Back in 2015, PlayStation published Until Dawn for the PS4, a choice based horror narrative game where players control a group of young adults staying at a cabin on a snowy mountain, trying to survive until morning as they’re chased by terrifying creatures, and a masked killer.
The game was recently remastered and re-released for the PlayStation 5, and while I’ve played through the game several times in the past, I wanted to check out the new remake in part to see how much the base game had changed, and in part to find out if the remake came bundled with any new accessibility features for disabled players.
While Until Dawn PS5 does make a strong first impression when it comes to accessibility improvements, and is definitely the definitive version for disabled players to check out, there are some caveats that come alongside the steps forward taken.
When you first boot up Until Dawn PS5, the game defaults to having an automated text to speech narrator turned on, and presents players with an option to leave it on or turn it off at initial game boot. This is on paper a great move, and something that I’m glad we’ve been seeing PlayStation published games recently adopt as more of a standard practice. Additionally, a pulsing white dot in the upper right of the screen shows when the text to speech voice is talking.
In the in-game settings menu, players can also alter the speed and volume of the text to speech narration, and change the voice between two gendered defaults.
While the text to speech implementation in the game’s menus seems decent enough, it’s important to note that it is exclusively supported while in game menus. Text shown on screen during the opening video sequence discussing “the butterfly effect” for example is not read out by the text to speech narration, and neither is on screen tutorial text, explaining things like how the Don’t Move motion control minigame works, or that players need to press X to progress the tutorial text.
Add onto this the fact that Until Dawn PS5 doesn’t feature support for High Contrast Mode visuals, audio descriptions of cutscenes, or navigation assist features, and it seems like many of the features that would be needed to support low vision players do not extend past menu navigation. This is a shame, as this is the kind of gameplay genre where following the lead of a game like As Dusk Falls could have presented a blueprint for increasing low or no vision player accessibility further than was attempted.
Returning to the initial boot menus, players are then asked if they would like subtitles turned on while they play, offering options of speech subtitles, closed captions, both, or all subtitles turned off.
After these options, players reach the opening menu, and can dig into the main settings menu itself.
In the general settings tab, players can toggle a setting called “extreme content censoring” which, as the name implies, can reduce the visibility of some of the game’s more gruesome moments.
Additionally, the general settings tab contains a number of subtitles options, such as increasing text size, adding speaker names, subtitle background with an opacity slider, and an option to switch text to a dyslexia friendly alternative font. While not named in game, the Dyslexia font chosen seems to be Open Dyslexic. While I’m usually a fan of that particular font, I personally feel like their default font choice in this game is surprisingly clear and legible, and I found myself sticking to it rather than the alternative.
Jumping to the Accessibility menu tab, players can display text transcripts during object interactions, and alter the opacity of backgrounds for those. Of note, players can also read text transcripts in the game’s pause menu if they’ve forgotten recent dialogue during conversations.
Camera movement during player choice moments can be reduced, to attempt to reduce motion sickness impacts.
The remake also supports an aim assist toggle, a toggle for enhancing the visibility of glints denoting things to interact with, an option for a persistent centre screen dot for motion sickness prone players, additional vibrations for finding glints and navigating don’t move segments, and high contrast background options for in game text.
In terms of quick time and don’t move segments, these get their own batch of accessibility settings tweaks.
Players can set don’t move segments to auto complete when encountered, or change how they function in a separate menu option we’ll discuss later.
Quick Time Events can be set to pause their timer on timeout to give infinite time to enter an input, auto succeed when timers run out, auto succeed straight away without the timer appearing, auto fail, auto time out, or automatically randomise success or failure.
QTEs can also be set to require either randomised button prompts to complete, or to always need a press of one specific “QTE prompt button”, which you as the player can set to a button that you find easy to comfortably and quickly select.
Lastly, the QTE button prompt telling you when to press a button and which one to hit can be made dramatically larger, as well as being set to always appear in the centre of the screen rather than in dynamic positions.
Beyond specifically accessibility, in the video tab players can reduce motion blur, film grain, and chromatic aberration visual effects, all of which can help to reduce motion sickness triggers for some players.
In audio, players can turn on streamer mode to remove licensed music, turn on “midnight mode” to reduce the dynamic range of audio volumes in the game, and tweak audio balance more gradually using various sliders.
Lastly, the controls tab. Players here can set the camera to auto rotate if they struggle with 3D camera controls, alter camera sensitivity and inversion, and further tweak the behaviour of the Don’t Move minigame.
While Don’t Move is by default controller by holding the DualSense still using motion controls, players who do not wish to auto complete these segments but can’t hold their controller still reliably can instead change things so that instead you use the left analogue stick to nudge an on screen capsule back into place in the centre of an outline.
There’s also a handful of settings options found in the Controller Settings submenu, including disabling touch pad, adaptive trigger and vibration functions, simplifying stick interactions, switching stick functions, remapping controls, and changing narrative choices back from adaptive triggers to their old default of right analogue stick selection.
Having played through a portion of Until Dawn on PS5 this past week I can say that, if nothing else, the game feels faithful to the original release while not being afraid to expand upon and add scenes that help keep the experience feeling new for returning players. While it is a shame that the text to speech support set me up to hope for more robust low vision player support options given the game’s genre, I can’t deny that this is a noticeable step forward in accessibility support for the game.
I always feel a little bit conflicted about accessibility support coming to a game via a paid remake. I’m glad the new support exists, and recognise that requiring purchase of a remake ensures some degree of financial support for the work done to add the features, but it is disappointing that the original game that many people will already own, that still looks great to this day and plays without issue on PS5 consoles, doesn’t get these improvements.
There’s a small handful of features missing like High Contrast Mode visuals that, while not formally a standard of PlayStation published titles, have come to feel like something that players can rely on being present. It would have been great to see them added here, but I still recognise that what has been added is a huge improvement for this game.
Until Dawn on PS5 isn’t fundamentally changing things so drastically that I’d necessarily recommend that everyone who liked the original needs to rush out and buy this remake, but there is definitely new content here worth seeing, and new accessibility support that’s going to make the game more playable for a lot of people.