Disaster Report: The Quiet Man (PS4)

Video games are unique among the ways to experience media in the way they allow the player to be immersed into an experience through interactive design that can allow them to better empathize with the conditions real people face. There are many examples of this in gaming, with games able to strip away the player’s sight to make them rely on sound as if they are blind, add abnormal elements to the game to simulate mental health issues… and then there’s The Quiet Man.

 

The Quiet Man thinks it’s giving the player a look at life as its deaf protagonist by just eliminating all sound for most of the game, but it decided to use this angle for a dialogue driven narrative game that, if I have to be honest, almost feels like it wasn’t originally about a deaf character at all and that angle was stapled on in post with a few scenes added to justify it. This is likely not the case, but it certainly feels believable when you see the mess of the story and presentation as the game plays long cutscenes that can go on for over excruciatingly long periods with no sound and just a lot of characters moving their mouths.

 

THE HEARING PROBLEM

Before we start really dissecting the problem with this poor depiction of deafness, I should begin with the obvious, and that is me saying that I have no intention to offend anyone with the condition, but this game certainly seems like it might affect people with hearing problems based on its half-hearted implementation of it. I have spent some time trying to dissect just how the deafness in this game is meant to be interpreted, so let’s first consider what might be going on here.

 

The game hints at one point that the main character has been deaf since birth, and while this may not be true, he has been at least since childhood. We cannot fully say how bad his hearing loss is, but outside the start of the game that has sound for no real good reason, we might assume we are “hearing things as he hears them.” With this theory, all sound is so muted that voices are basically barely-audible tones more akin to machines humming than voices. However, if this is how he hears things, then there are multiple characters in the game who speak to him and know he is deaf but still expect him to hear what they are saying, including a near lifelong friend who would defend him from bullies who picked on him because he was deaf I guess? Fictional bullies don’t need much justification for aimless bullying.

So, if we aren’t hearing things like he does, the first question is… why are we hearing things the way we are? Clearly the protagonist of the story has a better understanding of things as he is able to not only understand what people say but participates in conversations with people quite easily as if he wasn’t missing a word. Very rarely do they use sign language and there are characters who never use it that he understands, but we of course neither get explanations of what that sign language said or what the person said vocally. One theory I heard is that the main character is an incredibly good lip reader, and when I did my second playthrough of the game I closely watched each scene with this idea in mind… and it didn’t hold up. Our main character, Dane, is a moody fellow, one who will look away from people talking to him or focus his attention elsewhere only to still have the information he needs to act appropriately. Perhaps the most clear moment of Dane hearing something he could not have possibly read on someone’s lips is when he’s a child and trying to pull himself from the hands of a police officer in anger. Young Dane is not even looking at the officer when he says “Stop”, and on uttering that word, Dane is suddenly robbed of his energy and stops fighting. There are other moments where Dane is looking at a letter and his lifelong friend is talking to him during it about important information, and then there’s always the fact people speaking to him move as they talk as well instead of clearly making their mouths easily readable for him. The worst instance is definitely when the masked beaked man is talking during a dramatic moment, the two having a dialogue near the end of the game… despite Dane having no means to see the lips of the speaker and even if he could hear him, the voice is muffled by the mask as well.

 

The final theory to explain these idiosyncrasies is that Dane isn’t fully deaf, he just has some slight level of hearing loss… which also breaks down upon investigation. While you must play through the over three hour game in silence the first time through, the developers released an update where afterwards, you can play through with the sound on and actually hear all the dialogue that makes up like 2/3 of that experience. During this, we see at least two scenes where Dane is nearly within arm’s reach of someone who is speaking and they’re dropping plot reveals that Dane won’t get until later in the story. Meanwhile, Dane is able to somehow pick up the information from people much further away in other scenes and speaking with a similar volume level or lower.

