Audiogames.net monthly digest - May 2022
Welcome to the 5th edition of the audiogames.net monthly digest! May has been a pretty interesting month, with a little bit of everything. From fast paced action to turn based board games and RPG’s, from Sci-Fi to Fantasy, it’s all here. Also, here be dragons!
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New Releases
To the Dragon Cave for iOS and Android
Blind-friendly audio shooter spiced with hyperbole and fantasy story. Current release supports English and Czech, coming update will add German, Polish and Spanish.
- This is audio game, headphones required * Liberate yourself from the throes of a powerful dragon, escape from a stone tower and wander hither and thither in the far-away land of Laudonia.
Not for a single moment will you be safe, that's for sure. Hordes of enemies lie in waiting at each step of your dangerous wanderings. Bloodthirsty sheep, giant spiders, skeletons, zombie trees and lots of other dark creatures strive to seize your soul.
You, however, are endowed with a mission that drives you forward. Therefore, you shall never give up.
You won't want to miss: - classical FPS game genre - first person shooter spiced with hyperbole and phantasy story - 9 different settings - you will visit a Crystal Palace, stride through the Land of Eternal Snow, sail across an Endless Lake not to avoid the City of the Dead - 11 types of enemies, not to mention 5 ruthless bosses - perfecting your weapons - because who would fence with a common sword when you can wield its diamond super-brother? - the story dialogues dubbed by professional actors - a bonus in the form of an Endless Battle - once you have survived your passing through Laudonia, you are ready to take part in this challenge - 4 different endings of the game - it is only you who is to decide the fate of the game heroes - connection with the Game Centre - because you want to show to others how good you are
Beyond the Chiron Gate
Beyond the Chiron Gate is a text-based space exploration roguelike. Explore an endless universe filled with exotic planets, strange life forms, and ancient civilisations. Manage a crew of space explorers and upgrade their ship with new technology. Brave dangerous worlds to gather the data you need to reach the home system of the mysterious Gatebuilders. The middle of the 23rd Century. A space probe operated by the Global Astronomical Society detects unusual energy readings from the asteroid 2060 Chiron. A crewed follow-up mission detects a million-year-old artefact buried beneath the asteroid's surface. A ring of exotic matter that bends space and gravity. A Gate, which when activated could lead anywhere in the galaxy...
Sound Matching for IOS
From Applevis:
Matching Game using sounds to improve your memory. Play the classic matching game, but also other game modes to train sound recognition. Optimized for visually impaired persons. Features: - Three games - Seven sound categories - Three difficulty levels - Up to four players - Eight colors schemes - Comprehensive accessibility configuration
Ancient Board Game Collection for iOS
From App Store description:
Have you ever heard of Hnefatafl, a game played during the Viking Age? Or Latrunculi, popular over 2000 years ago in ancient Rome? Discover these games and many more in the "Ancient Board Game Collection".
Features: - 9 different games: Konane, Hnefatafl, Nine Men's Morris, Dablot Prejjesne, Gomoku, Halatafl, Latrunculi, Five Field Kono and Bagh-Chal - Play online against your friends or compete with via Game Center - Local Multiplayer on a single device - Step up your game by playing against the AI - Fully Accessible via VoiceOver and Voice Control - More Games will be added in future updates
Stellar Aeon Soundpack (For Mush client)
As described by Dentin on the forum:
The new Stellar Aeon soundpack is finally available! It's based on MushClient and shouldn't require any configuration to get it working after install. You can get the installer at http://stellaraeon.com. For those of you who don't know, Stellar Aeon is a space exploration game without any combat or fighting. You can mine for minerals, process ores, do various kinds of jobs for cash, upgrade and buy ships, hire additional crew, explore distant star systems, discover aliens, travel through wormholes, and more! For new players, you get a ship and a single crew member to start out with. The 'help' command is context sensitive and will guide you through understanding the commands and knowing what to do. There's special jobs at the start of the game to help you learn the basics of how to control your ship, navigate to various places, and mine. See you there!
