- Joined
- Feb 13, 2022
"Games are art!" People say. Unfortunately that also gives way into praising absolute dreck with messages and themes that tickles the prostates of journalists and internet personalities alike just for the messaging alone and not anything else good like gameplay value or what have you.
And what better way to showcase a game so far up its own ass it suffocated in its own farts than with The Quiet Man.
The gameplay is boring as is, a simple beat-em-up style loop with graphics that look like a college student's first project in Unreal Engine. The story is a complete mess that you're guaranteed not going to understand because well... the game is completely silent. No music, no sound effects, nothing. And this is because the main protagonist of this game, Dane, is completely deaf. And to try and simulate what it's like to be a deaf person the game doesn't give you a single iota of audio after the first cutscene in game. But what sends this game into pure hilarity over its own messaging is that... Dane does not act like a deaf person at all. He doesn't use sign language, he doesn't sound like a deaf person (yknow kinda retarded), the only way for him to understand people is through lip reading alone and even then the game doesn't stay consistent with those rules in place in certain cutscenes where it would be hard for Dane to understand what they are saying. He's just a normal guy playing as someone who pretends to not hear sounds.
But don't worry! This game does have a Sound Mode option once you beat the game the first time. And when you do enable it, the story still sucks ass and you're probably still not gonna fully understand it. It all has to do with Dane getting into a quarrel with his friend Taye and another kid named Isaac when they were younger, Dane's mother gets shot by one of the kids because they had a gun, Dane's father places the blame squarely on Dane for some fucking reason (he's still deaf btw, he's been deaf since birth so his father might as well be talking to a brickwall). Fast forward to the future, Taye and Isaac are now mob bosses who are rivals against each other and Dane meets up with Taye's girlfriend Lala (that looks like his mother for some reason) and has to try and rescue her from her stalker/kidnapper who curiously enough is hinted as being this Bird Man who looks exactly like Dane's drawings when he was younger. As it turns out, Lala's kidnapping was all orchestrated by Dane's father and the two of them battle it out with Dane having Bird Man powers now (again unexplained) that results in Taye, Lala and a few other notable characters dying in the process that leaves Dane and his Father being cool with each other now in the end I guess. The whole story is stupidly convoluted and dumb as shit, but what makes Sound Mode even more ludicrously offensive (besides creating the most artificial way of encouraging replayability) is that Sound Mode wasn't even added to the game until AFTER it was released. They really wanted you to feel like you're playing a deaf person for the first few weeks that this game came out when the way it "represents" deaf people could not be farther from the truth.
I'm not deaf but if I was, I'd probably laugh even harder knowing how much they completely missed the mark over how a deaf person should act like. But if I was a bit more sensitive and thin skinned, I'd probably cry on twitter over how this game is ableist and doesn't represent deaf people at all or some shit.
So yeah, any other games whose premise is all about huffing their own farts over how intellectually "Deep" and "Meaningful" it is?
And what better way to showcase a game so far up its own ass it suffocated in its own farts than with The Quiet Man.
But don't worry! This game does have a Sound Mode option once you beat the game the first time. And when you do enable it, the story still sucks ass and you're probably still not gonna fully understand it. It all has to do with Dane getting into a quarrel with his friend Taye and another kid named Isaac when they were younger, Dane's mother gets shot by one of the kids because they had a gun, Dane's father places the blame squarely on Dane for some fucking reason (he's still deaf btw, he's been deaf since birth so his father might as well be talking to a brickwall). Fast forward to the future, Taye and Isaac are now mob bosses who are rivals against each other and Dane meets up with Taye's girlfriend Lala (that looks like his mother for some reason) and has to try and rescue her from her stalker/kidnapper who curiously enough is hinted as being this Bird Man who looks exactly like Dane's drawings when he was younger. As it turns out, Lala's kidnapping was all orchestrated by Dane's father and the two of them battle it out with Dane having Bird Man powers now (again unexplained) that results in Taye, Lala and a few other notable characters dying in the process that leaves Dane and his Father being cool with each other now in the end I guess. The whole story is stupidly convoluted and dumb as shit, but what makes Sound Mode even more ludicrously offensive (besides creating the most artificial way of encouraging replayability) is that Sound Mode wasn't even added to the game until AFTER it was released. They really wanted you to feel like you're playing a deaf person for the first few weeks that this game came out when the way it "represents" deaf people could not be farther from the truth.
I'm not deaf but if I was, I'd probably laugh even harder knowing how much they completely missed the mark over how a deaf person should act like. But if I was a bit more sensitive and thin skinned, I'd probably cry on twitter over how this game is ableist and doesn't represent deaf people at all or some shit.
So yeah, any other games whose premise is all about huffing their own farts over how intellectually "Deep" and "Meaningful" it is?
