The NES is known for many things. The games are historically difficult to artificially inject longevity, the mechanics are generally extremely limited due to a controller that has fewer buttons than a landline telephone, and it’s one of the few systems where it’s actually a viable troubleshooting step to blow into the cartridge and system. It was my first major system growing up and one that never fails to send me into a deep spiral of nostalgia, even when I am playing a modern game released in the same style. Full Quiet is no exception, and even manages to add some elements that my small child brain would not have been able to handle as a youth.

It’s a basic yet deep game that follows a man searching for his lost son while repairing radio relays left behind by his grandfather and ham radio pals. A story is present and a little larger in scale compared to other NES releases, but easy enough to follow. With elements of traditional 8-bit shooting, survival/resource management, a fully functioning day and night cycle, and a heavy emphasis on puzzles, there’s a lot going on and the title delivers all of them in a way where every moving piece works together and nothing feels tacked on, or as if more attention was given to certain mechanics over others. I never imagined playing the hacking puzzles in the vein of Bioshock on an NES, but here we are, and the results were impressive.

Most of the game is spent expanding the map and reactivating radio beacons, which clearly communicate where your goals are but don’t come out and tell you exactly how to achieve them; sometimes at a fault. There are a lot of little nuances gained from using multiple commands at once – some are explained within the in-game menus while others are a little more trial and error, but once it clicks, it all comes together for one of the most entertaining modern-retro games I have played in quite some time. Unfortunately, the one-page cheat sheet doesn’t really convey the most important aspects in my opinion, but I also only managed to read about half of them thanks to the font size being set somewhere between a single grain of rice and a small ant. Even my son who went along on this adventure commented on how difficult it was to read with his young, near-perfect vision.

The game clearly tells you that nighttime is not the best time to be out and about, because that’s when the real terrors come out to play. Outside of the backdrops changing from day to night, there are no timers or hurry-your-ass-up tones in place, which was a nice change compared to the likes of the early Super Mario Bros. games. Of course, curiosity got the best of me and I insisted on messing around to find out and can confirm that you really don’t want to run into the ultra-difficult monsters that stalk the night.

The one area I really struggled with in terms of actually playing the game was the inventory, which by default I wanted to press a face button to exit but would end up wasting items in the process since it requires you to press the menu button. It was a nice touch, but a single dedicated use button would’ve been a better route to take. Outside of this, my only valid complaints are a few significant bugs, such as soft locking into one of those annoying enemy types that linger up high waiting for you to pass underneath so they can scoop you up and have their way with you. I also ran into a situation where a door closed on me, but instead of pushing me off to the side with a chunk of my health bar taken away, it wedged me permanently between the ceiling or floor and the door with resetting being my only recourse. This also happened a single time when I was stuck in one of the segments where the screen would scroll across as I entered a new area, leaving my character hanging out in a pitch-black version of limbo where the sides of the screen would flicker. If anyone knows how to go about blowing into a digital game to clear those up, I am all ears.

These bugs caused me to lose progress more than I’d care to admit, and despite there being a save option, it’s one that you’re going to have to backtrack to regularly to avoid the night cycle. This made repeating the same areas tiresome rather quickly, especially when I’d crash in one way or another in the same general area and have to backtrack again when the game didn’t call for it.

I wasn’t a huge fan of how the enemies respawn, as I was expecting the standard rule of once the screen loads a new area, I’d get fresh enemies and that would be that. In the case of this game, it’s every time you do anything that takes you out of the main space. So if you come into a room with some monsters and a puzzle, once you enter the puzzle and either pass or fail, they’ll be right back in the same room ready to inflict massive damage on you. Luckily ammo is infinite and outside of having to reload, you never have to stop firing away at the creatures that during the day don’t put up much of a fight.

In terms of the presentation, you’re getting what you’d expect from a game released in the late 80s or early 90s; nothing more and nothing less. I rarely ran into an issue where the enemies or assets bled into the world, a pitfall many NES-style games fall into. From the modern front, the title is lacking the bells and whistles many purists look for, such as the different filters and scan line options. You can change the panels around the 4:3 aspect ratio and that’s as far as the customization goes. This didn’t make or break it for me, but I know it will be a pain point for others.

Full Quiet is a game I can recommend to any retro-enthusiast who wants something familiar yet different at the cost of some of the customization options these newer entries are known for, but beware that some bugs are present.

8 out of 10

Pros

• An Authentic NES Survival Experience
• Solid Puzzles
• Inventory Management that Doesn’t Completely Suck
• The Day/Night Cycle

Cons

• Some Mechanics Are Not Clear Initially
• Frequent Backtracking
• Some Bugs Make Backtracking Even Worse
• No Place to Blow Into in the Digital Release

Full Quiet was developed by Retrotainment and published by 8-bit Legit. It is available on NES, NS, PC, X1, and XSX. The game was provided to us for review on XSX. If you’d like to see more of Full Quiet, check out the official site.

 

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