Terrible, simply terrible.

I wanted to give this game a shot, stream it to my friends and meme the hell out of it... It was hard to.

From the live action switch to 3D gameplay was off.

I could barely understand the plot in the beginning.. Because guess what? You're deaf! I feel like I'm in an underwater cinema.

Don't waste your money on this.

L'exemple même du jeu de merde que tu veux faire en rigolant, et que chaque minute supplémentaire passée te fait :
- regretter de l'avoir lancé
- relativiser sur TOUS les jeux de merde auxquels on voudrait jouer "pour la science"

Rien. Ne. Va.

N'y touchez pas.

(BacklogBeat's Game Club - May 2024 nomination)

@Sgulgi, welcome to your tape.

This game is so incomprehensibly bad that I can't help but feel like it was intentionally trying to be the next big cult camp classic. Terrible gameplay, insanely bad narrative, horrible acting, awful art direction...the list just goes on. I hate rating games this low, but I genuinely do not have a single good thing to say about this game.

Square Enix is the most unserious company on the planet.

Generally I like to go in detail and talk at length about what I liked and disliked about a game when writing reviews like this, but considering The Quiet Man has wasted enough of my time as is I'm going to just be blunt and get this over with as fast as possible: This is the worst game I have ever played.

The gameplay feels like if you took the earliest possible pre alpha demo of a Yakuza combat system and released it. There is exactly one combo you have and you'll be seeing it a lot because this game just likes to throw random combat at you every 3 seconds. The story is practically non existent because in trying to emulate a deaf character they just removed all sound from the game despite the fact that the character has conversations with some characters and clearly understands what people are telling him to do and what they're asking him so instead of emulating what it must feel like to be deaf it just feels like you're watching a movie on mute. The main character uses sign language exactly three times throughout the game which I thought was important to bring up since again, according to the devs they were trying to emulate how life is for those who are hearing impared, without even really including the most common way deaf people communicate. The nicest thing I can say about this game is that for most of the shots the FMV cutscenes seem to be shot competently.

Game just is not good, and I hate to say that because I like to see the good in even bad games but I just felt like my brain was melting as I played this game. To make things even worse when I closed the game it didn't even close it just hid itself in the system tray so it was still up but just continuously eating my ram. I wish I could say I was surprised by this but when I discovered this the next day I was more just disappointed that the game couldn't even close right more than anything.

1/10

Quiet indeed, the game has no sound in the first playthrough, no music, no sound effect and no voice over which is nice to have in a story game.
You see, the player character is deaf and so is the player and while Dane (whose name you wouldn't know even after your done playing) can read lips and use sign language, there is a good chance that the player cannot.
Somehow they make it possible for you to feel more deaf than a deaf person.

You'd be correct to think that the story is pretty much impossible to follow without any sound/words.
The whole game you'll be struggling to piece together what is even going on.
Most of your time will be spent looking at people talking, in complete silence.

It is only in your second playthrough that you'll be able to play with the sound on and even then it is nothing special.
Considering that the vast majority of players will not play the game twice, let alone after seeing what a disaster it is, I think it is fair to say that this was a very bad idea.

Aside from this the game does not even work that well,
it is filled with glitches and bugs.
The game does not even tell you the controls or mechanics.
My personal peeve is that losing a fight makes you have to watch a woman smiling, staring or making funny faces at you for about 30 seconds, which is pretty insulting especially in a fight where you have no idea how to even damage the enemy (which is a surprising lot of them).

Very bad game, not even funny bad and most of all not worth the 2,99 I paid for it.

heyyo

at the very start of the game I was stuck for more than 20 minutes because I didn't knew that I have to press down then hit A

