Deaf Game Review – Mutant Year Zero

Mutant Year Zero Deaf Accessibility

Bottom line: When playing on PC, Mutant Year Zero is fully accessible for Deaf and hoh players. We'd even go so far as to call it Deaf friendly. Console is less so, with subtitles being far too small to easily read, but the rest of the game is still widely accessible.

Score

9.5 out of 10

Mutant Year Zero is a new tactical adventure game with turn-based combat and free exploration out this week from Funcom. In the past, we’ve not had great luck with games that require stealth because so often, stealth games rely heavily on sound and listening, yet fail to provide any visual indicators of sounds for Deaf and hoh players. So we didn’t go into Mutant Year Zero expecting much.

We were very pleasantly surprised.

Before you jump into the game, you can toggle subtitles (they’re on by default) and choose your preferred language.

Those subtitles though, well, they’re not great. They would greatly benefit from some size options, a dark background behind them, and cutscenes desperately need speaker labels. As they are currently, they work fine for PC players but on console if you play sitting across the room, they’re quite difficult to read.

There are also a few instances of there being far too much text on the screen, again during cutscenes.

During gameplay, there’s a helpful icon above whichever character is speaking, though the text is still far too small to read.

While the subtitles are a disappointment, what makes this game one of the more accessible stealthy games we’ve played is the enemy radar (that’s not what it’s called in the game but we can’t think of a better term, so, enemy radar it is). Well before you’re forced to engage in combat, you can see red silhouettes on screen and little red diamonds up top on your little compass bar.

Also very handy for deaf and hoh players is the red or white outline you’ll see for enemies that indicated their range of vision and once engaged in combat, there are visual indicators for being in cover and whether your characters are in the line of enemy fire.

Bottom line: When playing on PC, Mutant Year Zero is fully accessible for Deaf and hoh players. We’d even go so far as to call it Deaf-friendly. Console is less so, with subtitles being far too small to easily read, but the rest of the game is still widely accessible.