Disclaimer
The copy of the game used in this review was provided for free by PlayStation, at no cost to the reviewer.
I opted to utilise no sighted assistance to see how far I could get with this game, partially because it can be an interesting experiment but also because this is a PS5 game. With the console currently having no way to utilise CoPilot-like functionality with the DualSense and gain the full range of features (including adaptive triggers and haptic feedback), this seemed like a reasonable way to start examining this game.
First boot
On first boot, I was met by a rather loud Sony logo, then a rather relaxing audioscape, which I thought would probably be the title screen. With no narration and garbbled Optical Character Recognition (OCR), I had no choice but to press a button to see what might happen.
Pressing X produced a very satisfying sound effect at a reasonable volume, leading into an autosave information dialogue box. Pressing X again to dismiss this produced the following:
Select Game Difficulty
Choose the difficulty level at which the game will be played.
This can be changed at any time via the Options Menu.
Very Easy
Hard
Very Hard
Recommended for those who have some familiarity with action games. Strikes a balance between
challenging gameplay and ability to enjoy the story.
There is, in fact, both easy and normal difficulties nestled within this, but the tooltips are understandable enough that you can estimate what difficulty you’re choosing. Of course, this is no substitute for menu narration. The menu also wraps here, meaning that you can’t just scroll to the bottom or top to pick the easiest or hardest difficulty either.
Selecting what I understood to be very easy, then confirming that selection with a second informational pop-up (where I had to press right then X to confirm), reassuring me that I could change my difficulty at any time through the options menu, I wasn’t sure what to expect. This is partly because I’d only seen small amounts of gameplay from the original PS4 release, but also because I’d not seen anything about accessibility options presented to me directly.
I didn’t have to wait long, however, as on the next screen I was presented with the ability to change the text size, should I so desire. The information on this screen also gave me pause for thought, as it said about settings being accessible from the title screen, which from the limited information OCR had given me, I did not know to tbe the case.
Pressing X to confirm the default text size catapulted me into a dialogue about additional content (which came as part of my copy of the game), though thankfully this was readable as well. A few more of these screens followed, also ledgable to a screen reader. Gamers without sight shouldn’t have to use OCR at allreally, but knowing that dialogues like this are readable to an extent can definitely take strain of those assisting players via CoPilot for instance.
All this falls apart though when, after adjusting screen brightness (or in my case leaving it set to default), I encountered a screen where I needed to enter information. With this screen not being narrated and OCR not being able to provide further information either, I was forced to get sighted assistance.
“only very mildly challenging. allowing almost anyone to make it to the end of the story.”