In a gaming landscape where sensory overload is everywhere, The Quiet Man offers something quite different and unexpected. The bold choice to mute out nearly all sound effectively adds mystery and tension. But Dane’s story is brief and not especially original, and the combat becomes repetitive very quickly, making this movie/game hybrid difficult to recommend as something you’d want to experience as a whole.

As a stylistic experiment The Quiet Man is quite courageous, as a game in terms of execution an absolute flop.

Trying something new doesn’t mean you’re necessarily doing something good. Behold The Quiet Man, who dares concern the topic of mutism. But despite its neo-noir atmosphere, The Quiet Man fails to draw attention.

The Quiet Man is a disaster. Period.

Yes, The Quiet Man is the most baffling release of 2018.

The Quiet Man is nothing short of a shoddy, broken, incomplete, tonally-deaf chore of a few hours. Even some of the worst releases this year alone could, arguably, be deemed more ambitious and more focal to their aims (regardless of the end product/direction), but The Quiet Man doesn’t even rustle up the effort to at least try and explore its prime concept of a deaf protagonist. Worse, it doesn’t respect the players’ very presence and instead strips most of its reasoning and room for exposition away, leaving us with some of the most indulgent and confusing storytelling you’re likely to bear witness to.

It's a spectacular disaster, which feels like a rarity these days: there are lots of bad games, but for a game that was announced at E3 and made by a major publisher and studio to be this catastrophic is something.