What all this adds up to is a man who is selectively deaf only to things he isn’t meant to hear but can hear things that do not logically fit into any interpretation of his hearing issues. The game never tries to say one way or the other that he falls under any of these interpretations, the only consistent information being he understands sign language, which can fit him anywhere on the sliding scale of hearing issues. The player has no sound or subtitles to understand the game while Dane moves through it without any issue, and that is the issue here. There could be an interesting take on how deafness would impact your ability to navigate a plot driven game, but here the deaf character is not experiencing that, the world treats him as if he can hear everything fine, even with people who would know better than to speak to him as if he could, and overall, it just feels like a cheap gimmick to drum up interest in a plot that would otherwise not draw in players on its own merits.

 

We are essentially watching a film with the sound stripped away, and there’s none of the action that allows people to follow along with it. Plenty of shots are just close-ups of talking heads, no one being more expressive or meaningful to bridge the gap in interpretation. Silent films and pantomime figured out how to exaggerate and act more meaningfully to convey their messages, and even video games have been doing a better job of this for ages. Many silent protagonists exist in gaming who speak only through actions or expressions, but no one here really makes the effort. In fact, I wager there are many movies that would be easier to understand if they were arbitrarily muted because directors often try to convey tone or meaning through shot composition, lighting, setting, and so on, something that could have used a lot more of a presence in this game. The game does frequently use flashbacks though… flashbacks that add very little context since they are just flickers of images of scenes that you saw just minutes ago.

While The Quiet Man is a video game, it does feature a lot of actual live action footage of actors for its story, the game transitioning between that footage and game graphics when it feels like it. As mentioned earlier, there are two ways to play The Quiet Man, the game forcing you first through its completely silent version before it lets you access its “Answered” version where all the muted dialogue is now perfectly audible and subtitled. This update did come a week after the game’s release though and on top of that, it was deliberately withheld to let people stew in the mystery of a game that doesn’t really have that interesting of a plot to tell, its inexplicable nature without the sound making it more rife for humorous over-dubbing rather than trying to actually suss out the drawn out contextless dialogues you’re made to witness in silence.

 

But, if they want us to try and engage with the game’s plot in silence, then I shall give them that. Having played through the game both in complete silence with no clue about the story and then playing the Answered update and having things directly explained by just hearing things as they happen, I shall give first what I thought the game was about through the images on screen and then explain what the actual plot of the game is.

 

THE PLOT, AS INTERPRETED WITHOUT SOUND

There are a few characters to the tale of The Quiet Man, but when you first play it, you won’t get names for them easily. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll front load this portion with names that sometimes weren’t even revealed until and hour or more into the game and after we had seen the person plenty of times. Dane is the main character, the supposed deaf protagonist of the story, and his long-time friend Taye is the head of a nightclub now that they’re both in their adulthood. If you’re wondering how you learn their names, there are scenes where we see their phones as they try to contact each other through “Face On”, which, at least they aren’t calling each other through audio-only means. Many characters’ names are gleaned this way, like having to read a policeman’s shirt or a poster for a singer to figure out who these pivotal plot characters are. Lala is the name of the lady singer in the story, and that’s no joke. While this is the soundless version of the story, I assure you, even in the sound version, they do actually refer to her as Lala. The last character who really needs a name is the policeman Robert, who was there for Dane as a kid and appears again during the events of the game.

Believe me, I was doing my best to try and figure out what was going on in this plot, so the interpretation of it what follows is in no way a joke. It was my best effort to interpret silent images that actively resisted interpretation.

Many years before our story begins, Dane’s friend Taye was being picked on by a boy from the SOL 33 gang whose actor is really bad at selling the bullying without noise and even worse with it on, the guy holding Taye’s nice white sneakers up in the air and taunting him. Dane was just walking by hand-in-hand with his mom that day, him probably eight and Taye probably a pre-teen, when Dane sees the struggle. By now, the sneaker taunting had escalated, and a gun was drawn, but young Dane sees his friend at gunpoint and thinks “oh boy it’s my buddy Taye!” and practically skips over to wave at his friend.

