10 Games With Incredible Accessibility Features


Key Takeaways

  • Sea of Thieves offers text-to-speech, single-stick navigation, and togglable audio for a seamless gaming experience.
  • Tekken 8 introduces Special Style controls, color blindness presets, and customizable visual settings for a fighting game accessible to all.
  • Celeste’s Assist Mode allows for various adjustments in difficulty, making it a gold standard for accessible gaming in challenging platformers.

The Video Games industry has come leaps and bounds in making the hobby more accessible than ever. There’s never been a better time to dive into gaming, and it’s an activity anyone can enjoy.

Accessibility is a big deal in the industry, and here’s a selection of games that demonstrate those commendable features.

10

Sea of Thieves

Converse Without Ever Saying A Word

Sea of Thieves is a unique PvPvE game where a silver tongue can save your crew from a trip to Davy Jones’s locker. That said, there are plenty of reasons why you may not want to communicate with a microphone.

If you’d rather stay silent, you can use text-to-speech, which works perfectly. The feature even translates other crew’s text into speech and blocks out profanities.

Sea of Thieves also has other impressive accessibility features, like single-stick navigation and togglable audio cues, which help with aiming.

Text on maps and clues can be narrated, and there are a plethora of other options to make the rough seas as welcoming as possible.

9

Tekken 8

Welcome To The King Of Iron Fist Tournament

Tekken 8 visual impairment mode

Tekken 8 is an exceptional 3D fighting game with a skill ceiling up among the clouds. Learning the intricacies of Tekken is pretty overwhelming no matter who you are, but some impressive accessibility features can help.

Tekken 8 is the first game in the series to introduce Special Style controls. Most characters in Tekken 8 have over 100 moves, and Special Style dramatically reduces these. You have key moves at the touch of a button and even basic air combos.

Beyond the control scheme, Tekken 8 also has a ton of color blindness presets, and you can get pretty granular with the visual settings. You can even change the size and position of HUD elements if you find them distracting.

Getting slapped around online is a rite of passage in fighting games, but the playing field is more level than ever before.

8

Celeste

Fully Customizable Difficulty

Celeste Assist Mode menu

Celeste is well-known for its wonderfully tight controls, creative-level designs, and fiendish difficulty.

The title is also known for its impressive accessibility features, many of which are tied to its Assist Mode. With Assist Mode enabled you can tailor Celeste‘s features to your liking. You can do everything from reducing the game’s overall speed to changing the fundamentals.

Dash Assist, for example, pauses the game when you initiate a Dash so you have time to plan where you want to land. There’s even an invincibility option if you get stuck.

In many ways, Celeste is the gold standard for accessibility in the genre. The game is challenging and rewarding with the default settings and can be toned down to suit preferences and circumstances.

7

The Last of Us Part 2

A New Industry Standard

The Last Of Us Part 2 Accessibility Feature from Playstation.com

Everyone Knows The Last of Us games for their cutting-edge graphics and cinematic storytelling. The Last of Us 2 (TLOU2) boasts some of the most in-depth accessibility features on the market, so everyone can enjoy the title.

TLOU2 offers three distinct accessibility presets for players who struggle with vision, hearing, and motor functions. Each preset has a plethora of settings you can tweak to suit your requirements.

For example, you can highlight enemies to be more visible and auto-target them in combat so you don’t lose them against dark backgrounds. Vibrations can be added to audio cues, and you can even add awareness indicators to nearby threats.

There’s an exhaustive list of every accessibility feature in TLOU2 on the official PlayStation page, and it’s clear how much attention has been paid to this aspect of the experience.

6

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart

Eloquent Solutions To Platforming Problems

Ratchet and Clank screenshot from Steam

Platformers are in an odd place regarding accessibility features, as the lion’s share of their gameplay comes from challenging players’ reflexes and jumping skills. That said, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart has impressive features that make the genre more approachable than ever.

Rift Apart has an impressive selection of accessibility options to tune the gameplay to your requirements. Alongside blanket difficulty presets, you can increase aim assist and add a hold function for many weapons, so you don’t need to mash the attack button.

Colors can be added to enemies and interactable objects to make them stand out. There’s even an “Edgeguard” mechanic, so you can’t accidentally wander off ledges.