Accessible letteronic for iOS
Accessible letteronic The accessible word game that you can play with all persons. This game has some accessibility features for various disability profiles. This game has improvements for people with visual impairments. This game is compatible with an external keyboard. This game is compatible with VoiceOver. Braille display's users should read the instructions to improve the gaming experience. Feedback with vibrations is only available in iPhone devices. Play with word of 4, 5 or 6 letters. Play as much as you like in English and Spanish and learn the meanings of the secret words. you can know if the letter is in the right place using colors, textured colors, sounds, voice, vibrations or braille. Every time you discover the secret word you will earn points. The objective of the game is to discover the maximum possible number of secret words to get the best score. Play with the official rules or play with easier rules. Change the difficulty level to get more points. You can change the difficulty level using the options in the settings menu. Share your high scores and achievements in GameCenter.
Game Updates
- Stardew Access has received a major update that adds more location/event-specific tiles to the readout, pet and co-op-related options to the character customization screen, an accessible museum donation menu, and much more.
- Fight! is now at version 22.0504 which, in the words of the developer brings “a truckload of new features” including a new more challenging arena mode
- Apotheorasis - Lab of the Blind Gods has officially reached version 1.0 and is out of early access. It’s unclear if there are any differences between V 1.0 and The previous V0.14 release from April, but it’s safe to assume it should be more stable and have fewer bugs
- Blind Survival is now at Beta 3. The changelog mentions adding new ambient sounds, an autosave system, and if you’re a patron a number of new story sections were added that you can experience before the game gets officially released.
- May updates for Alter Aeon focused on the crafting system. There are 3 new crafting guilds and various new skills were added to make crafting deeper and more interesting. There were also a few smaller changes to other skills and more exciting updates are planned for the summer.
- Warsim is now at V0.8.5, which adds various crowning ceremonies when you start the game. Like everything else in Warsim there are many of them and they’re chosen at random. Various other events were also expanded with new choices and outcomes. THe link above has all the details.
- BC4000 in Version 1.5.1 now has a multiplayer mode as well as an online Speedrunning leaderboard
- Bitlife a text-based life simulator once beloved for its accessibility on iOS is once again screen reader friendly. The game was ported to the Unity engine which is what caused it to become inaccessible, but the latest version has incorporated the accessibility plugin which makes the game playable on both iOS and Android.
- Mental Home just introduced a new major feature to Sonar Islands, events. These will be various time limited challenges you can participate in for a place on the brand new leaderboard as well as other rewards. The first of these events is a ride down the mineshaft in a train complete with having to avoid boulders and making sure that switches on the track are set correctly.
- Swordy Quest Had 2 updates in May with many changes and fixes mainly to improve the tutorials and experience for new players, as well as introducing a brand new healer class
- SayTheSpire Now at Version 0.3.4 added a few additional info keys to read incoming damage, player energy and monster intents, as well as made speech output configurable and fixed a number of crashes.
- Inheritance Public Build Now at A66 added a new location/NPC, dozens of scenes and improved distributions from mugging. Also of note are fixes to many user-reported issues.
Mainstream game news
- Sony/Santa Monica Studio have chosen Global Accessibility Awareness Day to reveal the accessibility features of God of War Ragnarök. Among the currently revealed features are an autosprint feature, full controller remapping, high contrast settings, captions and subtitles, etc. More features on the way include combat/aim assists, puzzle/minigame assists, autopickup, and much more. Considering the PlayStation's strong connection to accessibility as seen in The Last of Us 2 this could be huge news for us in the coming months. The trailer is also audio described.
- Continuing with the theme of mainstream game accessibility, the Ship of Harkinian project, which is a manmade PC port of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, just released a video announcing upcoming features. One of these features is text to speech for all menus and game dialog, as well as additional audio queues and an object viewer to make the game blind friendly. The project still has a long way to go with refining these features, however they’re being created with input from multiple experienced blind gamers. You can read more about this and follow additional news in this forum thread.
- And finally, the Game Audio Network Guild has recognized Blind Drive as a winner for the Excellence in Audio Accessibility category, tying with Halo Infinite. A hardy serving of congratulations goes to the good folks at Lo-Fi People.