The waving distracts the two squabbling youngsters and suddenly a battle for the gun begins, during which a shot is fired that hits Dane’s mom and kills her. We don’t know this the first time we see it, and we won’t know it during the many, MANY flashbacks the game has to this moment, but Taye was the one to draw the gun during the altercation, and technically, if you stretch things, he’s “responsible” for the gunshot too, even though the gang member was wrestling to get the gun when it fired so when the game has this “startling revelation” later it isn’t quite as impactful as it hopes. We never really learn why Dane would run so happily towards Taye while he was holding a gun quite visibly at a guy who was backing off from the threat. I almost feel like the game almost expects us to think because he’s deaf he didn’t notice, but we are also never given a good reason why Dane conveniently forgets certain details of this moment until they’re dramatic enough to remember.

 

After losing his mother, Dane becomes a very moody man. Taye is his friend, but his mother was incredibly supportive and kind and of course she has that level of angelic niceness only a posthumous character can have in order to make their loss so much more tragic. Dane’s… father? Stepfather? raises him presumably, and we see one scene where he’s really angry at him, but we don’t see the dad’s face at all, the game making a deliberate attempt not to show him. Taye grows up to be successful and takes Dane in as an enforcer, Dane being an incredible capable martial artist for some reason who helps Taye get a briefcase full of drugs from SOL 33.  SOL 33 is now lead by the guy that Dane thinks killed his perfect mother, but before the inevitable revenge, Taye is taking off to the airport and needs Dane to watch over his star singer/girlfriend Lala, who has a creepy stalker, the titular Quiet Man, who wears a bird mask and for some reason looks just like a picture Dane drew when he was a kid. Dane goes to her apartment and creeps around for a bit, and then Taye opens the limo and Dane and Lala get in, the two instantly falling in love as Taye tries to mostly look out the window and Lala talks to him as if he can hear.

Now… we must address a large elephant in the room. Lala looks just like Dane’s mom, even though she is clearly positioned as a love interest for him, and this similarity in appearance is 100% intentional. Not only does the game feature a scene where he shares that detail with her by showing a photograph to her, but she and the mother are played by the same actress. Of course, having the same actress portray two characters leads to a few moments of confusion. Early on I wondered if the mother didn’t die, especially since once flashback shows her open her eyes after being shot, but that was some sort of dream/vision that crops up to further confound the player.

 

Lala goes on stage to perform her song, Dane watching intently as we are once again left to wonder if his reactions are actually sound-based here, but soon SOL 33 crashes the performance and the beak-faced stalker is there as well, just walking in casually between people before the gang makes the real ruckus. The Quiet Man goes on stage and easily kidnaps Lala, Dane chasing after to stop him and getting in a fight that involves the masked man using a stun baton. The guy gets away no matter how well you do, but since SOL 33 was there, you now go to take them down. Right after the kidnapping though, the police show up and we meet our fourth major player, Robert.

 

Robert is a policeman who was there for Dane after his mother died, the two sitting outside and talking. Dane was looking down the whole time even as Robert spoke to him to comfort him, so it’s hard to say if that helped him at all. Now, with Lala kidnapped, Robert is on the case, asking around about her and helping Dane at different parts during this story.  Most characters fade into the background for a while as Dane just heads out to stop SOL 33, fighting gang members and the beaked man again until he gets to the office of the guy he thinks shot his mom all those years ago.

The guy removes the beak mask to reveal that yes, it is that guy, the leader of SOL 33, who apparently kidnapped Lala and is The Quiet Man. The two fight and the building burns down so Dane leaves and… things get really odd from here. So far, the narrative made no sense because of the absence of sound, but you could maybe piece things together. It’s hard to understand things like why Taye never went on his flight, why the guy who supposedly shot your mom would want Lala, and of course characters talk to you a bunch without anything being learned since you can’t hear them. It might not make sense, but it just looks like a revenge story… and then we enter the next half.

