As hard as it is to believe, in around 1 week on Thursday 4th September, Hollow Knight: Silksong is finally being released into the world. The game’s lengthy development cycle, the result of a DLC ballooning in scale and a development team whose financial success gave them space to create, will finally be a playable video game. No longer will Silksong exist mostly as a bingo space on prediction streams of Nintendo Direct presentations.
Silksong’s developers, Team Cherry, have stated publicly that the game will not be sent to reviewers ahead of release, apparently because they felt it would be unfair for anyone to get a chance to finish the game before the Kickstarter backers who originally supported it. While I can understand this mentality, it does also mean that we’re unlikely to see much in the way of hands on accessibility reporting on the game before release.
That’s why I took some time this week to try and assess what accessibility support, if any, could be confirmed or ruled out for this highly anticipated side scrolling metroidvania ahead of the game’s upcoming release.
While I’ve not had a chance to go hands-on with the game myself, I have scoured the game’s online digital store pages, and numerous recordings of the game’s recent Gamescom booth demo builds, to try and paint as clear a picture as possible of the game’s accessibility support options ahead of release.
Let’s start with the official Steam store page for Silksong, which features several accessibility tags selected by the game’s Developers that they feel accurately describe the accessibility support offered by their game.
As a reminder, Steam’s accessibility tags are a voluntary system where tags are self-reported by the developer. They are not verified by Valve and their criteria for inclusion are more nebulous than those of the Xbox or PSN accessibility tags. This can lead to issues with vague or inaccurate tagging, which we will address a little later in this discussion.
Let’s start with the tags that are selected for Silksong on Steam:
Save Anytime – This makes sense in context. In the original Hollow Knight you could save by sitting at a bench, but the game also automatically saved if you quit using the in game menu. You likely won’t be able to drop fixed manual saves at specific locations, but if you need to stop playing you won’t have to lose any progress.
Camera Comfort – This accessibility tag on Steam is pretty vague, but is intended to be for settings that support players with conditions such as chronic motion sickness or photosensitive conditions. While Steam is vague on what this means, Gamescom demos for Silksong suggest that this is referring to a Screen Shake reduction toggle.
Stereo Sound – Very standard, audio may pan from side to side. Notably, the game doesn’t seem to support Mono audio for players with one sided hearing loss. Some consoles do support mono audio on a system level.
Keyboard Only – Makes Sense, the original game could be played with just a keyboard.
Playable Without Timed Input – I can see why Team Cherry may have ticked the box to say that they support this type of accessibility, but I feel the use of this accessibility tag is going to be potentially misleading. Based on the description of the accessibility tag provided by Valve to game developers I suspect that Team Cherry meant to convey that Silksong won’t contain Quick Time Event prompts or button mashing sequences, but the Accessibility Tag is named in a way that in my opinion clashes with Silksong’s actual gameplay. Silksong as a game is VERY much about boss fights that require a lot of precise inputs in small safe input windows. You will need to precisely time inputs to progress through the game.
This is part of the issue with Valve’s system having its own terms for accessibility tags, and not a lot of firm requirements or guidelines about when to add them or not.
The accessibility tags that are not selected on Steam also suggest types of accessibility that Silksong likely will not support, though I will point out this method of ruling out accessibility isn’t 100% accurate, as we can kind of prove as we go through them.
The unselected tags on Steam seem to imply the following about Silksong:
No adjustable difficulty
No Adjustable Text Size
No Subtitle Options – For example font alternatives, speaker name highlighting, adjustable opacity backgrounds etc.
No colour alternatives – Likely meaning no support for colourblind filters or high contrast modes.
No Custom Volume Controls – This is the bullet point that kind of highlights the potential inaccuracy of using Steam’s accessibility tags to make these kinds of predictions about ignored accessibility support, as while this would suggest that there is no custom volume controls in the game, the Gamescom demo for Silksong does allow volume slider customisation of audio, so, I think that this probably should have been clicked by Team Cherry.
No Surround Sound
No Narrated Game Menus
No Mouse or Touch only input support.
Additionally, I checked both the Xbox and PSN store pages for Silksong, but neither page at present features accessibility tag information for the game. This is a shame, because both PlayStation and Xbox have more strict definitions and criteria for accessibility tags than Valve does, and are signatories to the Accessible Games Initiative’s standardised accessibility tag definitions, so these would have been useful resources to cross reference if available.
With that out of the way, we can move onto the Gamescom demo for Silksong which was playable by the general public on Xbox Series and Switch 2 consoles, and discuss accessibility settings that we can verify are present in the build of the game being presented at trade shows.
First up, as previously alluded to, there’s an option to reduce screen shake effects, which may be helpful for some motion sickness prone or visually overstimulated players.
Silksong also supports audio sliders to customise the balance of music and sound effects, as well as a toggle to turn off “Hero Sounds”, presumably in character shouts and effort noises made by the playable main character Hornet.
Hud Appearance – The in game HUD can be resized, either making it larger or getting rid of it entirely to reduce visual clutter. The limited images I have found of the larger HUD do seem to suggest that the size increase offered is fairly minimal, and not comparable to something like Atomfall for example.
Silksong can be played at 120FPS on Switch 2 which may further help reduce motion sickness for some players. This is confirmed to be supported when docked in TV mode as an optional settings toggle. There are mixed reports from players whether the game runs at 120FPS by default in handheld mode.
The Silksong Demo at Gamescom does allow players on Xbox, PC, or Switch to see a reference image showing the game’s controls, but doesn’t offer the ability to remap them. It may be that button remapping is disabled in the demo in order to avoid issues for future demo players, but it could also indicate that lack of in-game remapping support will be a factor of note in the full release next week.
The following settings were witnessed in the visual settings menu at the Xbox booth at Gamescom, seemingly running the PC version of the game. As such, I cannot yet confirm if all of these options will be supported on other console ports of the game.
V-Sync support is available but can be toggled off.
Particle Effects seem to be able to be lessened and turned off, but it’s unclear if this is a PC performance setting or an option which will be offered on consoles for photosensitive players.
Blur Quality can also be altered, again it’s unclear if this is a PC performance option or one that will allow the disabling of blur on consoles for motion sickness prone players.
The game supports in software framerate caps, useful for those who specifically find framerate inconsistency a motion sickness trigger.
There are brightness settings available in game, though how specific or granular these are remains to be seen, I didn’t get to see anyone actually use that settings option.
Lastly, I didn’t have a great place to put this observation, but for anyone who may need to pause gameplay on short notice, it is possible in Silksong to pause at any time, including part way through boss fights. While this is perhaps to be expected, I have had people specifically asking me about this, and so thought it worth mentioning.
With Silksong’s release around 1 week away we will soon have more concrete accessibility impressions for the game, but given the lack of pre-release review access I wanted to take some time to do my best to give disabled players a sense of what accessibility support to expect in Silksong at launch, and importantly what types of support not to hold your breath for.
Silksong’s accessibility support isn’t breaking any hugely new ground for the Hollow Knight Series. That’s perhaps unsurprising, the game started as a DLC and grew in scope without necessarily having a clear point during development where things would have stopped and assessed ground up changes to support for disabled players. Still, I hope that this roundup of known information helps folks make informed choices about the game’s accessibility if they’re considering picking Silksong up on day one.