Square Enix has released a Quiet Man Accolades Trailer and it’s brilliant. Rather than focusing on the minority of positive reviews for the game, it instead embraces the terrible reception a host of quotations pulled from media reviews and user reviews. The Quiet Man launched earlier this year before introducing a bizarre update that let you play through with sound.
The trailer follows the usual rules of most accolade trailers, with some dramatic music playing over some snippets of gameplay. It’s not until the first quotation, that describes the game as, “Inexplicable,” shows that the trailer will be something special. Things only get better from there, with the trailer quoting The Quiet Man being a “Catastrophic Failure,” user reviews calling the ga,e the “Worst Joke of the Century.” It’s a brilliant twist on the conventional accolade trailers we’ve come to expect this year, and it’s great to see Square poking a bit of fun at itself.
We do see a handful of positive comments for the game towards the end of the trailer, with one user review quoted as saying “Sorry I called it trash,” while another user claims the game’s “concepts are phenomenal and innovative.” Which is, well, technically true.
The Quiet Man released back in November and it’s still not entirely clear whether the whole game is a joke or not. The game played out over segments of brilliantly melodramatic live-action cutscenes, complete with fairly offensive stereotypes, a mask-wearing criminal, and a non-sensical romance plot. Basically, it was the FMV game we all wanted.
For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Square later introduced an update for The Quiet Man that let players play through the game – which stars a deaf man – with game sounds and voices being audible. Granted the sound-filled playthrough was limited to the game’s New Game Plus mode but considering the accolades the games boasts in the trailer, the New Game Plus probably wasn’t given too much attention.
