A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead Is Playable on Steam Deck, But Has Some Small Issues - First Impressions

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A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead was provided by Saber Interactive for review. Thank you!

When I heard A Quiet Place was making its way to video games, I was a bit surprised it hadn't been done before. In my mind, it felt like it could easily come over to games and could make for an interesting and horrific experience. So far, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead seems to be achieving that, and I have definitely had a couple of jump scares get me already, but I wanted to check it out on the Steam Deck and see if it could run! Despite the high requirements, it is actually more playable than I expected but still has some caveats.

Quick heads up: This article contains our impressions of how we think the game will run on the Steam Deck. We have played a bit to begin with, but have not played the full game, so there may be some issues with performance later on that we haven't encountered yet.

With the minimum GPU requirement coming in at a Nvidia GTX 1660, I had every expectation that A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead would be a bit too much for the Steam Deck's limited hardware, but I was wrong. For the most part, the game is able to hit 30 FPS or higher, and it looked pretty decent. But there are a couple of issues that need to be brought up, and some little problems I noticed that might make the experience a bit of a nuisance.

In almost every area outside, the game was able to stick to 30 FPS, with inside areas sticking to around 45 - 50. This is using the game's Steam Deck graphical preset, which is locked without being able to change it. I am not sure exactly what the settings are, other than FSR set to Performance, and it works decently well. I do wish we were able to change the preset and play around with it, but we should be able to do that with the SteamDeck=0 %command% launch option.

However, in some cutscene-like moments, there will be some major drops. A couple of scenes I noticed, like lowering myself down into an infirmary room, dropped down to 19 FPS, which was not great. It did go back up as soon as I could move around, but those cutscene moments will be dropping a bit.

There is also a solid amount of pixelation when moving around. This is due to the FSR upscaling being so low, and with it not being changeable, it will be noticeable almost every time you turn. This is a bit bothersome, especially when it is daytime outside, but when nighttime, it isn't as bad.

Overall, I would say this is playable, but it does have those caveats. It will be very hard to get a fully stable experience at 30 FPS, but it sticks at 30 or above when you are able to move around. Cutscenes will drop framerate, especially when other people are in the scene, and there will be some pixelation when looking around, but it's still playable. I could see it getting a bit more difficult to run later on in more complex scenes, but I personally think it will be okay throughout the rest of the game.

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is available on Steam for $29.99.

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