How to play The Vale adventure designed not only for the blind -apkrig
A lot has been written about last year’s game of the year according to The Game Awards. For a significant target group of players, to which I belong, The Last of Us Part II is perhaps the best game of the whole generation, if not the history of console gaming. This is the first AAA video game in the world, which is fully playable blindly, just by sound and without the help of anyone else. In recent months, relevant circles have reported that a whole host of last year’s news from Ubisoft, from Watch Dogs: Legion to Immortals: Fenyx Rising, will also bring a number of innovations in the field of blind accessibility. But after these games have seen the light of day, it turns out that in all cases these are really only partial advances, such as the TTS (Text To Speech) layer in the menu, and full-fledged blind playability is unfortunately still in sight.
It’s really a huge challenge to work out such large-scale open-world adventures as Ubisoft is famous for making blindly fully accessible. So far, no competitor has deprived The Last of Us Part II of an imaginary royal crown in the field of accessibility. Today, however, we will look at blind accessibility and playability from the opposite point of view. The upcoming story action adventure The Vale: Shadow of the Crown from the independent Canadian studio Falling Squirrel aims to provide players who cannot do without sight with the experience of so-called audio games, which until recently was the only way for the blind to play a full-fledged contemporary title. .
Who wouldn’t want to be a prince or, in this case, a princess? Maybe none of you if you were to be born blind. The royal daughter Alexandra, the main heroine of the story, could tell about it, which will keep you entertained for about 8 to 10 hours on the first pass while trying to complete all the side tasks. After his father’s death, he sits on the royal throne in an unspecified country and time Alexander’s older brother and princess herself, in order to comply with the last wish of the deceased king, must move to a sunken country fortress on the opposite side of the kingdom. But it is not a good idea to take such a long and difficult journey when barbarian invaders are about to conquer your country. The carriage with an armed escort, in which Alex accompanies her uncle on this hilarious journey, is attacked by a division of archers, the escort is decimated to the last man and Alex’s uncle seems to have been lost. It may lie somewhere between the corpses, but it doesn’t have to. So Alexander has no choice but to go on foot and alone back to the royal city in the hope that her older brother will not leave her in the lurch. However, she still has no idea what companions she will meet on her journey and which skills that her uncle secretly taught her as a child and which she thought she would never need are now useful, or what she will learn about her own past along the way.
Exploring unknown terrain and fighting for a bare life blindly? No problem!
Although the game world is essentially just a series of small linear maps separated by story dividers, battles, and cut-scenes, overcoming pitfalls can prove to be a much bigger challenge for sighted players accustomed to following in sight than it might seem at first glance . Occasional blind players or those who have not yet encountered any computer game can then be carried away by a new, as yet unknown kind of experience, a kind of interactive radio game. And hardcore blind players can complicate the challenge at any time by playing on higher difficulty and searching for various hidden easter eggs or small turns from the main line of the story. The game offers them in a relatively generous amount due to its small scale, but it certainly does not force anyone to discover them all right on the first pass. Each group of players that the developers target will come into their own, and the final form of the game represents a surprisingly homogeneous and functional experience that you will not soon forget thanks to its novelty.
Thus, for the first time, many sighted players will be able to experience, at least indirectly with the help of a game story, a hitherto unknown feeling of unexpected control over the situation, despite the seemingly insurmountable and disabling handicap.
Alex, though blind, doesn’t have to walk the whole game right behind his nose and get carried away by the events he encounters. He can accept optional quests from side characters, thanks to which he earns money to buy better weapons, shields or armor and even hunting bows. Although she is accompanied throughout the game by a sighted companion, it is she who has experience with fighting, hunting and running the state. Thus, for the first time, many sighted players will be able to experience, at least indirectly with the help of a game story, a hitherto unknown feeling of unexpected control over the situation, despite the seemingly insurmountable and disabling handicap. The game is powered by the Unity engine, but you will see the only graphics you come across during the menu and on other non-game screens. The only things you will see during the game itself are just some particles in the air, which are supposed to serve for a more intuitive visual representation of the direction in which you are just turned and in which you are moving. However, as a completely blind person, I have no way of judging this part.
So if you want to buy something, talk to someone or set out to complete one of the tasks as the story takes you to a busy, bustling city, you have no choice but to orient yourself and find what you are looking for only by sound. which issues the thing or place. When you listen in the square and turn around a few times, you may hear the sound of a lute from a tavern, the hammer hitting an anvil from a smithy, evoking traders, or the sound of bells calling for monks to pray in a monastery of a certain ancient order, which you will also encounter on your journey. . Instead of enjoying RTX effects at high fps, you will be able to enjoy a feast for the ears in the form of a believable, consistent and very plastic atmospheric landscape composed only of sound perceptions.
You can then successfully fight enemies body by body thanks to the sounds of their movement, plates and buckle of armor rubbing against each other. However, you can also orient yourself thanks to the sounds of stretched weapons and, last but not least, of course the voice of enemies, which with the help of unspecified binaural audio technology is heard from literally all sides with such high accuracy that you are able to react completely intuitively, even with your eyes closed, aim, parole and carry out your own counterattacks. You can then end a long day full of hiding, fighting and completing assigned quests by catching boars for dinner in a demonstration of stunning archery skills.
Release date coming soon, demo version now
As mentioned in the introduction, the game is aimed at the PC and also at the Xbox. The developers have not yet specified which generation of Xbox they mean, but given the support for backward compatibility and the absence of graphics effects, there should be no reason not to run on both the new and previous generations. According to David Evans, the founder of Falling Squirrel, negotiations are also underway to include The Vale in the Game Pass. The original intention was to release the full version at the end of last year, but even a small studio such as Falling Squirrel was adversely affected by the situation associated with the coronavirus pandemic. And it doesn’t change the fact that only two people work full time – the founder of the studio as the author of the story, screenplay and game design and one programmer, who is also externally assisted by the music author, actors and testers. Currently, therefore, a small team would like to release the game by the end of 2021, but you can already try your hand, or in this case your ears, with a continuously updated demo version on Steam or Itch.io every few weeks to months.
Because I work together as a beta tester, QA tester and gameplay designer in the development of the game, I can already promise that as soon as possible, I will share more detailed impressions of playing here on Vortex as one of the first. So far, even the Czech localization in text form has not been ruled out, although not definitively confirmed. If blind people who do not speak English fluently are able to enjoy the game, localization is almost a necessity due to its strong story and dialogue focus. It is therefore possible that this will be the world’s first audio game, aimed at the general gaming public and not only at a very narrow and specific community of the blind, which will also have Czech support and localization immediately after release.
