"Art House" Video Games

[Giggling Ghast]

For gits and shiggles, I’d like to mention a game whose creators thought was a bold artistic statement but was actually unplayable garbage: The Quiet Man.

The Quiet Man was a 2018 beat ‘em up put out by Square Enix about a deaf man who basically serves as a mob enforcer. It alternated between live action scenes with human actors and stages where you beat up waves of ethnically-diverse gang members. (Being kinda racist was the most mild of its sins, however.) There was some nonsense thrown into the plot about a dead mother, an abusive father, a fake kidnapping and a bird mask that inexplicably grants the protagonist super powers (despite this being an otherwise mundane setting).

While the fighting mechanics were terrible, what made The Quiet Man stand out was that for 95 per cent of your first playthrough, all sound was muted and there were no subtitles, ostensibly to put you in the shoes of the protagonist. That means you have to finish the game at least once before you have any idea what the hell is actually going on. (And even when the sound was turned on, the plot was at best mediocre.)

For good reason, it topped a lot of Worst of 2018 lists. Now it serves as a reminder that a game being “artistic” isn’t necessarily the same as being good.