The Quiet Man

In a gaming landscape where sensory overload is everywhere, The Quiet Man offers something quite different and unexpected. The bold choice to mute out nearly all sound effectively adds mystery and tension. But Dane’s story is brief and not especially original, and the combat becomes repetitive very quickly, making this movie/game hybrid difficult to recommend as something you’d want to experience as a whole.

Combat occurs are the primary form of gameplay and is basic. You can button mash your way through much of it and use slo-mo finishers to perform flashy attacks like from an action movie but its the bare minimum. The boss fights themselves rarely differentiate themselves and can be completed with the same tactics as normal enemies, which strangely all look the same.

Not every game makes it as far as release. Even the biggest and most successful studios cancel projects when they aren’t shaping up. Those games may never see the light of day, but curious gamers can find footage of many abandoned titles online – and The Quiet Man reminds me of those videos. With a mishmash of awful storytelling and mechanics, this narrative-infused brawler plays like a failed proof-of-concept prototype. Even though it has technically released, The Quiet Man doesn’t feel finished; the entire experience is a series of cascading embarrassments that make you wonder how it escaped...

Flunking the old-school.

We wrapped up The Quiet Man's conclusion no less than five minutes ago, and to say we’re baffled and bewildered would be an understatement. The bottom line is that Human Head Studios’ attempt at blending FMV with interactive combat scenes utterly fails in every conceivable way. In fact, everything about this project is truly perplexing, and to confuse matters even further, Japanese bigwig Square Enix actually forked out genuine money to publish this monstrosity.

The Quiet Man is an absolute disaster of ideas that don't work, bad design decisions, boring combat, ugly graphics, and attempting to use a real disability as a gimmick in a way that feels borderline insulting.