Audiogames.net monthly digest - July 2022
Welcome to the July edition of the audiogames.net monthly digest. Summer is now in full swing, there hasn’t been a more perfect time to sit down and play some games. As always we’re here to give you some ideas. This month, we have a bunch of exciting mainstream game news, a new accessible mud client, and more!
Before we dive in, a friendly reminder that you can get these digests delivered straight to your inbox or news reader of choice by subscribing here. Happy reading!
New Releases
Kilta (Windows on Steam)
Kilta is a game about being a Guildmaster of a newly established guild. The guild accepts commissions and quests from all walks of life firstly to promote the common good and secondly to grow as an association. A party needs to be dispatched to take on the challenges and earn glory and recognition, as well as hefty rewards for the guild. It's the Guildmaster's responsibility to assign the party to suitable missions and equip them accordingly.
GROW YOUR GUILD Recruit new guild members from a growing cast of heroes. All heroes are unique with their characteristics, abilities, and dialogue. Should you recruit Rufus, the mighty macaque guardian that excels in traditional martial arts known to his people? Or Maryu, the heart-warming but savage old lady that can curse your opponents?
HONE YOUR LEADERSHIP Always check what enemies your party is going to face in the upcoming quests. By equipping better items, choosing correct party members, and checking enemy compositions you can minimize your losses and always topple your foes. Try to find the perfect (or the most broken) combinations of heroes and items!
MANAGE YOUR INVENTORY Items are divided into weapons and equipment. One of your tasks as the Guildmaster is to equip your heroes with whatever you have at hand. Items are earned through quests and occasionally through dialogue. There are no character-related restrictions on the items. You are free to experiment with different combinations of items and discover the most powerful builds.
THE BLACKSMITH Always remember to pay a visit to the Blacksmith. The Blacksmith can combine your surplus items to forge more powerful items.
GUILDMASTER SKILLS As the Guildmaster, you have a growing repertoire of Guildmaster Skills that you can bestow to your party when they embark on a quest. These skills are both blessings and curses that can turn the tide of battle and possibly avoid the annihilation of the party.
COMBAT The auto battling combat system delivers tactical and engaging action. When the party comes across enemies on their quests, they have to engage them in battles. At the beginning of each battle, it is important to consider the enemies, their abilities, and their formation when positioning your heroes. The heroes will fight by themselves but your preparations will ultimately decide the outcome. In appearance, the battles offer explosive visuals, insanely good music, and cinematic camera action.
WHAT KIND OF GUILDMASTER ARE YOU GOING TO BE? Every hero has a background that they may want to share with you. Most often the heroes are arguing by themselves and it's up to you to resolve their conflicts in a way or another. Some choices might lead to surprising outcomes that can even affect the results of the battles up ahead. Are you a caring and capable leader or do you swing to be the worst kingpin of them all?
As Dusk Falls (Windows/Xbox, available on Steam and on Xbox Game Pass)
As Dusk Falls is an original interactive drama from INTERIOR/NIGHT that explores the entangled lives of two families across thirty years. Starting in 1998 with a robbery-gone-wrong in small town Arizona, the choices you make have a powerful impact on the characters’ lives in this uncompromising story of betrayal, sacrifice and resilience.
Replay the story again and again to uncover vastly different outcomes for the characters and explore hidden nuances behind every decision. Will your characters survive unscathed? What kind of people will they ultimately become?
Drive the lives and relationships of multiple characters in a decades-spanning story told across two intense books.
Uncompromising Crime Drama. The cinematic story is brought to life by the performance of actors that are digitally rendered into a beautiful art style, creating a unique experience that plays like a motion graphic novel.
Sacrifice vs Survival. Can you break free from your family’s toxic influence? What will you sacrifice for the ones you love? Can you overcome your past? Your decisions will shape the characters’ fates.
Interwoven Destinies. Follow two families in their struggle to survive, protect, and endure through challenges rooted in the previous generations’ mistakes.
Experience Together. Reveal insights about yourself and those you play with as you discover the underlying values of your decisions in cooperative gameplay with up to 8 players at a time, locally or online (or a mix). The As Dusk Falls companion app makes making choices in game easy, just use your phone or tablet to vote with or against your friends. (Online console multiplayer requires Xbox Game Pass Ultimate or Xbox Live Gold, subscriptions sold separately).???
The game offers a number of accessibility features, including text to speech which make the game fully playable by the blind, at least on a computer or Xbox. The companion iOS app is currently not accessible with VoiceOver, but hopefully this is something that the developers can address in the future. For more details and a gameplay video you can read Ross Minor’s review on his blog.
