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A heads up in advance. Today’s episode of Access-Ability focuses on a video game with basically zero visual elements. As a result, there’s very few screenshots I can include in this review.
The Vale: Shadow of the Crown originally released back in August 2021 on PC and Xbox, and finally made its way to PlayStation and Nintendo Switch this past week.
The game is a first person perspective fantasy adventure game where players control Alex, a blind princess who finds herself stranded far from home, as war begins to break out across her kingdom.
The game features basically zero visuals, and is playable entirely via text to speech narration of menu text and binaural stereo panned audio. While there is a title screen visible on first boot, and the pause menu does display visible menu text, all highlighted menu options are read out loud via mandatory audio description to the player. Sighted players will see floating dots on screen which shift in colour and position as you move, but provide no additional gameplay insights during the adventure.
During gameplay, players control Alex in first person as she navigates the world via audio cues. An early example of a non combat gameplay sequence might include attempting to find a character who is hanging out near a water wheel, by rotating your perspective until the sounds of running water and a squeaky wheel seem to be in front of you, then walking forward, tweaking your direction as you approach.
In combat, player perspective becomes fixed, with enemies walking around to either stand to your left, right, or in front of you, before audibly telegraphing as they begin an attack.
Players fight back initially by either using the left stick to raise a shield in the direction of an incoming attack to block and to ready a swift counter attack, or by using the right stick to quickly strike at an enemy early enough in their attack animation to get a hit in before they can react. The combat system does evolve further past this, including things like the ability to charge up a heavier and more forceful swing, or to cast magic.
The adventure, which follows Alex as she travels alongside companions, explores towns, sneaks through stealth encounters and often fights off multiple enemy combatants at once, is beautifully realised, with a wonderful balance of audio complexity. I was impressed by how well the game managed to create a rich audio landscape, with non gameplay critical sounds providing a sense of position and scale within the world, without those distracting from making gameplay important audio easy to pick out from the wider sound mix.
The Vale: Shadow of the Crown is designed to be accessible without sighted assistance for sightless blind players, and it seems pretty clear that the game achieves that goal without much effort. The adventure is built around the narrative’s blind protagonist, and does a great job of making sure that the player and hero alike are able to be the driving force of the plot. The game acknowledges that Alex is blind, it doesn’t dismiss the existence of her disability, but plays with that knowledge in interesting ways, such as with enemies who initially underestimate her combat skills at the start of some encounters.
That said, I did struggle initially playing the game myself, and had to make some tweaks to my setup to ensure that I could enjoy the game myself.
I have intermittent hearing loss in one of my ears. It’s not consistent, but often I find it harder to hear on one side than I do on the other. This can make determining the direction of stereo audio sources difficult, with me at times struggling to hear panned stereo audio correctly.
With many video games, I look in settings menus for options to toggle audio to mono, meaning that my good ear can hear all of a game’s audio information, but an option like that isn’t really feasible in a game based entirely around hearing which side audio is emanating from.
I’d have loved to see, for example, an option to make one ear’s audio track louder or quieter that default, until a preconfigured audio cue sounded like it was coming in front of me, from my left, or from my right.
As this was not available, I had to improvise a little. I played the game on Nintendo Switch, but I did so via a capture card on my PC. I used OBS to change the stereo pan of the audio as it was coming into my streaming software, which made it a little easier for me to identify audio directions more comfortably and accurately.
While my occasional one-sided hearing loss does make games based on directional audio a little more difficult for me to play, they aren’t inherently inaccessible as a genre. I don’t experience total hearing loss on one side, meaning that there are ways games like this can accommodate my needs as a disabled player, something I hope we see games in this genre adapt over time to offering.
The Vale does contain some settings options available for players, even if they didn’t help with my specific use case.
Players have three difficulty options available, can alter controller vibration, and can have controller layout elements explained to them via audio in a glossary. There’s also volume sliders available, and a setting to help identify correct headset orientation direction.
While my specific hearing issues required a little calibration to play the game comfortably, something it would be nice to see addressed with an in-game tool, I generally really enjoyed my time with The Vale: Shadow of the Crown.
The game does a great job translating first person adventure gameplay to work with audio only, and features a really engaging cast of characters and combat system. It’s ambitious, and a title that I’m really enjoying.
I don’t have much else to say. I really like this game, it’s super interesting, and well worth checking out. I wish I’d gotten around to checking it out on its original release, but I’m really glad its release on other systems has caught my attention.
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