Ghost of Yotei Accessibility Review

Releasing globally in approximately one week, on October 1st 2025, Ghost of Yotei is a standalone sequel to 2020’s Ghost of Tsushima. The game follows the story of Atsu, a young woman seeking revenge on a group called the Yotei Six who murdered her family and left her pinned by her father’s sword to a burning tree 16 years prior.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been playing through Ghost of Yotei, a game I think is incredibly engaging, but that I have lingering accessibility questions about at the time of writing my review. I have attempted to seek clarification, but will inevitably need to create a follow up to this video after the game releases to fully discuss the game’s accessibility successes and limitations.

Set approximately 300 years after the events of Ghost of Tsushima in early 1600’s Japan, Ghost of Yotei plays as a very emotionally fuelled story about vengeance, the costs required to achieve it, and what you’re left with if you follow vengeance as a singularly guiding motivation. The lead character, Atsu, is someone fuelled by a quest for blood soaked revenge, but from very early on the story makes it clear that this quest is being pursued in a very self destructive manner. Atsu’s plans to take revenge on the Yotei Six are frequently risky and chaotic, with her almost resigned to the idea that she will have nothing left to live for once her quest is complete. While this makes for a really interesting character, fantastically performed in English by Erica Ishii, it also has a notable impact on the feel of combat in this new title.

In Ghost of Tsushima, I felt like tackling combat encounters through stealth was essentially mandatory – you could keep fighting if discovered but were likely to be quickly overrun. In Ghost of Yotei fighting your way out of situations where you are discovered to me felt a lot more viable – stealth approaches were met with cool assassination animations and were often the most efficient way to get through an encounter, but you weren’t completely screwed if you got spotted. This increased ability to stand your ground and fight face to face more effectively against groups of enemies felt like a natural fit for the story being told, reflective of Atsu’s reputation as an onryō, a vengeful spirit of Japanese folklore. Atsu is perceived as essentially an unkillable force of nature more than a tangible human person, which feels at home with the game’s rebalance to better stand your ground in head to head combat scenarios.

This is less a ghost of death striking people down unseen, and more a ghost of death that doesn’t care if it’s seen coming, that won’t allow you to stop its approach either way.

In terms of accessibility, when first booting up Ghost of Yotei players are presented with a series of first boot options, ranging in accessibility utility.

After setting their brightness, players can select from five difficulty presets – casual, easy, medium, hard, and lethal – or a custom difficulty preset option. Players who select custom can manually tweak enemy aggression, timing windows (for parries and dodges), enemy damage, stealth, and hero bonus perk difficulties. Of note, each of these can be set between low and lethal difficulty – the casual difficulty preset isn’t available in the custom setup, only as its own dedicated difficulty category.

You either play entierly on casual, or set things to low in custom.

Players then select between a few preset presentation options for the game – English dialogue with no subtitles, English dialogue with English subtitles, Japanese dialogue with English subtitles, and “Kurosawa Mode”, featuring Japanese dialogue, English subtitles, and a black and white visual filter. While this opening menu suggests that you can’t play the game in black and white with english voice acting, that is actually an available option once you’re in the main game settings menu. Black and white visuals can be toggled separately from dialogue language, but not as part of initial onboarding.

Something important to know, you cannot change any more granular settings until you’ve made it through the initial cutscene and gained control of gameplay. As a result, black and white visuals with English voice acting is not an option for players experiencing the first cutscene on their first boot up of the game.

While Ghost of Yotei does feature a dedicated accessibility menu, accessibility settings are also not available during initial setup, and require seeking out once past the initial cutscene.

Once you’ve got control of the game, the pause menu features a number of different options to assist play.

The Controls menu features a diagram layout of button functions on the controller, as well as the ability to switch between four control scheme presets. Other than default, which focuses on Square and Triangle as your key attack buttons, there’s also a left handed control scheme where attacks are mapped to the D-Pad, a melee alternative where attacks are mapped to R1 and R2, and a left handed melee variant mapping attacks to L1 and L2. There is at the time of this review no option to manually remap your controls beyond this.

I’ll note at this point, the review notes provided to me by PlayStation alongside my review code for the game note that a day one patch will, among other changes, add “additional accessibility features” to Ghost of Yotei. There was no information on what these additional accessibility features would be, and my PlayStation representative did not respond to a request for additional information. As such I am reviewing the state of accessibility in the game at the time of my review, written a couple of weeks before launch, and will follow up with a post launch video if things change. I hope to see features like custom controller remapping added to the game, but I can only review the features that are present at the time of my review.

Controls also features options for camera inversion and camera speed, camera wobble intensity outside of cutscenes, stick drift compensation for players with drift prone controllers, options to set controller orientation (to change directional inputs if you need to hold a controller sideways or upside down), left and right stick swap while aiming, a motion aiming toggle (defaulted to off), and vibration and trigger effect intensity toggles.

