First time i saw this game was on Unfinished. Once i found out that the sound effects are muffled during gameplay sequences i was immediately turned off and moved on. For some reason, the internet didn't and the game has garnered hate from both players and critics. One of the critics has called pretentious for its failure to convey the ideas like the plot to the players.

Other developers in the past have delivered successful games that enables the players to experience blindness and i admire the developers for trying deafness.

When i think about it i believe that the developers have a pretty great idea but unfortunately failed to implement it.

It's an interesting concept but it is horribly executed, gameplay wise and narrative wise. It just looks like a chore to play.
I think it gathered so much attention because it was shown at E3, made by Square Enix with help from Human Head, the original Prey devs. It's just such a weird thing all around, not something you see often.

Because it's fuckin' terrible and even worse for them it's terrible in a really funny way so that means it draws way more attention than if it was just boring terrible.

Also I don't get the sense that this team actually tried to convey deafness at all. They just convey a game without any sound. I don't get any sense at all that there was any particularly robust research or consultation or anything on that subject matter.

Here's the experience of a deaf person playing The Quiet Man. Conclusion: The few ASL signs in the game was the only part that was accurate. The rest of the game felt built from the perspective of a person that can hear, without any feedback from deaf people.

This just doesn't seem to be done well enough to stand side by side to a game like Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. They just don't portray deafness in a faithful & informed way.

Everybody just wanted The Bouncer 2. EVERYBODY.

Stripping the speech audio didn't seem like a aesthetic decision at all. I wouldn't be surprised if they removed it because the game came in hot and they didn't have time to mix the dialogue correctly or splice the speaking scenes in a way that made the story make sense. All in all Quiet Man felt like it was made to round out Square's E3 presser. A project that was squeezed out in eight months and made as cheaply as possible. This is just my take as outsider looking in but if any of my assumptions are incorrect. If they spent considerable resources to make this or if this has been in development for years then it is all the more baffling.

@merxworx01: I'd wager development was so tough, they gave up and sent the game to die. The game was originally supposed to be released in 2019, but they moved up the released date to this year for some reason.

The Quiet Man is just the most fascinating kind of mess. The fact that they announced it to little fanfare in June and stealth released it 5 months later; the decision to release a game meant to be replayed to hear the dialogue, but not have that ready until a week after release; that the game is meant to be played multiple times but on first blush the story just seems like it's full of hackneyed plot points ripped off from "Fight Club", only executed extremely poorly all speak to what a crazy game this is.

If this game had all the time and polish in the world, best case scenario, it seems like it would be a mediocre brawler with a terrible story. That this was released on multiple platforms, right before holiday season, by Square Enix is amazing. It's the kind of misstep, from initial concept all the way to final release, that the industry doesn't see from big publishers anymore.

Ultimately I think it boils down to a kind of misguided nostalgia for games like Rogue Warrior. Big budget game with a lot of money behind it from a major publisher, that just fails on every level. As much as some people miss "B games" I think they miss the giant failures even more.

WHERE IS MY EXTRA LIFE VIDEO? No seriously, I can't wait to watch the beastcoast play this. I'm hyped beyond anything. Once I read they had, I've been impatiently waiting for the archive footage cause I kinda hate any and all live streams(anywhere, not just GB).

I think the most fascinating part of this tale is how badly basically everyone, EVERYONE, thinks of this game but it still came out. They still rather spend that last bit of money to push it out and get a tiny bit of sales for it rather than cancel it; the usual go to for games I feel. Also, Square Enix? They're having a real rough time with mainline FF these days but...the DQ11/FFXIV/Hitman 1/Deus Ex/Tomb Raider publisher that cut off the hitman studio, complains about tomb raider 1 sales, complains about sleeping dog sales, BUT PUTS THIS OUT? It's uncanny.

I’ve only seen video, and I’m interested in trying it (morbid curiosity), but from what I’ve seen:

- Awful looking combat

- Jarringly bad graphics next to FMV

- “experience the world as Dane does,” except he clearly reads lips and understands what he’s doing, while the player does not

It SEEMS (again, I haven’t played it), like a project that was fucked from the get-go, and someone in marketing threw a valient, yet doomed Hail Mary with the deaf-empathy angle.

Again, I’ll play it soon. I played Duke Nukem Forever out of curiosity, so this 3 hour experience should be totally doable.

@vortextk: Just go watch it on twitch. Twitch archives kinda suck, but the video will be there for the next two weeks. It might be on the site later, or the unofficial GB Unarchived youtube channel will pick it up probably.