 

Before tracking down the masked man, there was a scene that had Dane receiving Lala’s dress in a box, bloodied, and he just goes on some random rampage, beating up Taye’s men for no real reason. This comes back to bite him as after saving Lala, Taye is now there, and he threatens to kill Dane, Lala stops him, and Taye slaps her to assert his position as the new villain of the story. That random rampage must have ruined the years of friendship they had, as the next section of the game is Robert helping Dane take down Taye and his men at his club. After fighting through way too many enemies, you confront Taye, who shoots Robert and almost shoots Dane but… the bird mask is there. Was Taye the masked man too? Who knows! The game isn’t telling us, but he was suddenly evil and in the perfect place to attack Dane after he left SOL 33’s burning base.

Taye doesn’t shoot Dane, instead going to the roof where he has Lala, and Dane has a conversation in silence with Robert, who then dies. Dane goes up to the roof and confronts Taye, they fight, but Taye ends things with a few gunshots… and then things get even stranger. Dane is now The Quiet Man, but he also has super powers. We saw some flashbacks of him drawing the masked beaked man as a kid at a psychiatrist but nothing explains the sudden form Dane takes, turning into a shadowy figure that can move at super speed and easily beat anyone in his path. The game lets you spend way too long like this even though it’s not very fun before the plot progresses, Super Dane beating Taye down, having now lost his best friend…

But we’re not done! Robert’s eyes open up now, he wasn’t dead! Robert is now on the roof top and is also wearing the mask, and he’s got the stun baton so he is the one who kidnapped Lala in the first place! We have another fight, Dane and Robert hit each other at the same time, and it looks like the story is over, Lala coming over to help Dane up after.

That, apparently, is the plot of The Quiet Man, as best as I could glean from the silent pictures thrown at me. Of course, this isn’t wholly accurate, as we’ll learn after beating the game and the sound is turned on. Get ready for some revelations about a story that needlessly obscured details, made most of its major players turn into a masked villain, and for some reason has heavy Oedipal overtones to the romantic subplot.

 

THE PLOT, WITHOUT ANY NEEDLESS OBFUSCATION

Your second playthrough of The Quiet Man will have everyone speaking clearly for you to hear, the subtitles now working as well. Most of the scenes are the same ones we saw before just with their sound restored, but there is one thing they tack on to change the ending, that being…

 

We learn that Robert is Dane’s father.

 

On my first time through, Robert seemed like a good guy. He comforted young Dane, but with sound restored, he’s actually saying how much he hates Dane for getting the mom killed, all while having a plain or sympathetic expression. Older Robert in the present is even smiling and friendly to Dane, no real remnants of their hostile relationship from his youth showing and even when they talk, Dane and Robert barely acknowledge any animosity… but when Robert talks and Dane is arbitrarily not able to hear him in that scene, Robert starts revealing plot details about Lala and the beaked masked man, who we are actually given the name Quiet Man to refer to him as during this part despite my earlier use of the name. Since Robert saw the kid’s drawings as his father, Robert arranges to kidnap Lala because she wants to be kidnapped.

 

Yeah, Lala liked singing but Taye, her actual boyfriend, is too controlling, so she tries to get free by getting Robert to kidnap her, but Robert gets SOL 33 involved somehow to take the fall and has the gang leader, Isaac, pretend he was The Quiet Man. Robert is The Quiet Man when he first kidnaps her, but Taye is never The Quiet Man, he just got upset that Dane seemingly was making a move on Lala and refused to listen to anyone say otherwise so he tosses a long friendship out for the sake of more video game battle excuses.

It is possible that maybe some players would glean the faceless father we see once in a flashback is the police officer who seems chummy with Dane until the twist ending, but the game hides some details of Robert’s behavior until the Answered update. First of all, the original credits had just before them images of Dane’s past with his mother flash by, but in Answered, the images are expanded to show Robert was in all of them, just cropped out for their former appearance. We also see Robert deliberately whiff his final punch of their battle when it looked like mutual defeat before, because I guess at the end Robert felt bad for setting up such a convoluted plot that ruined Dane’s life with very little gain to be had if it had gone properly. A lot of what sound adds to the plot involves Robert acting nothing like how he appears to act during the original soundless version, but we do at least learn some details like Taye cancels his flight after he believes Dane’s putting the moves on Lala.

