to disarm traps, which annoyingly got me killed multiple times. There are Easter eggs, such as the spaceship toy from the first movie, for collectibles, which I appreciated as I fumbled through the levels.

Using the microphone feature was pretty interesting but I didn’t use it for more than the first level. Streaming a game while limiting my ability to talk was counterproductive, though I could see it being more for edited video creators. I can appreciate developers trying new things to engage the player beyond just control schemes.

The puzzles and levels were fun the first few times, then became increasingly repetitive without much as a reward. The things I did in the first part of the game carried through until the end. Yes, I ended up getting sand and other tools but all it did was allow me to walk slightly faster or have a little more grace in making noise.

Honestly, by the end of the game it felt as though I was pulling teeth to complete the story. The game stopped giving me reason to care about the characters besides the tropes. There was minimal backstory or build up. All of the potential big twists occurred in the first half of the game. The final remaining 3 or so hours were just “try to escape” which was annoyingly dull.

The game should have introduced some defensive capabilities, similar to the first and second movies, where my character could fought back. Or, instead of the same repetitive attempts to escape, it could’ve focused on levels to build up the backstory, especially between the remaining characters (trying to avoid spoilers!). Instead, it was level after level with the aliens stalking my character as I fumbled through random “puzzles” to complete tasks and progress.

Conclusion

All in all, I’m glad I was gifted a key instead of spending my money. I had such high hopes since I loved all 3 of the movies but was let down by the gameplay and lack of engaging story. Pretty disappointed and I would not recommend anyone purchasing.