It's a bad game that doesnt make any sense.

And I was just about to start six crazy frights.

@vortextk

All 150+ hours of Giant Bomb and friends streaming for the kids Donations are open all year at https://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.team&teamID=38626 over $292,661 was raised as of 11/6/18

Danve Lang: His videos are broken up because he had to restart his stream, first section is linked. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/329746395

Giant Bomb East: (Quiet Man starts at 2 hour 48 minutes) Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/330161428 Mixer: https://mixer.com/giantbomb?vod=63591051 Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAVNdJjEZDI

Matt Pascual: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/330438941

Giant Bomb West: Mixer: https://mixer.com/giantbomb?vod=63859647 Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/330608887

Formerly Tested.coms own Will Smith: (He does the fresh prince rap): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/332031752

Alex: https://mixer.com/giantbomb?vod=64294740

Drew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fR3VLOyoUg

Danny: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/332264332(edited)

@onemanarmyy: Wow, thanks!

"We need you guys to work on Cloud's hair. Now."

Holy shit this game is bad. It's impossible this came out. Game's this bad don't come out from studios this large anymore, right? This actually got cancelled but somehow released accidentally?

Gotta say, some of the character models do look really good, uncanny valley not withstanding, until they move. Some of the combat moves look like they could be cool. I think backgrounds and objects, from a not maximized video stream, seem to have pretty high fidelity. That said, the fighting looks abysmal, the animation is jank, the clipping is some of the worst you could imagine. Physics don't exist and bodies do whatever they want. The acting is blah BUT WHO REALLY KNOWS, BECAUSE ALMOST THE ENTIRE GAME IS SILENT. Not silent "the main character's deaf!" but silent as in SILENT. The kid has fucking conversations with people by speaking OR sign language. No subtitles. No hint at what anyone is saying other than raw context clues from whatever the fuck is going on screen(which is harder than it may sound the farther in you get).

Constant flashbacks to scenes you've already seen but then you get to see 5 more seconds that puts it into better context. Whole scenes of several minutes of dialogue with NO SUBTITLES OR SOUND. Crazy fake out endings and then a non ending. A camera that doesn't care where your character is or what's happening most the time. The critiques are honestly an endless sea.

It's a triumph; it's an abomination.

The game feels and looks like they just ripped out all the speech out off a normal game about a deafperson, wich is a bad start i am guessing they started with the audio in and then said "Yow with off all the speech was gone bro, wouldn't that be amazing!" Also the first half of this game is beating up every Hispanic stereotype for the first hour, i thought we where past that...

It turns out we were actually blessed by the silence all along.

A lot of bad games come out but The Quiet Man manages to be terrible in a way you'd think would be impossible for an indie developer, let alone a AAA developer. Even the shabbiest of narrative amateur games manage to convey some kind of story, even if it's a terribly-told one, but The Quiet Man can't do even the most basic storytelling. And most games don't stumble into weird incestually-tinged romance in the way it does. It's definitely pretentious, but it's not pretentious just because of these failures; pretentiousness always comes about from somebody having vastly overblown claims about how profound and meaningful the things they're doing are.

The Quiet Man is pretentious because there are cues in the game showing it wants to be some arthouse experience and there are all these super high-concept statements that the producer made about the game, but at its core, it's just generic, low-grade action garbage. It's really mystifying how the creative lead expected people to feel like they were exploring deep human connections after hitting guys in the face for five hours. It's not even as if they had this conceptually good idea about making a game with a deaf protagonist and then failed to implement it; the game and its creators don't seem to be clear on what it means to be deaf, in the first place. The game and the producer seem to think that being deaf means you can't communicate with other people and that's not how it works at all; that portrayal does a disservice to deaf people. And if this is supposed to be a game simulating deafness then why would you add the sound back in?

So few AAA games are this broken and no video game has ever fucked up in the unique and unimaginable ways that The Quiet Man has.

Yeah its bad but the gleeful hating on the game just seems snide.

Oh I dunno, check out the version with sound now... it's so much worse.

Some things might just deserve it.

As someone who's finished it once(silent) and has beat: Vampire Rain, Duke Nukem Forever, Naughty Bear, Mindjack, Aliens: Colonial Marines and probably a whole bunch more I'm forgetting...yeah, it ranks in there with one of the worst (non-steam garbage) games of the past decade. The only thing it has going for it is that the video quality of the FMVs, otherwise everything else is just abysmal(I can't overstate just how badly the combat feels and how terrible some of those boss fights are). I say this as someone who bought it day one hoping it would be at least a passable game with an interesting concept.

