i like Silksong in a lot of ways, but one huge failing of the game is that with all the resources they have and all the time they had to make the game, they choose to have no accessibility options at all. i hope they can improve on this. i have a lot of concrete ideas for easy to implement options.
My kingdom for a highlight player setting. The art is beautiful, but I keep losing track of myself under all the effects.
yeah maybe they could peel away the foreground and ambient effect layers around the player character and enemies as an option, too. or have a luminous shadow.
It gets so fucking bad. I'm fighting a white enemy on a field of white flowers, and all their attack flourishes are white.
Many of these options are indeed easy to implement, so I'd like to see some sort of standardised accessibility layer that devs can just "plug into" or outsource entirely. If for example this list were treated as a standard we could rate games based on their compliance gameaccessibilityguidelines.com
i hope this is something the developers would consider patching in! i think it wouldn't consume many resources and it would let a lot of people enjoy the game who are having trouble or can't, with it in its current state.
Nooo, that makes me a lot less enthused. Does Silksong at least have audio subtitles/ability to adjust volume by category? Playing Hollow Knight for the first time atm, and the voices are so loud. I've been playing with the audio off for my sanity, but now I can barely find grubs...
it does have category volume. and spoken dialogue is not in a human language, so all the dialogue is delivered via subtitles.
i'm not sure if they have voices as a separate category though, it may just be "sound" and "music"? will check next time i play.
Ah, I meant subtitles for gameplay important sounds (like a lot of the Hollow Knights NPCs make noises to indicate they're in the room, and the rooms tend to be dark). But I think turning off sound turns those cues off, too. Maybe someday, if I have more noise tolerance then.
ah! no, they don't have that. that would be a great idea.
for context, it is possible that other versions are different (eg for platform compliance reasons), but i'm playing the gog version, but i'm seeing a two setting text size option, ability to turn off screen shake, and nothing else.
^and
there were some accessibility articles written about features before this came out and it was inferred it was going to have at least some basic options like altered savepoint behavior, but it looks like the conjectures were misleading and they actually just did... nothing. it's really negligent.
i you want concrete, easy to implement options, you're better off asking someone who's actually a specialist in this. but as a designer invested in accessibility, some or all of these seem worth exploring:
ability to disable punishment for death. sliders for amount of damage player takes, including invulnerability. enemy and player speed sliders. input options which allow more flexibility, eg ability to bind some of the chords (esp. dive kick!) to a single input.
and this is a little more involved, but: ability to checkpoint anywhere, or manually placed extra checkpoints.
another more involved thing i'd look into is adjusting criticality of timing for certain player actions, such as increasing coyote time. and, independently: adjusting criticality of timing for enemy attack patterns, eg making enemies which do a dive attack telegraph it in a more forgiving fashion.
rather than granular control over enemies vs player character, i'm a very big fan of what Chicory did, which is have an overall gameplay speed slider (when in action scenes) this approach is really helpful at least as someone with cognitive bandwidth limitations
it doesn't change any of the designed intention of the game, just literally runs all the underlying logic & animations at a proportionately slower speed
yeah that's a nice option! it maintains relationships between eg evade moves or travelling attacks and enemy movement. i also think it might work well to change speed during combat or precision platforming selectively, and have it be a different user determined speed outside precision situations.
that would be effective, too. i agree. the thing i'm looking for as a person with both cognitive and motor disabilities is to modify the intended gameplay experience as little as possible, adapting it so i can engage with it as close as possible to its own terms.
That’s truly sad to hear. Not liking this trend in well-resourced indie darlings lately
Big agree. With a game as cute and appealing as this you're just leaving a massive audience on the table by not making it more accessible--and such options don't leave anybody behind! Feels almost incongruously out of place that they didn't add such features.