This game also adds a further strange twist to the affairs. A final scene is added where Dane is just released from prison because apparently he was arrested but his dad wasn’t for the convoluted events of the game. Oddly enough, Robert is standing there with his car to pick him up, the two talking about trying again as if some personal relationship was reestablished after years of pain. Literally every scene where Robert looked like he was comforting young Dane turns out to be the opposite when sound is restored, and besides helping Dane chase the red herrings involved in Lala’s kidnapping, Robert’s only redeeming moment I guess is not punching his son at the end. Also, the Oedypus connections grow even more appropriate when the detail of Dane fighting his father comes to light, and I don’t think the game is quite capable enough to have deliberately made such an allusion, especially since it tries to make Dane and Lala sympathetic rather than creepy.

 

Learning the truth of what I just spent 3 hours playing in silence was interesting in its own way, although I would have much preferred having the details present the first go round. Some scenes in silence are excruciatingly boring as they offer nothing to look at or glean without their dialogue, and besides missing the mark on some details like Robert and why Taye turned, there was much more time spent on things that reaffirmed the obvious or set up pointless details. Taye has a right hand man who spends the game in a strange rivalry with Dane, Dane wiping his blood on the man’s handkerchief, punching the guy’s car window out for now reason, and really just bullying this man who did nothing to deserve it save one instance in the voiced version of the story where he says Dane isn’t dressed for the classy club Taye runs. We get a few flashbacks to establish Lala and Dane’s “growing relationship”, but adding voices to the affair complicates things. When they got in the car earlier together they first met, and Taye tells the driver to take Lala and Dane straight to the club for the performance… but they also apparently had heartfelt chats before the performance with no one around, on a fire escape somewhere.. and during one of these he actually tells Lala he’s deaf. That doesn’t stop her talking, and outside a moment where he tells random gangsters he’s deaf, it’s the only time he really tries to communicate he can’t hear people… and they of course keep talking to him as if he never told them.

 

But, we can’t harp on the terribly conveyed and convoluted story of this game forever. There are many unintentional moments of ridiculousness caused by removing the sound from scenes that need the noise to make sense, but it hardly makes the slogs most cutscenes are that much more interesting. There have been games that fail in the plot department that make up for it with the gameplay, and so far we haven’t looked at how you actually play The Quiet Man all that much. Even in games that fail so spectacularly with their plot, you might at least expect something akin to passable gameplay attached to it, especially since in The Quiet Man’s case, you have Square Enix publishing and helping with the development, the company responsible for things like Final Fantasy, the newer Tomb Raiders, Hitman…

 

To my great shock though, even if you had taken away the terrible plot… The Quiet Man is still a disastrous game.

 

COMBAT IN THE QUIET MAN

Outside of passively watching the game’s story unfold, The Quiet Man will sometimes throw you into combat scenarios, but the first barrier to play is that the game is deathly afraid of having any text in its menus. You can get a look at your controls on the pause screen, “look” being the key word as rather than explaining any of the attacks you can perform, you see them demonstrated by neon signs. For example, the kick and punch commands will show Dane attacking some goon, so those are easy enough to read… but then the dash and one of the dodge options might as well look identical in neon, the grab doesn’t explain its different uses like throwing or attacking while you hold them in place, and perhaps the worst image is one of Dane just radiating energy, which is meant to tell you about Dane’s “quiet voice” ability.

Most battles in The Quiet Man happen just the same, and that’s a heavy “most”. Some guys will run into the room you’re locked in, Dane needing to take every single one out before he can move on. The first issue with this combat approach is just how dumb the enemies are.  The neon sign pause menu offers two difficulties to chose from, but the harder one doesn’t make bad guys smarter, it just makes you die in fewer hits from them. Enemies in The Quiet Man, even when on screen and Dane is standing still, will often shuffle in place, looking like they’re ready for a fight but hesitant to engage.  Eventually, one might run in, and after one patch I think they did increase the chances for them to rush in if you aren’t doing anything. However, if you do the slowest walk possible, you can still outpace the approaching enemies, their attacks whiffing and then the enemy falling back to a neutral position. Some areas do force a bit more aggression out of them, mostly by surrounding you so you can’t escape that zone of being in their attack range, but in more open areas, you can quite easily avoid damage just by not engaging too hard with your opposition.