Mudlet (Windows, Mac, Linux)
The developers of Mudlet have started working on full screen reader support including automatic speech as well as reviewing the output. Mudlet is probably the most popular mud client right now with sighted users. It’s free, cross-platform and has a very powerful scripting system using the Lua programming language just like Mush Client. The program is under constant development, and has already received more updates refining the accessibility support. In addition to what’s built into the program, Tyler Spivey whose responsible for the accessibility scripts for Mush, has released his own package for Mudlet that adds quick text review keys and makes the speech work better on Mac. Links to all of this can be found in the thread above.
text rpg, Level 13, now with more accessibility
Description from Dark:
This is one which I think has been discussed a little for the past couple of years, but recently has had some great accessibility fixes, and (according to a very nice response from the developer on Reddit), will be seeing more in the future. its a slow, tactical, and in some ways quite unforgiving partly incremental text rpg, played in your web browser, in some ways similar to a dark room. Waking in the dark, you find yourself in a grim abandoned cityscape with an injured leg. You can scavenge for food and metal. Using the "bag" heading you can access your inventory, where you can start crafting, the first thing to craft is a lantern to see in the dark, after which you can scout the area, equip a plastic bag to hold more inventory, and then craft a bucket to catch water, and a trap to catch food, and a camp to rest in. You'll also at this stage see directional buttons on the map, with the directions you can't go disabled, and so can think about exploring, but bare in mind each move takes both one food and one water as well as some stamina, and running out of either of these can be costly in time and injuries. This is how the game works, slowly accumulating resources to painfully unlock the next part of the game, heck even fixing that injured leg takes quite a number of upgrades and buildings, including getting camp workers. Despite some existing access benefits, like showing the coordinates of the square you're currently in at the top and some handy headings, the game did have some access niggles, such as lack of labeled images, which could make things like looking at the inventory and your upgrades a might confusing. Not anymore, now everything has a nice lot of labels. one thing to bare in mind, is that many things in the game have mouseovers, which tell you what they do or access other functions, including equipping items, previously I found these a little haphazard, but either because NVDA or chrome has improved, they now seem much more stable. The only miner access niggle currently is the map, since the area is large and somewhat maze-like, and you really do need to explore quite a lot of it to find things you need to continue in the game, indeed currently I'm mildly stuck trying to find those last few rooms I haven't explored yet. I've made a few suggestions on the Reddit, and the developer has promised updates to the map in the next version of the game. I'd say though at the moment the game is more than playable so long as you don't mind slightly floofy directions.
Frantic Fire
Frantic Fire is our newly released action minigame. As you enter a world of chaos and inevitable destruction of epic proportions, you had better hold onto your hat – and your gun! Smash smashers to acquire smash points for your whole team to get to the top. Hunt down other players and get out your rage in this wild environment, where everything just will not stop trying to get you! features - form an alliance if you’re lucky, or get captured into another, and lead it to victory - avoid and kill enemies, making sure to smash as many smashers along the way - Stay focused, keep your eyes on the prize and go smash those smashers with no destructive distractions in the periodic 30-second truces
The End of Time Soundpack for Tintin++
This is an accessibility enhancement pack for End of Time MUD. Features include sounds, channel buffers, music, and customizable shortcut keys with multiple profiles.
The list of features supported by this pack is very extensive, so looking at the readme is very much recommended if you’re interested in trying it out.
Ploppy Pairs (iOS/Mac OS)
A fun card matching game for everyone! What makes Ploppy Pairs special is the SharePlay functionality, which lets you play with friends and family together via FaceTime and makes you feel as if you are all in the same place.
The game is designed in a kids-friendly manner, without any difficult mechanics or texts - so it can be played by everyone, even the youngest ones who cannot read yet.
There are various theme-based levels with difficulties from 4 up to 70 cards, which makes the game a great fun way to train the memory skills for all ages! Each level unlocks a new skin by reaching the best score possible. The score is dependent of the amount of needed turns.
Try it out by downloading the App Clip with one level for free on the iPhone and iPad.
HOW TO PLAY
Each level starts with a randomized faced down set of cards. Tap a card to flip it and memorize its image. If the next tapped card's image matches the first one, the cards stay faced up, otherwise they will be covered up again. Keep doing so until all of the cards are matched to finish the level.
FEATURES: - Play together via SharePlay during FaceTime calls - Kids-friendly designed - can be played by everyone even the youngest ones who cannot read yet - Five different themes with 30 levels overall - Different difficulties from 4 up to 70 cards - Endless gameplay by randomized cards - One level for trying out the game for free via App Clip - Unlockable skins in each level - Sticker Pack included - share the Ploppies with family and friends via iMessage - No advertisements or in-app purchases within the game - Offline playable
Available on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV.
Though not mentioned in the developer’s description, Version 2.0 introduced full VoiceOver support as well as graphical changes to make the game playable by those with color blindness.
Game Updates
- 4X4 Archipelago is now at version 1.2 which adds a lot of new content, including new character perks, enemies, bosses, quests, areas and more. The post linked above has a full changelog.
- July updates for Alter Aeon include various updates to crafting and guild, but also some new and newly reopened areas.
- Pokemon Access, the set of VBA scripts which provide accessibility for the 1st and 2nd generation of Pokemon games is now at Version 3 which introduces support for Pokemon Fire Red and Leaf Green (the 3rd generation remakes of the original game). Between this and the Pokemon Emerald Access scripts, we now have nearly complete access to all of the Pokemon games on the Gameboy Advance.
- Lost and Hound is due for an August 17, 2022 launch on Steam, and will follow on Xbox soon thereafter.
Mainstream Game News
Leaked screenshots of The Last Of Us Part I Remake gave us a glimpse into the game’s accessibility settings. Laura Dale provided us with descriptions of these screenshots on Twitter. Thanks to this, we know the game has all of the features first introduced in Last Of Us 2 including screen reading, audio queues and navigation assistance, as well as for the first time in a mainstream game, audio descriptions. A later video gave us a very brief glimpse of this feature in action. Just in is also a design overview video from Naughty Dog themselves.