Quiet, Please!

Quiet, Please! is pretty much a point and clicker set in 2D side-scrolling frame.  I’ve been lambasting the genre for a few weeks now, making it clear that I hate these games.  Quiet, Please! is better than most because it doesn’t use static screens and it feels like you’re actually doing stuff.  I will say that it makes me wonder if I’m starting to hate the genre because of what it’s doing to me.  Psychologically.

As I pointed out in my Without Escape review, these games usually involve a degree of logic so unglued that it’s probably dangerous to speak of it in the presence of others.  Following my play-through of Quiet, I’m now certain these games also rewire your brain.  The basic idea is you’re a girl who wants silence in her house so she can get some sleep, forcing you to figure out ways to shut off anything making noise.  The actual ways this is accomplished are as sane and valid as any P’n’C title I’ve come across.  However, the ways I hypothesized I would do it are probably enough to get me sectioned.

For example, you have a brother who chases you around and won’t stop bugging you.  I don’t have any siblings, so I can’t relate.  Among the items in the house are a remote control car and a comic book, both of which he seemed to be drawn to.  The game begins with you being dropped off on the sidewalk.  If there’s a sidewalk, there must be a street.  If there’s a street, there are moving cars.  So I theorized that I would use the remote control car to lure my brother onto the busy street, thus killing him, or at least maiming him into silence.

I wish I was making that up.

Hey little bro, do you want to go play with the big zoom zooms?

Oh come on, don’t look at me like that.  The first thing you do is distract your mother by plying her with wine.  I figured if that was copacetic, why wouldn’t splattering your brother be justifiable?  It still doesn’t excuse a later moment in Quiet, Please where you have to pacify three noisy kittens.  At the same time, there’s a neighbor who has a lawnmower going all day and all night.  I turned to Brian and plainly, calmly, and completely seriously said what is perhaps the worst sentence uttered out loud since the fall of Nazi Germany.  “I probably need to get him to run over the kittens with the lawnmower.”  And I meant every word of it.

As it turns out, you can deal with the kittens by giving them a ball of yarn, and the lawnmower thing is also handled in a rational (albeit totally illegal) way as well.  This is what playing these games has done to me.  I’ve gone from being grounded in reality to dealing with problems in the most roundabout way possible.  In a way, I should thank Quiet, Please! because it’s one of the first games that you deal with problems the way they should be dealt with.  Lull your brother to sleep with comic books and clean pajamas.  No murder.  Huh, makes sense.

So I won't silence Daddy by smothering him with a pillow? Huh. Weird game.

So how is the actual game?  Well, it plays well enough and it’s a nice change of pace from how this type of crap is usually presented.  It only takes about thirty minutes to finish, if that, so you don’t have to clear your schedule or anything.  I guess I’m squeezing out a mild recommendation on it.  If nothing else, it won’t cause any further damage to your psyche.  It also won’t undo any damage already caused by point and click games, so if your first instinct when handed an object is to do something insane with it, sorry, you’re stuck that way.  There is no turning back.  Just do what I did and find someone like Brian to follow you around and remind you that if you pick up a stick, do with it things sticks are usually used for.  Apparently, this does not include waking up your friends by sticking it up their peeholes.

The name of the game is School? That doesn't sound very fun. Oh wait..

Quiet, Please was developed by Nostatic Software

80 Microsoft Points have a boyfriend have who is saying “that’s just wrong” at the moment this is being typed in the making of this review.  “You wouldn’t actually do that, would you?”  Christ, I don’t even know anymore. 

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