The Quiet Man

While it misses the mark in general and douses the hopes I had when I first saw the E3 2018 trailer, The Quiet Man does have some value. It’s reasonably priced despite its issues and brevity, and if you’re looking for something a little different, it’s worth a look, just keep your expectations considerably tempered.

I really want to enjoy The Quiet Man. But with seriously flawed design decisions, either in terms of screenplay or mechanically as well as dramatically, it becomes tedious too soon. And that is saying something for a game that last only three to four hours.

Perhaps the most disappointing thing about The Quiet Man is that it presents a world I want to know more about. I like the idea of a deaf vigilante-esque antihero doing his best to find the good in a world of darkness and violence, even if it means having to become a force of darkness and violence himself. However, in the case of The Quiet Man, that strong premise is squandered by lazy development decisions and incredibly odd artistic choices.

Trying something new doesn’t mean you’re necessarily doing something good. Behold The Quiet Man, who dares concern the topic of mutism. But despite its neo-noir atmosphere, The Quiet Man fails to draw attention.

As you might have gleaned I'm totally into this eccentric insanity more often than not, but there's a limit.

First of all, hats off to Square Enix for trying something different. We would’ve loved for this game to be good, but it fails at pretty much everything it tries. It’s a sad outcome for an interesting concept, and we hope this doesn’t discourages the team from trying to make something unique again.

Despite showing signs of a strong vision, undercooked mechanics and a nonsensical story propel The Quiet Man to miss the mark in just about every way, causing its best ideas to deteriorate into forgettable gimmicks.

I want to call The Quiet Man a farce, but farces are funny. This game is just a conceptual catastrophe that does everything wrong and nothing interesting.

Square Enix and Human Head Studios had an idea, but the final product is a true disaster which misses its point in every aspect with appalling gameplay and a lousy storyline. Maybe one of the worst games of 2018.

The Quiet Man is a failed experiment, but unlike other games that share this fate, it doesn't seem constrained by budget or technical limitations – but rather poor execution and abnormal design choices that cause its own undoing.

The Quiet Man is one of the worst games I have ever played, but forcing me to play twice to experience the audio left an even worse impression. While withholding all dialogue until the second playthrough is an interesting concept in theory, it added little to The Quiet Man's already terrible story, making the second run even more of a chore than the first.

The Quiet Man is so bad, we can't shut up about it. A great idea is totally killed by bad gameplay and full motion video we simply can't get our heads around.

An inexplicable and decidedly wrong project.

Inexplicable design.

A terrible idea poorly realised, with a mixture of pretentious, gimmicky storytelling and banal combat that is almost awe-inspiring in the full extent of its incompetence.

Despite being successful as something to joyously mock for its absurdity, The Quiet Man is a catastrophic failure on every level. It’s perhaps telling that the nicest thing you can say about it is that everybody involved got a lovely selection of clothing out of it.

There’s nothing else quite like The Quiet Man, and there’s a reason for that. The blend of FMV and interactive combat sequences fails on every level with an unfathomable plot that raises far more questions than it answers, and encounters that fail to explain themselves and do little to engage. The Quiet Man is the most baffling release of 2018, to the point where a post-mortem investigation into its sheer existence sounds so much more exciting than this bizarre and convoluted comedy sketch.

They said: ‘It’s the worst game of 2018. Don’t play it, just watch it on YouTube’. I didn’t listen. And I should have. [13/2018, p.86]

A deaf protagonist. A quiet man. A thundering silence, as you sneak by this game unnoticed, leaving its abysmal contents to the vultures.

The Quiet Man is a once-in-a-generation terrible game mired by technical and racial issues, pretentious ideas, and poor execution. It’s an ineffable game that fails to land any of its posy punches. That it merely exists… now that is something to cry over. [Issue#157, p.97]