When you do chose to fight, it’s incredibly boring and incredibly buggy. Hammer the attack button a bunch to take down maybe 80% of all enemies in the game, stringing together the same combos until they’re dead. The bugs come in the form of how they are executed, although they’re oddly in your benefit. A downed enemy might teleport back to their feet so they can be hit by your attacks, you may knock an enemy through environmental objects, but they’ll pop back out when they teleport to their feet.  Some enemies can be slammed against the wall or ledges, and sometimes this will trigger even when the characters isn’t close to an object to lean against for the attacks, leaving them oddly positioned on what seem to be invisible objects. Dane also teleports around the battle pretty easily, making it a cinch to escape most moments of being surrounded. Press a direction and the attack button and, if there’s an enemy over there, Dane will be there in a flash to push them back with an attack, every regular enemy interrupted by being hit and ending any attempt they might have been making to capitalize on having the drop on you. No matter which difficulty you chose, these fights are just busy work and rarely put up a fight. Dane seems ridiculously capable though, even in a cutscene where he’s holding Lala in his arms like a baby, he can pull off flashy kicks and strikes against men armed with baseball bats. Between battles the game sometimes abruptly cuts to a scene of Dane doing some flashy action for no reason, although the weirder version is where between cutscenes the game might cut to a random moment you control where you just walk Dane around. There are no collectibles or objects in the environment to justify any gameplay outside of the battles, the environment itself lazily recycling objects to have things like tons of identical arcade machines in the gang hideout.

 

While 20% may be a generous number for the other kinds of enemies you encounter, most of the remaining percentage are slightly stronger goons. They will either have a distinctive appearance or weapon like a bat or machete to set them apart, and when you face them, you’ll find mindless attack combos will finally be blocked by men with a few self-preservation instincts! The Quiet Man threatens to be interesting here, but the way you overcome these foes is boringly consistent. Activate Quiet Voice, and suddenly everything slows down and enemies who would block against you now don’t. Lay a few strikes on them to open them up and then they’re down too. You can’t just spam the Quiet Voice repeatedly so you have to build it up on regular bad guys first, something the game throws too much at you already. Battles are long and boring beat ’em up affairs that, despite the game’s plot being so awful, would make the game better by their removal. When I wanted to go through and hear the game in Answered, I had to fight all these battles all over again, which meant mindless hammering attack buttons and directions until a tougher guy appears, upon which I press the button to make him vulnerable and get back to doing the same thing and succeeding. There is no other reason to mix up your approach, but there is one last type of battle in the game.

 

Boss battles in The Quiet Man can actually break through the Quiet Voice and if you try to use regular attacks on them, they can perfectly block them. These battles actually threaten to be complex for a moment until you realize that since you can’t actually hurt them at all save for prescribed moments, you don’t actually get to do much during the fights. The boss needs to open themselves up for you to attack, after which you get a period to whale on them, and then the process repeats, no health bar telling you how much health they have left. Your health is also invisible in the game’s efforts to keep things hidden from you, but the screen gets redder as you get deader, to coin a phrase. Dying will set you back to the start of a fight, but before you do come back, you get an unusual scene of your mother looming over what must be your baby self. Sometimes she smiles silently, sometimes she makes goofy faces, and then you’re back in the action and ready to fight a boss that mostly just asks you to stand in place and dodge when they make a move. It wasn’t until having completed many boss battles that I learned that most bosses have tells, the player meant to strike when they slip into a certain animation like Taye’s right hand man adjusting his tie. However, the fact I beat the game before that shows that the battles can be essentially brute forced by dodging and attacking until you land a hit that lets you land more.

