Square Enix introduced The Quiet Man with what may have been (and, in hindsight, I'm quite confident was) the worst trailer of E3: A man enters an alley, kicks some ass, and leaves a bag on a guy's face. Why? We did not know. But now, thanks to a live reveal event that took place yesterday, we have a slightly better idea of what's going on.
(The gameplay, if you want to get straight to it, starts around 39:30.)
It turns out that the quiet man beat up the alley men because the hot dog man told him to. And then he beat up some other guys, stole a briefcase filled with drugs, delivered it to his crime kingpin friend, had a flashback to the day his mother died, beat up some more guys, I skipped a bunch of stuff, and then watched helplessly as someone who may or may not be his girlfriend was kidnapped by some mysterious thugs.
If that sounds confusing, it's because the game's volume is turned down so that the three event hosts can talk about what's happening, and they're speaking Japanese. And the on-screen action is not exactly straightforward, either: The game flips seamlessly between live-action and gameplay, and the live-action bits really drag on. The briefcase-full-of-drugs delivery scene runs a full ten minutes in length.
Fortunately, Game Informer translated some of the high points: The Quiet Man will be roughly three hours in length and will be priced accordingly, although a specific number wasn't given; the lead character, a deaf man named Dane, is a martial arts superguy who's on the hunt for a kidnapped dancer; his mom was killed by a banger and all these years later he's still not dealing with it very well; and the mix of live-action and gameplay will run through the entire game.
Acknowledging that I'm not seeing the game in its proper context, I can't say that this new, extended look at The Quiet Man does anything more for me than the E3 trailer. The gameplay looks stilted and clunky, and the live-action bits have all the dramatic gravitas of a Tex Murphy joint. Hopefully Square Enix will come across with something more accessible to English-speaking audiences soon.
The Quiet Man is listed on Steam, but no release date has been set.