While many of the options offered in this menu are pretty basic, I am quite genuinely pleased to see controller orientation options being offered in game like this.

Before I move further into discussing Ghost of Yotei’s available accessibility settings I need to point out that, past the controls menu, Yotei’s menus all feature incredibly poor text contrast against the menu background. White and grey text against a grey backdrop made text on the left of each menu difficult to read at a distance, even for me as someone with fairly high vision quality. This is a major issue, and something I would really like to see Sucker Punch address in a patch.

Moving into the gameplay menu, players can turn on a toggle lock option. This allows the player to press up on the D-Pad to lock the camera onto an enemy in combat, and switch which enemy is being targeted with the right stick. This is in contrast to the default, where the camera is fully in player control during fights. You can also set the camera to lock onto a new target after one is defeated.

There are also options to allow or reduce automated camera motion in specific scenarios, which may help with either motion sickness mitigation or situational awareness. The camera can automatically turn to frame enemies near screen edges, or have automatic camera movements to frame final remaining enemies or duel bosses disabled or slowed to reduce motion sickness risks.

Players can also turn off training reminder tips, turn off a golden bird that leads the player to points of interest, turn off a wolf that can appear rarely to assist in combat, and turn on the ability to skip steps such as lighting a fire and roasting food via minigames when starting a camp.

In the Audio menu, players can turn on “midnight mode”, which reduces the dynamic range of audio. This basically means making the loudest sounds quieter and the quietest sounds louder, to give a more consistent volume profile. This can be useful for those playing at night not wishing to wake up other people, or for players with conditions such as autism who wish to avoid spikes in audio intensity due to sensory sensitivity.

Audio volumes can also be customised via sliders.

In Display, players can increase the game’s contrast, select between performance profiles, toggle on “Miike Mode” (which adds mode blood and mud and uses a tighter cinematic camera), Watanabe Mode (which adds lofi music inspired by the anime director Shinichiro Watanabe), toggle on enemy stagger meters, minimise visible HUD elements, and toggle off blood.

Finally, in the dedicated accessibility menu, players can add a backdrop behind subtitles, toggle speaker names, alter subtitle colours, and increase the size of subtitles and “some other text items”. This last point is pretty nebulous – It does slightly increase subtitle sizes but not by a huge amount, and many pieces of tutorial text in game are not made larger, making them pretty difficult to read at a distance. It’s good that there is an option to increase text size, but this does fall very short of the standard set by games such as Atomfall in this regard.

Players can also increase the size of glint visuals for parries and dodges, make “guiding wind” visuals (which lead you in the direction of your next objective) more pronounced, set the camera to automatically face the direction of the guiding wind, set a custom size centre screen reticle, and remove the time limit pressure from minigames such as mandatory bamboo cutting sequences.

In the minigame Zeni Hajiki, players can turn on a visualiser to help display the distance of their shot in advance, rather than it being something that they need to judge by feel alone.

Forging, by default done with motion controls, can be switched to a press of the R2 button. Similarly, blowing to light campfires can be toggled between an R2 press and blowing into the controller.

Players who struggle with button holds can replace them with single button presses.

As someone who relies on aim assist in many games, I found Ghost of Yotei’s implementation very effective, if a bit overly intense perhaps. It definitely does the job, but there’s no degrees of sensitivity, it’s either off or at full strength locking onto enemies.

I would rather this than no aim assist offering, but it may be a little more than some players need from an aim assist.

Lastly, players can set indicators to show ranged attacks coming from offscreen, replace the full screen white flash of flashbombs with a flash of darkness instead, and show colour coded visuals when off screen enemies detect the player.

Notably for a first party PlayStation Studios title, Ghost of Yotei doesn’t support high contrast mode visuals for players with vision related disabilities. There is an option to focus on the world and see silhouettes of nearby enemies, but these are not particularly high contrast, grey outlines on a grey world, and as such are not a replacement for a proper high contrast mode implemtation.

Of note, there are no preview images for what any changes made in the settings menus will look like, and a number of options such as “Midnight Mode” audio are not sufficiently explained to players who are not already familiar with what they mean.

Once you first get gameplay control of Ghost of Yotei, very quickly a potential accessibility barrier begins to arise – a mandatory touchpad sequence writing the names of your revenge targets on a scroll. It is not ideal that this sequence is mandatory, it cannot be completed by PlayStation Access Controller users who don’t have a DualSense built into their accessible PS5 setup. That said, it’s not as hard to complete as it is presented to be. While the screen instructs the player to precisely follow the demonstrated brush strokes, you can progress through this sequence by wildly moving around in circles on the touchpad without too much difficulty progressing.

