It’s hard to know where to start with this misbegotten game, a short interactive drama with a deaf protagonist and live-action sequences that succeeds only in replicating the experience of flicking between the Starz channel and a substandard PS2 brawler with the TV on mute. It is a terrible idea, poorly executed, which is insulting to the hard of hearing as well as the time of everyone who plays it.
The Quiet Man tells the story of Dane, a moody young deaf man with a biker jacket, because he is tough, and a curtain of emo hair, because he is tortured. (Or perhaps because it’s the same hairstyle sported by the Square Enix producer, Kensei Fujinaga, whose brainchild this game is.) He maybe works for a local crime lord; at any rate, he spends his time beating up ludicrously attired gangsters in alleyways and delivering briefcases full of drugs to a slick operator called Taye. When he was a child he witnessed the shooting of a woman who was probably his mother, and this made him very angry. He seems to blame another crime boss for the woman’s death. There is also a woman who looks identical to his mother, but seems to be a different person. She’s a singer a local nightclub, and is possibly Taye’s girlfriend, though everyone is weird about this. Dane spends a lot of time staring beatifically at her until she is kidnapped by a man in a bird mask and a hooded cape, abetted by the gangsters in silly clothes. This uncocks his fountain of adolescent rage and he sets off to find out what happened to his apparent Oedipal crush. For some reason that’s hard to pin down, this makes Taye very angry, too.
If I am unreasonably vague on the details of this very simple plot, it’s because The Quiet Man, in supposed empathy with its lead character, plays out near-soundlessly, so you can’t hear any of the dialogue in what is an extremely dialogue-heavy two-to-three hours. There are moody musical cues, and you hear a muffled, distant chiming sound when characters speak. Dane’s physical sense of the world is rendered more forcefully, with taps and booming thuds replicating a touch on the shoulder, a footstep, a punch.
Source: Eurogamer The Quiet Man review – a juvenile, incompetent embarrassment