December is an essential month for me. It’s a time to celebrate the holidays with friends and family, surprise loved ones with unique gifts, and try to reconnect with the ever-growing monstrosity that is my backlog. December is also a time for me to reflect on the games that were released throughout the year – especially those that continued to show an raise in accessibility acceptance, as well as pushing the envelope of innovation for future titles.
2024 was full of games available, spanning multiple genres and developed by studios of all sizes. As the industry’s understanding and implementation of features and designs continues to evolve, gaming is much more accessible than before. In this year-end issue of Access Designed, IGN would like to recognize a few games for their excellent accessibility.
Runner-up: Dragon Age: Guardian of the Veil
The latest installment in Bioware’s fantasy RPG series, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, is the purest definition of standardization and accessibility. Not only does this demonstrate the studio’s increased commitment to disabled players since the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2014, but Veilguard’s accessibility features impressively cater to the needs of people with disabilities.
Visual features such as subtitle adjustments, colorblind filters, and both melee and ranged threat indicators enable deaf and tough of hearing users to process gameplay information without sound. For blind and visually impaired players, Veilguard options offer audio indicators of incoming attacks, dialogue options, and interactive objects – all of which are crucial to combat, storytelling, and traversal of the world. Players with physical disabilities can remap controls, toggle mechanics such as blocking, aiming and holding inputs, and even clear QTEs and combos with quick button presses.
Veilguard’s greatest achievement in terms of accessibility, however, is its vigorous difficulty setting. The difficulty is not unanimous. Not only do the rules, methods, and understanding of the challenge vary depending on the studio, individual games, and player experience – most difficulty settings only apply to enemy aggression, damage output, and player health. However, in Veilguard, disabled players can change settings such as enemy resistance, enemy vulnerability, dodge and parry time windows, health, and enemy aggression. You can even toggle player death, allowing you to stay alive no matter how much damage you take. Combine this with settings that allow players to constantly access previously learned information, have consistent landmarks for objectives and items from around the world, and the ability to stop at any time, and disabled gamers have the chance they need to process any encounter or recover resilience.
Veilguard is not perfect. Some features are missing, such as single-stick movement and solid guidance systems. However, it is still the quintessence of a contemporary and accessible experience. The industry continues to rightfully praise games like The Last of Us Part 2, but Veilguard shows that it’s time to move beyond the notion that a single game deserves all the praise for accessibility. Instead, accessibility is evolving across the industry, and Veilguard is one of this year’s best examples.
Second place: Botaniki Manor
There is a misconception that accessibility can only be provided by companies owned by wealthy megacorporations such as Microsoft or Sony. The belief that accessibility requires dozens of developers and untold amounts of money continues to plague innovation. However, the low-budget puzzle game Botany Manor proves that this belief is wrong.
Developed by Balloon Studios and published by Whitethorn Games, Botany Manor is a soothing puzzle-solving game set in a stately home in 19th century England. This genre is not my favorite – I prefer action games and turn-based RPGs. But Botany Manor’s accessibility features and design made this game an unexpectedly pleasant surprise. For starters, it offers full mouse and keyboard or controller support, depending on your preferred setup. It also offers single-stick gameplay, with the option to toggle the ability to look around. Finally, there is also a sprint switch.
This is admittedly a compact selection of options, but it is enhanced by the impressive operate of inclusive design at Botany Manor. There is no time limit for solving puzzles; instead, players can spend as much time as needed finding ways to grow specific crops. What’s more, puzzles are moved to a selected number of rooms in each chapter. Instead of opening up the entire mansion to players, which might seem overwhelming, people with physical and cognitive disabilities can stay energized knowing that the puzzles are divided into sections.
Botany Manor is by no means perfect, as blind and visually impaired players will undoubtedly struggle without special audio-based options. However, an independent studio that creates a game with such attention to accessibility and inclusive design should be rewarded for their efforts. Botany Manor is proof that you don’t need a huge budget or dozens of options to make puzzle games accessible.
Winner: Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
The winner of this year’s accessibility award is bittersweet. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown proved to be truly creative for the Metroidvania genre. However, publisher Ubisoft recently disbanded the Montpellier-based development team and reassigned them to several recent projects, meaning the chances of a sequel to the studio being made are very slim. But I don’t reward developers out of pity. Rather, I am awarding the team because they have created the most innovatively accessible experience of 2024.
The Lost Crown features customizable controls, subtitles, audio indicators for various attacks, and a switch that automatically unfreezes your character when frozen by the frozen state effect. However, these options ultimately pale in comparison to the creative Memory Shards and Guided Mode features.
The Metroidvania genre is based on intense memory and backtracking. Areas must be explored multiple times throughout the game, with each segment opening up recent layers on subsequent visits as players gain recent tools or powers. Shards of memory allow players to place a screenshot of a location on the world map, reminding them of hidden items or barriers on recent routes that can only be accessed through skills or equipment they have not yet acquired. Did you notice the buff at the beginning of the off-limits zone? Simply place a Memory Shard on the map to remind you to return after making progress. This feature has been generally praised as a gameplay tool, but it is an extremely helpful tool for players of all cognitive abilities.
Similar to Memory Shards, Guided Mode shows players exactly where their next objective is, as well as highlighting any barriers that may appear along the path. Combined, these two features dramatically reduce the risk of cognitive overload while still respecting the core feature of Metroidvania – exploration. While guides and placeable clues aren’t recent to gaming, Metroidvania games have always been dense and confusing and, as a result, cognitively inaccessible. And it was like that until the premiere of The Lost Crown. This year’s Prince of Persia truly changed the game (and the genre).
2024 continued the trend of improving accessible experiences for gamers with disabilities. We are no longer expected to follow specific studios in terms of games available. From AAA games to indie games, gamers with disabilities are no longer circumscribed to specific genres for accessibility reasons. And while barriers still exist, 2024 points to growing support from studios that continue to implement accessibility best practices. Some hiccups aside, 2024 was as accessible as ever and was another fantastic year for disabled gamers.
Grant Stoner is a disabled journalist focusing on accessibility and disabled perspectives in video games. When he’s not writing, he’s usually shouting about Pokémon or his cat Goomba on Twitter.