There is however, not much further into the game, another area where Ghost of Yotei features mandatory touch controls, which in this case can’t be as easily navigated. Sequences where the player is required to play the Shamisen require finding a specific point on the touchpad to make the correct note, and holding contact on that position for a few seconds. This is likely to be a bigger barrier for those who struggle using the touch pad on the DualSense, or are trying to play with just the Access Controller.

If you’re a PlayStation first party studio, at this point you should really be making sure that your game doesn’t feature any mandatory touchpad or motion inputs, to make your game accessible for disabled players who are using exclusively the PlayStation Access Controller, which lacks both touch and motion support. I would really like to see PlayStation as a publisher mandate this across their publishing line-up. If you design an accessibility controller, your own games should be designed in such a way that they are completable using exclusively that accessibility controller where possible.

Once in proper gameplay, there are a few notable accessibility features and barriers present inherent in Ghost of Yotei’s gameplay design.

When scouting out locations using your Spyglass, a light appears at the edge of your view to indicate the direction of other points of interest you’re required to find.

Boss fights will sometimes feature mid fight checkpoints between phases, which will in some cases recharge the gauge used to heal your character.

You can collect bottles of Sake to recharge your meter used for healing, but drinking the Sake adds a blurry filter over your vision temporarily, making it more difficult to see what you’re doing. While I understand the intent of making using this item inherently risky, it reduces visibility during gameplay and caused me experiences of light motion sickness.

While the bamboo cutting minigame can have its timer switched off, you can’t alter the fact that sometimes L3 stick clicking inputs are made part of these sequences, a notoriously inaccessible button for many disabled players to access.

If you pick up a throwable weapon such as a discarded sword, enemies it can be thrown at will be highlighted in a bright white outline, and your throw will always hit a highlighted target. It would be great if a similar highlighting system could be more broadly offered to players.

Ghost of Yotei also includes a number of gameplay mechanics such as the Onyro’s Howl, which can only be activated if you are able to hit enemies numerous times in a row without taking damage.

I’m not gonna lie, I barely got to use this ability during the game because I cannot consistently avoid damage for terribly long.

While by default enemy archers and enemies with guns shout to give audio cues before they shoot the player, you can switch on a bright red visual indicator to get the same information without being able to hear game audio.

As you progress within the game, you will gain access to multiple types of weapons, each of which has a rock, paper, scissors style strength and weakness system, impacting the ease of staggering a specific type of enemy. While you can brute force through, the game pretty clearly wants you to recognise what type of weapon an enemy is holding mid combat, and switch your weapon to the appropriate counter. In busier late game fights I found myself wishing this game had high contrast mode support, if only to colour code each enemy type and make it easier for me to see which weapon I needed to switch to in the chaos of a large scale encounter.

For those of you with ADHD, or simply replaying the game in future, you cannot button mash to skip past text, or skip cutscenes.

One particularly positive highlight, during escort missions the NPCs you are travelling with will proactively adjust their speed to match yours, meaning that whether you are walking, sprinting, or dashing on horseback, the NPC should always keep pace with you, staying in the lead if you are meant to be following them.

However, a particularly notable negative, the contrast levels on the in game map are pretty terrible, in many ways matching the issues that I had with menu text. There were frequent times where I struggled to see where my reticle was when trying to skim over the map to highlight a town or other location.

All in all, after spending roughly 25 hours playing through the main story and a handful more hours playing additional side content after the credits rolled, I think that Ghost of Yotei is a pretty fantastic game overall, even if it has some notable issues with visual contrast at present.

I personally enjoyed Ghost of Yotei considerably more than I did Ghost of Tsushima, in no small part down to the writing and performance of the lead character, Atsu. Her quest for vengeance feels personal and raw, unafraid to be emotionally vulnerable. I believed her reputation as the onryō, and really loved what the game did with making her confront what committing to being a vengeful spirit more than a living human would ultimately mean. Her story of vengeance, its costs, and what it takes to achieve was gripping throughout, and a great contrast in its conclusions to other first party PlayStation titles exploring cycles of revenge.

If you’re just looking to mainline through the game’s core story that’s fairly manageable, but there was never a shortage of interesting plot hooks for side activities to go and chase down, and little clues to encourage travelling off of the beaten path. It was pretty telling how little of the game’s skill tree for example I had unlocked upon finishing my initial core narrative playthrough of the game.

I am looking to see what additional accessibility support comes to Ghost of Yotei at launch. Right now the game’s mechanical and cognitive accessibility support is fairly robust, but it would be great if we could see some improved support for other groups, particularly players with visual disabilities. I have fairly strong vision, and sat on the sofa I more than once struggled to see menu text, my map reticle, and smaller on screen tutorial text, which is not a great sign for visual accessibility.