The Quiet Collection (Wii U) Second Opinion Review

The Quiet Collection follows four adventures of a little girl who wants… well, quiet. In addition to the original adventure, Quiet, Please, she engages in further adventures for beautiful, beautiful silence on vacation and on Christmas, and then mixes things up in the final adventure to search for candy. It is Halloween though, and even the most reticent of children knows candy triumphs silence one hundred percent of the time. She must deal with loud lawnmowers, crying cats, selfish candy owners, and other loud things on her quest for silence.

The game itself is a throwback to the ultra-retro old school adventure games of yesteryear. The visuals are simple pixelated images that look like they'd be at home on the NES. This isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but some of the artwork here isn't particularly well done, and it is hard to tell what certain objects are without actually going up and investigating them. The kittens could be kittens or mice or maybe a melting letter "x." The sound never really gets more complex than a little beep or boop or a "meow stop trying to put me between w and y, I'm a kitten". This simplicity even extends to the gameplay, where interacting with an object is one button and grabbing it is another. That is the entire instruction manual, right there, in completion.

The simplicity works at times, and The Quiet Collection certainly does a nice job emulating old adventure games. There are a handful of different puzzles to solve in order for the little heroine to get the quiet she so desperately desires, and all can be accomplished by some standard adventure game puzzle-solving mechanics. Perhaps the best aspect is that it doesn't really offer any unnecessary guidance. The girl needs quiet, go out there and figure out how to achieve it. It sort of lends its way into a fairly open experience, and while none of the games are particularly big, essentially everything is open from the get-go. Any specific puzzle can be tackled at any time, and the order the puzzles are solved in is primarily dependent on which ones are figured out first. The open-ended puzzle-solving works well for a simple game like this, and the relatively small size of each game makes it so the aimless wandering that can occur at times never becomes too frustrating.

The simplicity also winds up being the game's greatest weakness, and there simply aren't any worthwhile puzzles to solve along the way. The solutions are almost always painfully easy, with only a couple of exceptions that require a bit of critical thinking. The Halloween adventure is the best at this, and is really the only portion of the title that is large enough to have any level of complexity. Most of the time, as soon as an item is located it becomes painfully obvious what other item to use it on. Each separate game feels like it should be the introductory level to some other, more complex title, and it never gets around to taking the training wheels off. A better assortment of puzzles would have been nice, and without them things just become somewhat boring.

Part of the issue here is only one item can be carried at a time, which is a mechanic the genre evolved past a couple decades ago for good reasons. There doesn't seem to be any logical reason for this, other than to prevent players from just walking around and rubbing their entire inventory on a puzzle until the solution pops into their laps. So, instead, the little girl can only carry one object at a time, meaning there will be multiple instances where it becomes obvious what must be done next, but it can't be accomplished until she goes a couple rooms back and picks up the other object she couldn't carry around in the first place. It's needless backtracking put in for the sake of padding out the gameplay, and running around to pick up the various objects that should've been able to been picked up ten minutes ago isn't a good definition of fun. It also prevents any sort of real item combination puzzles, with one notable exception of constructing a variety of costumes in the Halloween game. It is no surprise that this is the best puzzle in the entire collection, and expanding the inventory could have thoroughly improved upon this otherwise mediocre experience.