| THE QUIET MAN
No-one’s listening
Producer Kensei Fujinaga fights back tears as he explains in a video from Square Enix why The Quiet Man exists – aged just 15 he was in hospital and PlayStation ‘saved his life’, enabling him to communicate with a child who couldn’t talk. Nice story. This game, however, isn’t going to change anyone’s life. The entire game is silent. Even the emotional musical interlude as club singer Lala takes to the stage, the moment when you, the player, are supposed to fall for this endless victim, is soundless. You see, hero Dane is deaf so you’re placed in his designer leathers and asked to experience the world as he does, without a scrap of sound. It’s an interesting take, and in our heads somewhere David Cage is clawing at his own hands in frustration that he didn’t think of it first. But it also means nothing makes sense. What’s worse, Dane can lip-read, so he actually knows what’s happening, but you, the player, are left in the dark.
So you’re left to fumble at the plot, hoping to work out the storyline as you play: there’s a serial killer on the loose, a decades-old argument over a pair of pumps, a love triangle of sorts between Dane, his childhood friend Taye, and the aforementioned club singer who looks exactly like our hero’s dead mum (she’s played by the same actress, so at least this one weird point is clearly signalled for you). It’s an Oedipal complex made worse as Dane’s actual mum revives you by making googly baby faces into the camera, at you, the infant Dane. (We imagine David Cage is throwing furniture by this point.)
JUST, NO
Combat is very simple, with kick, punch, and dodge buttons used to execute Dane’s mixed martial arts. It’s stiff and clumsy, and done contextually he’ll weaponise the gritty urban environments, pouring petrol down racially stereotyped gangsters’ throats – we’re afraid if the game’s not presenting women as devoid of agency, a problem to be fought over, it’s typecasting Latino and African American men as violent drug dealers.
The Quiet Man is a oncein-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.
VERDICT
You won’t believe what you’re playing for all the wrong reasons. This should be shown in schools as a warning to future generations. Ian Dean