@snowypliskin: I completely agree. The dedication of the entire staff, both west and east, to repeatedly hate on this game is really offputting. I think everyone can agree it’s a bad game, and a 20 to 30 min quick look would have sufficed at saying so. Two play throughs later, several minutes on each podcast and it feels a bit much. It’s even more strange when it seems on the whole, that giant bomb as a site takes criticism directed at themselves fairly badly, and are typically pretty defensive. I don’t know. The obsession with this game and tearing it to pieces is a bit much at this point. There are other games to talk about. Just my two cents though.

@majorzero64: But all of that comes from a mindset of HOW? This isn't 2 people making a game with no experience and no money. This is Square Enix. This was at their E3 conference. They gave demos of this at PAX. This is a big publisher showing off their game, so HOW?

Are there that many more games to talk about? Heard about odyssey for weeks, red dead now, BLOPS; and we know what all of those games are even before anyone from a website put pen to paper or uttered a word online about them. I didn't know what the Quiet Man was and I still don't know what it's trying to actually be.

I don't think it's a pure hate for the game. Mostly bewilderment. This is a huge company spending millions on this and bringing it out to international events. It's just baffling how this product came out the way it did. The internal logic doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense neither. Sometimes Dane can understand everything, sometimes sign language is needed. The first cutscene plays out with full voice acting, but other scenes do not. Sometimes Isaac boasts with his gun, but then it's portrayed that he accidently shot the gun. Why would he be boasting after this accident? Why is Dane running & waving hello to his friend that's clearly in a hostile situation that involves a gun. Even if he didn't saw a gun, it's still clearly your buddy being stuck in a bad situation that doesn't warrant Dane happily waving at him. Also, who the hell came up with the idea that this whole tragedy starts out because a guy steals the other guys shoes and mockingly holds them up to him? And then we flash forward and we're deep in the drugs business. There's also a scene in there where Dane gets abused as a kid, but that doesn't seem to go anywhere. At least not in the silent version i saw.

It just doesn't feel like this game was ever meant to be seen without sound. There are just way too many cutscenes built in a way where the dialog is the focus. Now if they made two versions of this game and made it so that the cutscenes in the first version are wildly different compared to the 2nd version, one playing to the strengths of the eye & one playing to the strength of the ear, that could be pretty cool. But you can't just have people stare at talking faces and then cutting the sound away as a way to add mystery. Especially when the actual deaf character has no problems figuring out what's being said. Honestly, if he didn't point at his ear & there was no sign language in the game, people might not even know he was deaf. Playing without sound doesn't even feel like you're roleplaying as Dane the deaf guy.

And let's not even talk about the abhorrent camera, the constant clipping through walls, the extremely limited fighting system, the lack of character models & and the downright comical 'float in the running position' & ' slide around in circles' type of animations Dane constantly gets wrapped up in. It's a neat thing to see played out in completion, but the only thing it does well is having decent FMV.

I'm watching the Beast Extra Life and man, wow, they are really committing to dumping on this game huh? It feels like they are trying way too hard. #forthekids

@majorzero64: @snowypliskin: Yeah, I've felt this since they talked about it PAX West. A bad game is a bad game, but it seems like this one in particular got the entire games media industry to pull a Jim Sterling and give a ridiculous amount of coverage to a game they clearly think is bad.

Giant Bomb is no stranger to doing video of bad games, but the sheer quantity of coverage of this game seems almost mean.

Now that said, the game is clearly shitty at the portrayal of people, so by all means put it on blast. Just...does it have to be on this much blast for this long?

The Quiet Man is fairly shitty towards minorities, is a meandering clumsy mess at best with it's subject matter, is a weird story about a man who wishes this woman he has some relationship with was more like his mom, and in the new Answered scenes has a lot of scenes of a child with a disability being abused.

The Quiet Man needs no defense force, and it needs nobody feeling sorry for how long people are dunking on it.

@bladeofcreation: I think this is a consequence of it being a Square-Enix released game that was displayed on the main stage at E3. Then they decided to do this weird "second playthrough sound mode coming in a week" thing that just added to the publicity and kept everyone talking about it for a week. It's also a fairly short game that anyone can complete in one sitting, so it's not hard for people to join in and give their opinions on it. This isn't even touching on how profoundly bizarre everything about this game is which is what fuels the negative publicity.

