From the Archives: Full Quiet
Have fun, buddy!
Notice
I initially wrote this post in 2024 before starting my page. Most of these older posts will not be available for free subscribers, but I’m making an exception for those, like this one, that wound up being ranked in the top 10 of my favorite games from each year.
Full Quiet is the best NES game ever made and my GOTY for 2024.
Full Quiet is an adventure platformer developed by Retrotainment Games as an NES homebrew, but released on Steam and Switch in a slightly expanded engine that allows for more control options and an in-game way to bring up the manual. The game starts in media res with a cutscene of your father-in-law Pap battling his way through hordes of enemies while trying to coordinate with his radio buddies, then fast forwards to Hutch, the protagonist, making his way there to search for his own missing son. You find a note from Pap explaining that the Grid has broken down, unleashing horrors on their lands, and he has gone forward to make repairs. Restore the Grid, and Ohnnah will come!
The game has a similar feel and structure to the first La Mulana – you start the game in a fairly self-contained zone, where you straightforwardly learn what the game expects of you to ‘complete’ an area, and then opens the gates to the wider world that is more complex, interconnected, and obfuscated. Early on you have a lot of pressures, and the layout seems daunting, as a new creature has appeared that will instakill you if you’re out past 2 a.m., and the safehouses that provide shelter for you to rest overnight are as locked-down at the start as most of the regions in general. But as you explore, pick away at new routes, and finally complete your circuit of the game world for the first time, you’ll start to gain more freedom of movement, more awareness of what to look for as you travel, and a little bit more firepower to defend yourself. You do gradually gain some equipment that aids you in progressing, but it’s fairly grounded and all laid out in the manual – rather than the usual double jump, for example, you eventually find a grappling hook launcher that lets you attach ropes to pitons to scale ledges otherwise only navigable in reverse.
The game is laid out in distinct regions, and each one has a signal generator which you must find and sync with the hidden codes locked away in that area, mostly in the form of Morse. You’re aided by Pap’s notes, old radio conversations that filter out of the static as you sync more of the Grid, and a well-designed map and compass that turns what would be a nightmare of three-dimensional navigation in a sidescrolling platformer into a relatively coherent layout. But you’ll still be taking plenty of notes yourself – while the game saves all the notes and transmissions you’ve found for later examination in your menus, this was still a game I had to bust out some pen and paper for.
I mentioned this game is an NES homebrew, and I’d like to take a moment here to underscore just how insane that is. I didn’t actually believe it at first, because the game just plays too well, looks too nice, has too many features, and frankly lacks even the tiniest bit of jank. The movement and controls in general feel tight, the map, the codec call style portraits, and the sprite and background art are incredible, the amount of detail poured into almost every single path is breathtaking. Even the orientation of long screens are taken into account, with some east-west passages giving a gorgeous parallax view of the distant mountains, for example, and other paths giving you glimpses of the layout of nearby regions.
The day-night cycle exerts pressure on you to wrap up explorations and loop back to safety, and is immediately visible when outside as the yellow glow of sunset transitions to the darkness of the evening. But it is, in fact, primarily an NES homebrew, even releasing on cartridges and presumably playable on real hardware – I tracked down a ROM just to see how much was tweaked or added for the PC release, and to my surprise, once I ran it on a sufficiently accurate emulator, it seems like it’s hardly compromised at all. Really the only downside to playing it on NES would be the lack of shortcuts for crouching and manual reloading, but both are still possible on the NES. Oh, and the price being several times higher for a physical cartridge.
The movement and combat both feel extremely good, and fitting in a way that is rare in this format of game. There’s a bit of a learning curve with how the grappling and swinging work, but once you get some practice in, it all starts to feel incredibly tactical. Dodge rolling past a swooping beast, hopping over another and squeezing off three rounds into its back before slapping another magazine into your pistol – it doesn’t sound like I’m describing an NES game, and it even feels too good to be true. Like I mentioned before, you do get a wider arsenal, but all weapons except the pistol have smartly limited ammo, restocked at safe houses [if you invest fuses to repair the resupply generators] and so instead of trivializing the game or obsoleting the pistol, they really just give you more options and a way to power through gauntlets too daunting for just the pistol. Even the manual is a treat – designed like a hand-drawn field guide, it provides notes on enemies, equipment, and mechanics as well as a little backstory and sketches. All of the critical information is also found through in-game notes and transmissions, but it’s still a really nice touch.
With all that glowing, I have only one small technical caveat to point out – the game is designed to run at a steady 60 FPS, but the application will actually lock to your monitor’s refresh rate, meaning if you have a high hz display you’ll need to manually lock the game to 60 or it’ll run uncontrollably fast.
Full Quiet is an absolute gem of a game, and worth every dime of its full price despite being trivial to pirate. It’s a better follow-up to La Mulana than La Mulana 2 was, and even has better pacing and technical competency than the original. This isn’t just the best NES game I’ve ever played, it’s a great game period. If you want to learn how Pap and his crew stalled out an alien invasion with just ham radios and handguns, grab Full Quiet as soon as you can.
Afterward
Full Quiet was the first game I finished in 2024, and in spite of my enthusiastic appraisal, did not end up being my top pick at the end of the year. It was second.
Full Quiet can be purchased on Steam, Switch, or on a physical NES cartridge.