WHY CAN'T I JUST PRESS A INSTEAD

well anyways, fantastic start

as someone that didn't played a lot of bad games,
man this game was bad. not the way that it was like...funny or anything like that, it was just tedious

to the game's credit it had really great looking visuals, and acceptable ones on combat sections

but ooh boi the game itself,
I feel like this would've been better as just a bad movie, not a bad video game

the amount of pointless "go from point A to point B" which was like 10 steps away and then the next cutscene plays made the pacing so annoying and the cutscenes themselves didn't help either

and the combat? well it goes from "Mash X" to "sometimes hit Y" and then "sometimes hit A" and the B button is just useless because most enemies can't be grabbed or you get hit when you're grabbing them or even they break out of it so it's just what's the point just Mash X

the game doesn't explain ANYTHING to you, for 3 hours I didn't knew I could go into powerup mode with LT and the game doesn't even hint at you about any of the buttons and what they do until you pause the game and look at the visual representation of what every button do, which I didn't knew it was a thing and even then sometimes you have to do something that the game doesn't tell you about and you just have to...test every single button I guess

the whole "Quiet Man" mechanic of the game made the cutscenes so much worse, and no I'm not saying that having voices makes it better hell no it's much worse, although it COULD have been much better if the story actually made sense

it's just...really really horrible game design
this whole game is a failure of game design

like I can see where they were going with it, but they missed the mark BY A LOT
probably because of communication problems between the dev team

as a nail of the coffin I didn't even get a ending it was just a black screen

this game was a pain to experience
not only because it was tedious but I just feel bad about all of the actors, artists and the budget for this game

Look, I don't know what to tell you. The Quiet Man is an inexplicable game in every way. It was developed by talented people who had a genuine vision, clearly very intent on making something unique. And I can't help but love that it exists.

Imaging how many layers of creatives and executives had to be swayed for this game to exist. A FMV brawler with no dialogue and professionally shot cinematic cutscenes. Cutscenes that go on for minutes without the player knowing a single word that is spoken.

It's meant to simulate the deaf main character's lack of hearing, see. Never mind the fact that the character himself understand what's being spoken. Never mind that this narrative device makes the game totally incomprehensible.

Imagine how persuasive Kensei Fujinaga must be. I adore and envy him. Because The Quiet Man is bad and makes no sense but it's also amazing. In a shocking number of ways, it's inventive and well-made. The cutscenes are beautifully shot in real locations, and the almost non-existent UI helps make the transitions between cinematic and gameplay genuinely impressive at times. Even the fighting has its moments of charm, at least until it gets repetitive and unclear. It took me to my second playthrough (yes) to understand a fundamental gameplay mechanic because the game never informed me that it existed.

I can't really explain how happy I am that The Quiet Man exists because it's a charming misfire of the kind that you rarely see these days. It's the sort of bad game that can only come about from wild experimentation and creatives who are as persuasive and enthusiastic as they are deeply misguided.

Very interesting. It would be a much lesser experience without anticipating the second playthrough having audio, so not advertising that was probably a mistake, but the format actually works quite well. On my first playthrough, I thought that it was either not making good use of the silence aspect, or it was abusing it so much that it didn't look that way, but I now think it was fine. There's a lot of things that are easy to miss, but none of them feel like cheap trickery.
In the silent playthrough, it feels less like a glimpse of what it's like to be a deaf person, and more what it's like to be deaf without the experiences of a deaf person (such as with how sign language isn't subtitled). As a result, I don't think it's true (as has been said) that it makes it look like deaf people don't understand what's going on (especially since the protagonist does appear to know what's going on), but rather that things are a lot more difficult.
The playthrough with audio is a lot more original than might be expected, though it's a pity that by the time you reach parts in the second playthrough, the questions you may have had in the first playthrough are very possibly forgotten. If it was a bit shorter, a third playthrough before the final version could've been interesting (to try and piece together things once more), but it's not really worthwhile.
It also looks very nice graphically, though the transitions between animations in gameplay are a lot less smooth than most cinematic games. The transitions between different types of cutscenes and gameplay are very smooth though.
Also the combat is fun, it's very linear and it fulfils the same kind of role as QTEs. I played it on the easy difficulty but died quite a few times, though it's very doable.
Also worth noting that if it wasn't for the audio stuff, it would be fairly normal. Some of the writing's quite cringe (and it's nice that the first playthrough spares you from that) and a lot of it's general lowbrow action film stuff. If it was only the version with audio, it'd be neither terrible nor worthwhile. But the fun comes from creating a mystery based on allowing the user to raise their own questions, with the answers clearly and fairly provided later.