Deaf Game Review – Farmer’s Dynasty

Coty Craven3 minute read

Farmer's Dynasty Deaf Accessibility

Subtitles are not great and players looking for the RPG part of this farming sim RPG may miss a lot of it.

Score

5 out of 10

Reviewed on Xbox One

Let me start this review by just making it clear that I love this game. I’m a sucker for farming games and I love RPGs, so this game mixing the two, I’m just so happy playing it. I had to clear that up because what follows might make it seem like I don’t like it, which is not the case.

Have you ever played a game that’s just so bad for some reason or another that it’s just precious? Probably. Like, you start it up and just instantly, you’re like “What in God’s name…?” but you can’t stop playing because there’s just something about it. That’s what Farmer’s Dynasty is for me. This is the best worst thing I have ever played. The writing is awful, the dialogue is laughably bad, there’s a tool in the game called “Nail That!” that makes me giggle every time I Nail That! And it’s definitely not the best looking farm sim out there. But I’m on a mission to sleep with my neighbor Clara, who is quite fond of me now that I’ve plowed her field (I plowed her wheat field. Grow up, reader.)

Why am I trying to sleep with Clara? Because that’s the point of Farmer’s Dynasty! To grow crops and grow children! The only way to get people to like you in this game is to do things for them, fix their barns, plow their fields, be their errand boy (how like life, right?) and once you do enough things for people, they like you! They really like you!

Now that you understand why I love this game, let’s get into why I also don’t love it.

That would be because the deaf/hoh accessibility is awful.

Usually in farm sims, there’s not much needed in the way of deaf/hoh accessibility. I mean, you grow wheat and that’s pretty much the gist of it. Wheat doesn’t need sound visualization. But in this game, there’s a story, there’s dialogue, and it’s so hard to read!

Illustrating the small subtitle text size with too much text on the screen at once.

It’s far too small and as you can see above, there’s way too much text on the screen at once.

Illustrating the illegible floating dialogue subtitles.

Shown above is the floating text that appears during the times you have to follow an NPC and as you can see, the text is smaller yet and even with the background, contrast is still a big issue.

There are no options for subtitles, not even on or off, they’re just on for everybody, which isn’t ideal, and the overall presentation of them is just not great.

However, this is the only issue regarding deaf/hoh accessibility. And if I’m being honest, the story isn’t great so I don’t feel like I’m missing out on a whole lot when I don’t feel like sitting an inch from my screen to read the text.

But there you have it, Farmer’s Dynasty – the best worst game I’ve ever played.

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Coty
CravenFormer Director of Operations and Workshop FacilitatorThey/Them

Founder of CIPT and former Director of Operations and Business Development. He/They

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