Game Review: Dead Space is terrifyingly good on PS5, but it is not Blind accessible
This article has originally been featured on my Patreon page.
Hello everyone. Last Friday, EA has released Dead Space for PlayStation 5, Xbox series X/S and PC. We got our download codes just in time for the weekend and dove right into this terrifyingly good PS5 remake.
This article will be split into two segments. First, I will tell you about the game and the experience able gamers can expect from Dead Space and after that I will share my views on the game and on the accessibility features shipped by EA.
To be clear right from the beginning, Dead Space 2023 is not playable by the blind, but more on that later.
Rebuilt from the ground up on the 2008 classic survival sci-fi action video game with the same name by the team at Motive Studio, this remake promises to bring jaw-dropping visuals, improvements to gameplay, suspenseful events and atmospheric audio to modern consoles in order to deliver a deeper and more immersive experience.
Gamers will follow an expanded narrative to uncover the dark secrets behind the events aboard the USG Ishimura through the final audio, video or just text logs, of the ill-fated crew. They will try to piece together what happened analyzing the dramatic encounters with the few members that remain alive. There are 12 chapters and on the Story difficulty gamers can expect to get at least 10 hours out of Dead Space, considering they are not going for side quests and they don’t choose a higher challenge level.
Alina and Alex have played the game and both of them loved it. The story is captivating, the atmosphere is dark, oppressing, filled with tension and scary as heck. I understand that there are no load screens, aside from the very short ones after each death, our main character has a voice, which he didn’t in the original game, and the player can navigate the ship at their leisure, thanks to it being reimagined for modern audiences, without the limitations of the late 2000s.
The gameplay is engaging, the encounters with the enemies are brutal and visceral, the weapons feel great and dismembering a Necromorph was never this satisfying.
Dead Space looks great on PS5 and players can choose from dynamic 4k at 60 FPS with Performance Mode or 30 FPS and 4K with Fidelity Mode. Just this morning I noticed that an update has been downloaded that should clear out some issues with the graphics. Alina encountered a crash during her play sessions that completely closed the game and forced her to restart it. Luckily, no save data has been lost.
The voice acting is good, the music does its job to help the player imagine themselves in the game and the bloodcurdling screams and weird sounds, combined with the excellent haptics of the DualSense PS5 Controller, add even more to the level of immersion.
Now, this is all nice and swell, but things change dramatically when we move to accessibility, especially, when it comes to people who can’t see.
EA always have advertised in the last two years that their games have Menu Narration and Text to Speech functionality. After FIFA 23, F1 and the recently released Need for Speed games appear to have shipped with this feature just on paper, because aside for press X to continue, the functionality was completely broken on all platforms.
With Dead Space gamers in the blind community have hoped to discover a change for the better, and they did, but things are still quite bad. We have Menu Narration, but it is turned off by default, which is a clear no, no, when it comes to Blind Accessibility. The feature is implemented poorly, it uses a very bad TTS engine that reads menus like adio in stead of Audio, gmplay in place of Gameplay and so on. Besides, it does not read tooltips, the short text areas explaining to the user what a specific option is supposed to do, does not read tutorials and I could continue like this for one more page if you want, but I’d better stop here because I think that I stepped on enough toes already.
There is also a navigation assist mechanic in the game. It was there since 2008 and nothing has been done to make it work like a proper NavAssist like we have in The Last of Us and God of War Rognarock. Incidentally if you are blind, have the game and want to enable Menu Narration you need to do the following on the boot screen, immediately after the logos. Press down arrow on the d-pad to move on that option and right arrow in order to turn it on. I hope that will help someone who can’t get sighted assistance and doesn’t use OCR.
I want games to be accessible by default. I don’t like to jump through hoops in order to be able to play them. Games should be fun, not frustrating and the bad implementation of accessibility will do just that to a disabled gamer. I know how hard is to deliver a game with blind and motor accessibility done right, but if you advertise features and pound your chest saying that you as a company are doing everything to make sure everyone can play your games, be sure you don’t deliver half-baked features and make damn sure you don’t false advertise!
Sure, if you are deff, have low vision or cognitive challenges you’ll find some accessibility options that will work in your case, and trust me, I’m happy for you. Get the game, enjoy it, have fun! But for me as a blind gamer, things are different. Me and others like me are left out and feel ignored. That’s it, rant over.
In conclusion, the remake of Dead Space manages to do exactly what EA and Motive Studio set up to accomplish. A new generation of gamers will get to experience this cult-classic on the latest hardware. It is a great game that plays well and looks the part. Sadly, the accessibility suite leaves a lot to be desired, especially for blind gamers. I’d appreciate if some publishers and developers would not only talk about accessibility, but do more about it. You know, talk less, do more, let others praise you for what you did, if you did something good.
Disability happens when accessibility doesn’t and with Dead Space I felt exactly what I am, a blind individual trying to play a game that wasn’t made for me.
Watch the video embedded in this article and you’ll see that all my frustration is warranted. If you are a regular gamer, you’ll have a lot of good times with the new Dead Space, but if you are blind, you’ll run around in the dark, asking why are you still trying to play something that it doesn’t want you to play it. Dead Space leaves blind gamers dead in space!
Game Score: 8.5
Blind Accessibility Verdict: Stay away from it unless you have a sighted person who can help you at almost every step.
Review copy provided by EA
Victor Dima
