Thanks to 8-Bit Legit for the review code

Title: Full Quiet
System: Xbox One/Series X
Price: $9.99
Release Date: 07/06/2023

---

Story

In this metroidvania adventure from the NES, you take control of an explorer who sets out to investigate the disappearance of their relative, and to repair a camp site suffering unusual damages. The further you explore, the more weird everything gets, revealing what happened to your Pap wasn’t just an ordinary trip for supplies…

Full Quiet touts itself as a more open-world game, and right off the bat this game is pretty impressive for the NES based off the sheer scope of its game world; this one will definitely take a long while for you to clear if you’re up for it, and for better or worse it does drop a lot of cryptic hints and other things for you to piece together in order to progress and make it to the next save point.

Presentation

This is another NES port via 8-Bit Legit, and just like most of their prior NES ports, this comes in a pretty barebones wrapper. No screen size options, and only a few borders to pick from. You get reminded every few minutes that LB/RB open said menu, which is annoying and I wish that reminder was able to be disabled outright. There’s a manual scan included yet again, though Full Quiet’s manual is a little unusual and is written a lot like a real travel journal, which is a cool touch for providing a link to the in-game world, but not so helpful with actually teaching you the game mechanics all that well.

There’s also a page for you to write down notes for the Morse Code clues the game will provide every now and again, but since this ain’t a physical manual and this digital manual won’t let you write in it, you’ll have to write them down the old fashioned way in the real world. There’s even an extra sheet of gameplay tips included, which is more helpful at getting you started here than the actual manual.

For how the game itself looks, Full Quiet is decent. The sprites are OK and the backgrounds get the job done, and it even tries to do a lot of cool things such as multi-layered scrolling, albeit in a very messy fashion. The UI for elements such as the pause HUD and minigames give off a neat retro-LCD vibe, which is pretty funny when you consider how this game was meant for systems that work with TV displays equally as old as the sort of portable gear featured in the game.

Still, there were visual aspects that I wasn’t as fond of. One time I was climbing down a set of cliffs, and what appeared to be a slimmer part of the geometry I could land on was actually part of the background, leading to a few frustrating deaths. Some areas have multiple layers to them, and it’s not always clear what you can walk on or when you have to push down or up to move to another screen. Even if you follow what you think is a normal straight path, sometimes it just actually takes you around in a loop or a different direction, so making use of that map is essential. I kinda wish there was a bit more detail to these spots as a result, since the depth perception can really hinders some of these screens.

Some areas just have ambient sound, but the few times you’ll hear music I found it rather forgettable. Still, considering the lost in nature aspect the devs went for, I think the overall audio design works just fine here.

Gameplay

In Full Quiet, this is a Metroidvania where your main objective is to investigate the strange camp and work your way further into it. Being that this was a NES game originally, it may initially seem odd that the four face buttons all do different things, along with the RT button being used to lock your character in place; did the devs add some crazy six button magic to their NES emulator? You have a shot, jump, and roll

Well, not really, since a lot of these are shortcut macros, and better executed than I’d typically expect from a package like this. Normally the X button would be used for shooting, A is your typical jump, and B is your dodge roll, but double tapping up on the D-Pad would refill your ammunition (though this automatically refills when you run out and you have infinite ammo of your normal gun anyway) and double tapping down locks you in a crouching position which allows you to fire in eight directions without moving. Here on xbox, the refill command is mapped to Y, while RT lets you do the crouching lock, and I found those much easier to pull those off via the shortcuts than frantically tapping the D-Pad.

In fact, more often than not I’d pull off the crouch lock on accident while trying to shoot straight ahead at an enemy while crouching, only to get myself stuck in the lock doing so in a panic, so the ease of use for these shortcuts are much appreciated; I was also worried using the shortcuts while trying to climb an object or grab onto a ledge would just make you go down or up, but thankfully the shortcuts don’t cause you to change movement direction while using them, which is another plus. Overall I liked the control scheme, but I still wish there were options to freely remap the buttons as you pleased, since you can’t change the button layout.

Making your way from objective to objective requires that you act very, very carefully every step of the way, instead of just mashing the shoot button at the first thing you see. Yes, you have infinite ammunition, but those brief pauses when reloading can be enough to get you seriously hurt if it happens while fighting off a swarm of enemies. The dodge roll is an absolute lifesaver when these tricky situations come into play, but annoyingly it relies on a stamina wheel, meaning that if you use it too much in succession you’ll have to wait for it to refill, so likewise you can’t just abuse that either.

Still, solid controls, (no bothersome input lag I could notice here in this port) made it so I was able to get the gist of this game starting out, but soon enough I would realize this game has a lot of nasty tricks that it would pull at you, and not all of them are particularly fair or fun to deal with. For starters, when it turns to night everything becomes tougher and access to certain areas gets closed off. Thus, like in Castlevania II you’ll have to fight your way out of tough situations or wait until morning in order to make it out alive.

