Quiet, Please! (Nintendo 3DS) Review

Quiet, Please stars a little girl who, as one might easily deduce, would like everyone to shut up. Her dad is listening to the television rather loudly, her mom is gabbing on the phone, and her little brother is, like many little brothers, doing his best backpack impression and following her where ever she goes. Oh, what can she possibly do?

The star of this game, in reality, is how ridiculous it is. Players should expect to shake their head several times as this little girl goes to great lengths to shut up all the noise in her house. Some of these lengths are downright insane, and require a great degree of property damage. It's all pretty funny, and the game is rather short. This means that the humour doesn't have time to grow stale as you proceed.

In general, this functions as a standard point and click adventure. The player will need to grab items, occasionally mixing them, in order to achieve their goals. As each family member requires a certain something special to get them to keep quiet, there is experimentation involved in order to figure out exactly how to hush them. Fortunately, the solutions don't really feel arbitrary, and due to the limited amount of goals and items, everything serves its purpose just fine.

The big issue here is the controls. There are plenty of times where items are so close to each other, they inevitably aren't selectable. Placing, say, a steak, a lamp, and a light near one another may make it impossible to pick one, or worse, any of them up. This example is purposefully silly, but there are plenty of times where the player will be stuck trying to perform one interaction, only to find themselves mashing the interact button till it finally works properly. There are also times when scripted events don't work correctly. The only solution is to restart the game, because something that was supposed to happen simply won't. Add in the fact that only one item can be held at a time, and a lot of the length just comes from having to drop things, go grab others, then return.

Besides the main game, there are also two additional adventures for this girl to play the buzzkill in. One is a Christmas themed version, which feels like a lot more of the main game, and the other one sees the family go on vacation. These feel more like additional chapters than other games. They are also equally short, and while on a first playthrough, any of these could be stretched longer, all in all you could feasibly finish all three in under an hour.