Even before he knew anything about this year's A Quiet Place: Day One, Luca Esposito, the senior narrative designer at Stormind Games, used that movie's star Lupita Nyong'o as inspiration for his lead character in A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead, a new first-person video game set in the world of the cinematic franchise.

"I saw Us three months before I started working on the game and the character she depicted was amazing," Esposito tells Entertainment Weekly of Nyong'o's Adelaide Wilson, a mother of two whose family is attacked by their twisted doppelgängers in that 2019 Jordan Peele-directed horror movie. "It was one of the main references we had for Alex."

He's referring to Alex Taylor, who now, with A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead (out Oct. 17), becomes the franchise's latest lead survivor alongside the Abbott family of the first two films and Nyong'o's Sammy in the Day One prequel. EW can reveal an exclusive dev diary (shown in the video above) that introduces Alex's backstory, while Esposito explains how the game itself connects to the events of the three movies released so far.

"The beautiful thing about A Quiet Place is that it's not just horror. It's about humans," he says. "It's very humanist. The error is what happens when you can't communicate properly with other human beings." He means that metaphorically, as well as literally, given the main premise revolves around a world ravaged by alien monsters that are blind but hunt through sound. "Another great thing that we wanted to put inside the game was the family theme: how families stick together and work together to face an alien invasion like this one, and at the same time how human relationships just fall down facing a menace like that, facing a loss."

Saber Interactive

The story driving A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead hops around in the timeline of the movies. It begins with a flashback to an unspecified date before jumping to Day 119. We'll also see additional flashbacks to Day 1, when the monsters known as Death Angels arrived on earth, as well as Day 105.

Math wise, Day 1 is June 18, 2020, so Day 105 is Oct. 1 of the same year, which makes Day 119 set on Oct. 20, 2020. This is still well before the timeline of the first movie, 2018's A Quiet Place, which followed Lee Abbott (John Krasinski), his pregnant wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt), deaf daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds), and young son Marcus (Noah Jupe) fighting for survival on their rural farmhouse in upstate New York. The Road Ahead is also set in upstate, a decision, Esposito says, that came from studying the first two installments of the franchise.

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

"Almost immediately we decided to set the game in upstate New York. We are Italians," he says of his teammates at Stormind Games. "So everything we knew was just from what we could see from the movie. We didn't know almost anything about the place." At the time, they also didn't know what the plans were for the Day One prequel and didn't want to introduce anything that might conflict with that story. "I think that at the time the cast was still unknown," he points out, "so we had to work with what we were sure was still relevant in the franchise."

The team's only directive when they began the process was that they had to show at least some events on Day 1. Esposito saw the benefits for two reasons. One, the interspersed flashbacks of the narrative offer players "moments of relief" after tense situations, he says. And two, "Human relationships change during moments of crisis. So it's interesting to see how they were before and what took them from point A to point B."

Saber Interactive

Before the Death Angels descended, Alex (played by voice actor Anairis Quinones) was a young college student studying engineering at the local music school. Her mother died prior to the events of Day 1, so she grew close with her father, Kenneth (Jason Hightower). She has a boyfriend named Martin (Aleks Le). "Like all relationships, they've had their ups and downs, but ultimately they are deeply in love," Esposito says in the dev diary.

Martin's parents are Laura (Catherine Cavadini) and Robert (David Kaye), with whom Alex is also close. Laura, in particular, loves to hunt and has an impressive rifle collection, even if Alex finds it a bit disturbing. Actor Brandon McInnis also voices a character named Mark.

Early on in the main story, Alex learns that she's pregnant with Martin's child, putting her in the same treacherous situation that Blunt's Evelyn found herself during the events of A Quiet Place. Alex must also deal with her asthma in a world where using an inhaler could attract the monsters' attention, which becomes a crucial game mechanic. This combination "gave us a lot of possibilities to create an interesting character," Esposito remarks, "and make her understand that even in difficult situations, no matter who you are, there is a way [forward]."

Saber Interactive

The franchise previously explored what it'd be like for a woman to give birth in such a hostile climate that requires silence to survive, or how a deaf child or a cancer patient living in the noisiest city in America might face that apocalyptic environment. Esposito found it equally alluring to center The Road Ahead around a musician. "How a musician, a person that actually expresses herself with music, can live in a world where she can't do any sound," he says. As a music engineer, Alex also knows her way around electronic devices. "This gave opportunities both for the story and the gameplay," Esposito adds.

Other mechanics were too good to not pull directly from the movies. So fans of the films will get to utilize familiar tools, such as sand bags. In A Quiet Place, the Abbotts create trails of sand to dampen the sound of their footsteps. In Part II, Regan then discovers high-frequency sounds can incapacitate the Death Angels, which becomes another mechanic players can use in The Road Ahead.

There will be others, Esposito says, but in staying true to the franchise, he's keeping quiet for the moment.

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead arrives this Oct. 17 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.