If Square-Enix didn't put this out there, I don't think we'd talk about it as much as we do. This was probably the biggest AAA publisher blunder in a long time. It's especially bad when you consider they axed Io and Hitman for this.

It feels like the story and it's themes rep the worst impulses of anime, made worse by being delivered in fmv. Everything from the disturbing mother-love to the skinny kid having his revenge on his tormenters (with a seemingly racist bent) just comes off as incest and power fantasy. I'm a bit fascinated by it, but it is easier to watch something like The Room, then play a (from the sound of it) bad game that is also constantly creeping me out. Which is why I haven't even watched TheRoom

I desperately want to watch GBE's play of The Quiet Man, because it was new to them and it would be entertaining. And then I do not want to think of this game again, going by the QL.

Because it was shown on the main stage at E3. The game looks and plays like a PS2 era beat'em up, but its not the worst game I have seen. For someone like Alex, that often had to review some of the worst games that came to gamespot, I doubt its on his top 5, specially in a post-greenlight steam era. That is not to say it is not a bad game... indubitably it is; but it is on a B or C-list bargain bin level bad, not "the worst game ever bad".

The fact it was on the spotlight of the biggest trade show, it was founded by one of the biggest publishers in the world, and the (apparently) earnest pretentiousness of the creative team (that pours on every second of its fmv cutscenes and every tweet they have posted), is making a lot of people pay closer attention.

The comparisons with The Room are not misguided (specially in the level of detachment from real interaction the writers had) although a little too easy. However, like it, I would pay money to watch/read someone do a Disaster Artist of The Quiet Man. The story behind that production seems a lot more interesting that anything else in the game...

I loved seeing the gleeful way Dan laughed at this game, and loved Abby's disgust at the mom/son/girlfriend love mess. I hope they do another look at it with the beast crew with sound like Dan mentioned because I want to watch THEM experience and laugh at it. Ultimately I don't care about the game itself, I like to see the gang having fun and getting emotional about games. It's why we watch them play Mario Party even though most of them HATE it, and I personally think it is extremely boring, but the cast's interactions are what makes it fun to watch.

Some people are mad about this game getting so much bad press, but I don't really understand why. If you don't care about it, that's fine, just don't watch it. Most of us are bewildered at how this thing even got made and not just outright canceled. Even more troubling for Square Enix with all of the recent events and poor sales numbers of their biggest franchises, so in that context many people are looking at this game as a blatant example of Square's bad decision making and poor prioritization and wondering what it means for the future.

Dig further in, and you can see the interviews and the tweets of the producer and people who worked on this game and how pretentious they are in what the message is supposed to be from the Quiet Man, and then how far off the actual product ended up being...well it demands a certain level of questioning from everyone.

Some of the environment art and models look fantastic, then the animation and gameplay looks and feels abysmal. My money is on the theory that this was supposed to be a much larger game and needed a ton of work still to flesh it out and Square just decided to ship what they had and call it a loss.

For me, I wouldn't say I hate it, but the producer saying that you are supposed to experience what it is like to be deaf, then their solution was just to remove the sound when clearly the deaf protagonist can understand and speak to the other characters...well it puts a really foul taste in your mouth. I WANT to believe that they wanted to do more to actually see their dream realized, and that Square's management decided to just squeeze this out as it was, but either way it is just confusing all around.

On the one hand, I'm fine with the staff mocking it, in the same way that I'm fine with people mocking The Room. The Room is badly made and tells a bad weird story, and it could've just come and gone, but Tommy Wiseau put just enough marketing out there in the LA area that enough people knew what it was and it gained a cult following and now people watch it to dump on it. The Quiet Man is badly made and tells a bad weird story, and it could've just come and gone, but they inexplicably put it in an E3 presentation as if it warranted the attention and now people want to dump on it.