The save points are rather rare; you’ll either be doing tons of backtracking after getting something done, (if such a thing is even possible, as some areas aren’t so easy to backtrack to!) or working your way to the next one slowly but surely. Even if you think you’re careful and know the way around, you may end up in a situation where you have to fling yourself from platform to platform, do a tricky dodge roll to land on a platform below you without taking fall damage, or go past temporary points of no return with no way to head back to stock up on supplies or resources.

You can find the occasional healing item like a medipak or energy bar to use from the pause menu, but these are so sparse they’re basically last resort items; a neat way to encourage careful resource management, but not so fun to deal with when there are several spots where the game can just instantly kill you if you mistime a jump or roll, and when the path from one save point to the next can be rather long, (especially if you take your time to avoid unnecessary damage, since a lot of enemies will punish you for hastily going at them) nothing is more infuriating than perfectly avoiding damage for a long period of time only to fuck up a jump and die from fall damage, or die because a platform you didn’t know was below you was what you needed to land on the entire time. Looking around by staying still and holding down on the D-Pad is almost essential to avoiding these situations, but even this doesn’t always help.

But oh god, the most stupid, absolutely worthless, and infuriating part of the entire game (and the biggest difficulty spike for me personally) are these power repair minigames where you need to rewire a powerbox to unlock electronic doors. This shifts the gameplay into one of those silly pipe-linking games you might remember from being a kid, and if you fail the minigame, you take a decent chunk of damage. Fail on low health, and that’s a death sending you back to the last save point.

Yes, failing a genre shift can kill you. No, these minigames aren’t always fair, especially at first when you fumble around and don’t realize aspects to them that make it a lot easier. For starters, you aren’t stuck with a piece placed on a tile, since you can just overlay another piece on top of it to reroute it as needed. You can also rotate these tiles with the press of a button, which is very helpful when dealing with the curved pipes. Still, even if you get the hang of this, there are other nuisances out to get you in this minigame, such as the board randomly breaking apart, (and needing a repair if you have the tools to repair a damaged tile) and an invisible time limit that will also damage you if you fail to complete the pipe puzzle in time.

Needless to say, this one aspect of the game was enough to seriously sour my enjoyment of it. The limited resources I understoof, even if they were annoying to deal with. The meticulous movements required to make it to the next save location alive, I could get and I even found to be a pretty neat way to encourage taking it slow and memorizing the routes rather than just being reckless. The stupid blind jumps at points, while dumb, at least were memorizable and satisfying to pull off after failing at them several times. But this minigame with an invisible timer? Nah, it’s really, really, really bad, and even once you know the tricks to make it a whole lot easier, it just comes off as a very unfun, terrible way to pad out the experience and throw an irritating “gotcha” at the player.

When I finally cleared the first of these on the skin of my teeth after playing for 22 minutes without saving, I didn’t feel like a genius or badass, I just felt like I had really dumb luck. When I hit the next one after solving some morse code riddles, taking my time going to the next area and barely making it to the repair box with next to no health after another of several failed 20 minute treks, then died because the tiles I needed for the stupid minigame didn’t come in time, I was done with Full Quiet. And that’s a shame, considering the pretty decent parts leading up to and after those segments.

Conclusion

Look, I can absolutely appreciate ambition in a game, especially when it does something that most games on a console normally would not do. But sometimes there’s such a thing as too much ambition, and Full Quiet absolutely falls under that. Considering this wrapper is still incredibly basic as well, it also is rather disappointing the only sort of QOL this port got was some button shortcuts, with not even the ability to remap buttons being an option here. You really have to play it raw, and playing Full Quiet raw can range from satisfaction at memorizing a route to sheer frustration at stupid minigames or day shifting to night.

On one hand you have a pretty expansive world with some cool ideas and neat interconnected routes, but on the other you have old school difficulty (of the bad variety) with occasional blind jumps and trial & error, absolutely bullshit minigames, long gaps between save points and just all around a very ambitious and admirable effort bogged down by stubbornly throwing in cryptic stuff or sudden difficult obstacles that do no good.

When I end up losing a 20 minute gameplay session due to a lame grid minigame that completely shifts the genre, barely explains itself to you, and is mandatory to unlock the next save spot, that sin alone makes me want to never touch this game ever again. And honestly, considering how much I really tried to get at this game and progress over a period of a few months of off and on weekend play, only to fail due to said minigame again and again, I really feel like this game was made by someone with very good ambitions who wanted to pay tribute to the classics that made you take notes and carefully map your next route to a save point, only for them to get a little bit carried away on making the game more frustrating than satisfying to conquer.

If you’re up for a challenge and some bullshit every now and then, this game will still keep you pretty busy for quite a while and still has moments of fun to be had; just be prepared to go “Oh for crying out loud!!!” several times while doing so until you get it right.

I give Full Quiet a 5 out of 10.