THE QUIET MAN™

I know you. You're looking at this game thinking, "oh im gonna buy this for a friend as a joke" as a friend did to me. When that friend inevitably makes YOU suffer with them there will be NO laughter. NO entertainment. NO japes, jokes and haha funny times. The only thing you'll feel is confusion and dread as you experience the game in near silence for three hours with looooong silent cutscenes and a fighting system that feels like shaking a bunch of action figures inside a plastic container. There's better joke gifts out there and better developers to give money to, no-one needs this.

no

This game is genuinely one of the worst experiences I’ve had, and I can’t believe it was released in this state. On my first playthrough, there was no audio and no subtitles at all, which makes the game practically unplayable. Even worse, you’re required to complete the game first just to unlock audio, which is an incredibly poor and baffling design choice. The combat is equally frustrating. You can’t properly damage bosses with normal punches, forcing you to dodge and counterattack constantly. In certain boss phases, regular attacks simply don’t work at all, making the fights feel restrictive and poorly designed rather than challenging. To make matters worse, after defeating a boss, the game freezes on a still screen, forcing a full restart from the last checkpoint. This happened repeatedly and completely ruined any sense of progression. Overall, this game feels unfinished, buggy, and extremely frustrating. I strongly recommend saving your money and avoiding it altogether.

The Quiet Man, developed by Human Head Studios in collaboration with Square Enix and published by Square Enix, is an experimental action-adventure title that set out to blur the line between film and video games, but ultimately became better known for its missteps than its ambition. The game centers on Dane, a deaf vigilante navigating a single night in a grimy urban underworld, searching for answers surrounding a violent incident and a mysterious masked antagonist. From the very beginning, The Quiet Man makes it clear that it wants to be experienced as something unconventional, prioritizing cinematic presentation and atmosphere over traditional gameplay flow. One of the game’s defining features is its decision to largely remove audible dialogue and subtitles during the initial playthrough. This design choice was intended to place players directly into Dane’s perspective, forcing them to interpret the story through body language, facial expressions, and environmental context rather than spoken words. While this idea is conceptually interesting, in practice it severely undermines the narrative. Key plot points, character motivations, and emotional beats are obscured to the point of confusion, leaving many players unsure of what is happening or why it matters. Instead of fostering immersion, the silence often creates detachment, as scenes unfold without enough visual clarity to compensate for the lack of dialogue. The narrative itself aims for a gritty, neo-noir tone, filled with crime, revenge, and moral ambiguity. The story unfolds through a mixture of live-action full-motion video and in-engine cutscenes, with real actors portraying many of the characters. While this hybrid presentation is visually distinctive, it contributes to an uneven pacing that frequently pulls players out of the experience. Long stretches of passive viewing are punctuated by brief combat encounters, making the game feel more like an interrupted movie than a cohesive interactive work. Even once Square Enix later added an optional update that restored full audio and subtitles for a second playthrough, the story’s structural weaknesses remained evident. Combat is presented in a straightforward beat ’em up style, featuring basic punches, kicks, dodges, and a focus mechanic meant to slow time and highlight incoming attacks. Unfortunately, these systems lack depth and refinement. Encounters are repetitive, enemy variety is limited, and the feedback from hits feels muted and imprecise. Rather than escalating in complexity or challenge, fights tend to blur together, offering little incentive to master the mechanics beyond simple trial and error. As a result, the interactive portions of the game often feel like obstacles between cinematic sequences rather than meaningful gameplay in their own right. Visually, The Quiet Man has moments of competence but rarely achieves the impact it seems to be aiming for. The urban environments are drab and loosely detailed, matching the game’s somber tone but lacking memorable identity. Character animations during combat can appear stiff, and transitions between live-action footage and in-game scenes are often jarring rather than seamless. The overall presentation feels like an idea that never fully came together, with technical execution falling short of the cinematic aspirations driving the project. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of The Quiet Man is the sense that its core concept had potential. Exploring a story through the lens of a deaf protagonist could have offered meaningful insight or innovative storytelling mechanics, but the game rarely engages with the realities or nuances of that perspective in a thoughtful way. Characters appear to communicate freely with Dane despite his condition, and the lack of subtitles affects the player far more than it meaningfully reflects the character’s lived experience. This disconnect makes the silence feel more like a gimmick than an authentic narrative device. Overall, The Quiet Man stands as a cautionary example of how ambition alone is not enough to carry a game. Its attempt to merge cinematic storytelling with interactive action results in an experience that feels disjointed, confusing, and mechanically underdeveloped. While a small subset of players may find value in it as a curiosity or a bold experiment gone wrong, most will likely come away frustrated by its shallow combat, incoherent storytelling, and uneven pacing. Rather than being remembered for innovation, The Quiet Man has earned its reputation as a lesson in the importance of execution, clarity, and respect for the medium’s interactive strengths. Rating: 4/10

AN HONEST REVIEW!!! I think this game got a lot more hate than it deserved, sure it has its downs but I want to give an honest opinion. The story line is great, however, the downside is that you have to play the game twice to get the context. Since you play as a character (Dane) that is deaf, the whole first play through is completely silent. If you have the patients and time to spend on this game I do recommend playing through it twice, and you get a nice ending after the credits. My only real complaint is that the game play consist 90% of cut scenes and 10% of fighting. As a Square Enix game I was expecting a lot more to come from it but it is a decent game, not the best, but as I said if you have the time for it, it can be enjoyable. The concept was great, but maybe a bit of context throughout the first play through would have made this game more bearable. To be honest if I hadn't read some comments and knew there was more in the second play through I WOULD NOT have played it again, it was a struggle just to finish a first play through. I recommend the games to those with patients and curiosity. DO NOT recommend for those without it.

It is an experience. I do not understand, and I don't think I was meant to. Thank you, The Quiet Man, for allowing me to enjoy other games more in comparison.

This is a game that I absolutely believe is genuinely terrible through and through, but not an experience I regret having. The quiet man is a game with terrible gameplay, sound design, storytelling, visuals, cutscenes, and it even runs very poorly and is built very poorly. I could only set the resolution up to 720p, I experienced like 3 crashes during my 3 hour playthrough, and I could not use a controller despite the game definitely feeling like it is built for it. Despite the fact that not even 1% of this product resembles a good game, I still found some enjoyment while playing through it. If you can find this game on sale for like $1-2, go into it as blind as possible, and stream it in a discord call with the homies, I think you'll definitely get an unforgettable experience that you will not regret.

I had to check out this game because of the negative reviews. And let me put it clearly. IT IS PURE TRASH! No sound but long cutscenes. So what is the point. You only fight the same guys over and over, with a clumsy movement and lots of visual glitches where the character are rendered inside walls and objects. How this game can be released by a reputable company like square enix, is beyond my comprehension.

judgment made by white people

I don't read analyzes or watch gameplays. I was attracted by the fact that the character was deaf, but I was completely disappointed. The story is poorly developed, although the main character is deaf, everyone talks to him as if he wasn't. Furthermore, the 1% of gameplay is just fighting and it's worse than play1.