Bosses last obnoxiously long of course without any meaningful change, but nothing is quite as obnoxiously long as the moment Dane becomes The Quiet Man. Meant to be some awesome moment where you’re an untouchable god of fighting who no one can stop… it hardly feels like much of a change from regular play. Mindless hammering buttons to beat easy foes wasn’t thrilling before, and they toss way too many at The Quiet Man’s supernatural powers before things end and Dane is suddenly just not supernatural anymore. The only real highlight of being The Quiet Man is the useless grab move finally has a fun use, that being to pick up a guy and repeatedly gut punch him as long as you like. Barely seems to do any damage, but the animation is hilarious, as is a glitch I encountered while fighting Isaac, the leader of SOL 33. When he’d kill me, Dane wouldn’t fall over dead, he’d teleport from standing to face down as the game fails to connect the two states properly. Really, messing with the game’s bad combat animation and AI was probably the closest thing to fun to be had, but if the enemies are growing a bit more aggressive after a patch, I can only imagine they’ll move away from the hilarious flaws more and more and instead leave us with a bland, boring, barebones combat system that offers nothing of interest between a plot that already doesn’t invite much interest save for just how poorly it’s told.

 

CONCLUSION

The Quiet Man is a fascinating piece of work for showing how to fail at both narrative and gameplay spectacularly. The choice to have the first playthrough of the game’s story completely silent is incongruous with the inconsistent portrayal of deafness featured, but even if you could hear the story, it’s a convoluted mess that doesn’t try to be understood when silent and isn’t interesting when the sound is restored. The combat is boring and brainless, breaking away from boring punch strings only to force you to either wait on bosses to be vulnerable or use an ability to make certain regular enemies vulnerable. Ultimately, The Quiet Man is a boring live action movie that was made silent to generate mystery rather than creating a well-written and interesting plot, those scenes connected by pointless battle filler so it can justify being a video game instead of poor amateur film-making.

 

I would like to see the core conceit of this game done well. A soundless game could be better constructed quite easily, and so could a wordless narrative. The Quiet Man does not show us the plight of a deaf character though, as he understands most things perfectly. People don’t need to change their behavior around Dane to be understood, and he only misses a few details in the grand scheme of things seemingly. Muting the entire game just makes things confusing for the player, as would muting any random T.V. show or movie, but it doesn’t add anything to it. Funnily enough, the one good thing in the game is perhaps the song you get to hear once you’ve beat the game and it’s dropped its “completely silent” shtick.

Even the comments on this youtube video show people’s confusion about the mother/girlfriend situation though. It’s really hard to attach yourself to either version of the story, as the wordless version resists making sense, and having words leaves a flew glaring issues like… besides losing his mother, Dane is a boring unsympathetic protagonist who barely talks or acts and when he does, it’s violent and often directed at people who might not deserve it. The pile up of twists is definitely just mystery baiting rather than the pay off of building story elements as well.

 

The Quiet Man is oddly ambitious, trying to be cinematic and experimental and none of it paying off in the end. It’s astonishing that a game in such a state can be released, but this feels like a project where the creators would let nothing stand in the way of their vision, even things that would improve the experience, make it fun to play, or make it worth experiencing.  Sadly, The Quiet Man’s ridiculous and exploitative use of deafness to try and add an artistic edge to a flawed story comes off as corny rather than helping people empathize with those who actually have hearing issues.

 

While it would be best for The Quiet Man to fade quietly in history, it was necessary to make some noise about it to avoid anyone falling for the trap of what sounds like an intriguing angle for a game. The execution was horrendous here and The Quiet Man is best avoided entirely to avoid spending hours staring at soundless dialogue scenes and barely participating in dull combat to unlock the chance to do it again, but this time you CAN understand the awful plot you were almost spared from by not being able to follow its silent version. I’m happy to finally say goodbye to The Quiet Man, something Dane would no doubt be able to hear if he needed to.