Insomniac Games has a complete list of features on its support page, with options for everything, including adaptive trigger settings and audio tuning.

The Ratchet and Clank games were Sony exclusives for the longest time, but Rift Apart is one of several PlayStation titles that have made their way to Steam.

5

Tunic

Adorable And Accessible

tunic gameplay from Steam

Tunic is a cutesy 3D platformer with an adorable protagonist and light puzzle-solving elements.

Tunic makes the list thanks to a robust selection of accessibility features that can dramatically alter gameplay on the fly. Combat difficulty can be reduced, and you can even turn on invincibility to remove the threat of battle entirely.

On that note, players typically have a stamina bar to manage, which dictates how often they can dodge. Stamina consumption can be switched off if it becomes an issue.

Even puzzle difficulty can be lowered to help players who struggle with motor function. There are multiple scenarios where you must punch in a directional code, but you only have a few seconds to enter each input. With Tunic‘s sequence assistance, you can remove that time limit.

Tunic is a superb puzzle platformer, and the wealth of options and features means it’s an adventure anyone can enjoy.

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4

Fortnite

Headsets Are Optional

Fortnite visual cues

Sound is a massive part of any multiplayer shooter, as hearing your opponent before you see them is an enormous advantage.

This reliance on sound cues can make the shooter genre unenjoyable if you’re hard of hearing, but Epic Games has an excellent solution. You can turn on Visual Audio Cues in Fortnite, which displays all sounds on a directional ring in the center of the screen.

With this setting enabled, players can see everything from footsteps to vehicle sounds, and it can even be used in custom games and LEGO Fortnite.

You can also use many uncommon peripherals, including Foot Pedals and Motion Controls.

3

Assassin’s Creed Mirage

Take A Leap Of Faith

Assassins Creed Mirage gameplay from Steam

Taking the series back to its roots, Assassin’s Creed Mirage casts you as Basim, a street thief in Baghdad who eventually answers to a higher calling.

The Assassin’s Creed games have come a long way, and the latest is surprisingly packed with accessibility features to make your time in Baghdad more comfortable.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage boasts a fully customizable HUD. You can remove and reposition elements you don’t like and even change the aiming reticule’s color for clarity. The HUD can be hard to keep track of by default, but you can fix this by putting a solid background behind it.

Sound options are also expansive. You can turn on a narrator with multiple voice options who will read objectives and provide hints. The subtitle sizes can also be adjusted.

Parkour is still a little fiddly, and there’s no getting around that in Assassin’s Creed games. If you can stomach a few missed jumps, there’s plenty to enjoy.

2

Sea of Stars

Accessibility Woven Into Gameplay

Sea of Stars gameplay from Steam

Sea of Stars is a turn-based RPG with gorgeous pixel-art graphics and plenty of old-school elements.

Just because Sea of Stars takes inspiration from the classics doesn’t mean it’s without modern features. You will find many Relics on your journey that bestow game-altering modifiers if you switch them on.

These effects include automatic healing after combat, damage reduction, and increased XP gain to remove the sting from grinding.

Other more impactful Relics make fishing easier, and there’s even one that removes timing-based elements from some attacks. Beyond that, players get the Amulet of Storytelling item at the start of the game to make the entire experience more accessible, and there’s even equipment to do the reverse.

Sea of Stars does a great job of making its accessibility features feel organic rather than a checklist in a menu somewhere.

1

Street Fighter 6

Anyone Can Join The Pantheon Of World Warriors

Street Fighter 6 gameplay from Steam

Fighting games are fiercely competitive and offer a multiplayer platform where the only person you can blame for a loss is yourself.

The genre may be one of the last you’d associate with accessibility features, but Capcom has done everything it can to make Street Fighter 6 as welcoming as possible.

First, we have the Modern control setting, which simplifies directional inputs for special moves. The feature limits your available moves but dulls the learning curve for those tricky inputs.

There are even accessibility features for visually impaired players that describe match events in audio form.

Honestly, the technology is a little lost on me as I don’t know what the cues sound like, but they can narrate everything from Drive Gauge levels to the distance between you and your opponent.

These features are so robust that there’s even a blind player called BlindWarriorSven who competes at the highest level and his gameplay is an absolute joy to watch.

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