That being said, some small part of me still wants to believe that the publisher suddenly pushed up The Quiet Man's release date by weeks or months to bury it in the busy November release schedule, before the FMV audio was fully mixed, and that's why the Silent version sucks so bad. It just makes no sense that in the Silent version, that opening scene (from E3) with the hot dog cart and guys in the alleyway has totally normal sound, and then the entire rest of the game doesn't. So the devs can't publicly say "the publisher fucked us", and it would be weird if they released a game with like 60% audio or something, so instead they just stripped all of it out and pretended it was a deliberate decision to release the no-audio version. But for whatever reason, I guess they thought people would be suspicious if the hot dog cart scene had no audio since we have literally heard that audio at E3, so they included audio in just that one scene. Plus, the hot dog scene actually has that good FMV-gameplay transition, and basically no other scene has that level of polish. The gameplay never would've been great, but this change in release date could also explain why the gameplay animations are so buggy and weird if the team expected another few weeks of QA or something. With the new release date, they cut their losses, realized they'd never have the time or budget to properly QA the rest of the game, but gave themselves a week to scramble to mix the rest of the audio so that the final version is slightly more coherent.

Overall, the game just would've been regular bad if it released with the audio track. But releasing the game without the audio track is what shifts it into super bad territory, since it has so many 5+ minute dialogue scenes that are incomprehensible without the audio; it honestly seems like the game was never conceived to tell its story without words. If you were making some kind of silent film or weird arthouse film that deliberately tried to tell its story through visuals only, there is no way your script would include so many silent dialogue scenes where people barely emote. Surely this game had to show the publisher at least some kind of prototype or script or something, and it's hard for me to believe they would get their budget to start making it if the whole concept was utterly stupid without audio.

It's so hard for me to believe the soundless version was ever intentional, and not just the byproduct of some weird business decision to push the game out before it was done.

@bisonhero: I love the optimism here but interviews I've seen with these folks really sound like they think they're on some next level shit.

@efesell: I totally agree with you. I've seen those videos as well. Somehow they forgot they were making a gmae, and games are supposed to be fun.

So I watched a few minutes of the QL, then decided to see what the final intent was by watching a full playthrough of the game with the audio track on (and no commentary from the person playing it).

It's not great. The dialogue is terrible, and there's some serious Oedipal shit going on here. And, uh, gotta love the story that abused kids turn into violent adults. Yep. Fuck that.

It tells a decent mystery story, sure, but the problem with the mystery story is the same problem with BioShock Infinite: the mystery is a thing that the character you're playing would already know the answer to. Say what you will about Fight Club, at least THAT mystery is internally consistent.

I dunno. Having watched it, I think I'm also throwing in my two cents of the soundless version being initially unintentional, and the result of a very bad late-in-production decision.

@efesell: My alternate theory that I can go along with (and some GB staff also proposed) is that at some point in development they realized the game was going to look and play terribly, so months ago (prior to E3) they conceived of this weird release gimmick to intentionally hold back the audio (and story) at time of release. Basically a distraction from the bad gameplay, in the hopes that forums would busy themselves theorizing about what the game is about between release of the soundless version and receiving the version with audio. And that's what all the developer interviews had to really stand behind, as if that was the plan from the start.

There's just no way the script was ever written around the concept of "the player can't hear anything but will be able to intuit character relationships and motivations visually." The way the scenes are written and shot just doesn't support that. But luckily for them the game had a deaf protagonist so they had room to backpedal into this no-audio misguided PR gimmick, as if "no words" is somehow related to their deaf protagonist who speaks numerous times.

My problem with this theory is: why does the opening hot dog cart scene ever have audio? Why show it at E3 with audio, and why give it audio in the soundless version of the game? If they were already committing to this no-sound, incomprehensible-story gimmick, why dangle a tiny bit of irrelevant audio in this one scene at the beginning of the soundless version? If the audio was fully mixed and available, why not sprinkle it into one or two other scenes like the hot dog scene that give no plot-critical information? Why not have the player hear the scenes where the woman plays piano or something?

@bisonhero: I think this is more plausible but I dunno I am fully willing to believe that the makers of this game fell headfirst into the trap of 'No one ever does this so that means if we do it'll be special'.

I'm sure that some point SOMEONE realized why it is that no one has ever done this, but I fully believe this was a totally realized Bad Idea from start to dreadful finish.

The aforementioned interview is something else, by the way.

While I think there may be something to bisonhero's claims, you are right. The tweet from the developer that Jeff read on the After Show was, in my opinion, next level. You could tell that, to him, adding sound via DLC kinda went against his original "artistic" intent.

Y'all are going to feel really bad when it comes out that this game was the first one entirely made by an artificial intelligence and here we all are dumping on it and hurting its feelings. That's how you get Skynet, people!!!

Oh, and the female singer character is named Lala. Get it? Lala. Like singing. She sings. That is just plain lazy writing.

The song at the end of the game sounds like the type of song you'd hear in the end credits of an anime.