Resident Evil 3 Remake Deaf/HoH Accessibility
All in all, while it doesn't suffer from all the Deaf/hoh accessibility problems RE7 and RE2 do, Resident Evil 3 Remake is yet another accessibility failure for Capcom and the Resident Evil franchise.
Score
4 out of 10Game reviewed on PS4.
This review won’t be much of a departure from Elizabeth Garcia’s review of the demo, so instead of simply reiterating everything she said, I’ll just add a few things that stood out to me.
The game begins with a dream sequence. Jill is turning into one of the zombie things. She’s inexplicably left the TV on and water running all night and her gun just out on the bathroom counter (Raccoon City must suspend rent during this pandemic if she can just afford to do that nonsense). It’s dark and creepy, as made evident by the sound design, which is for naught for Deaf players. She jolts awake.
Players now in control of Jill, she once again eventually goes to the bathroom to find her water running (seriously who does this??) and upon leaving the bathroom, the subtitles read, “Just a sec!” or some such line alerting players that something is happening.
Is it the door? She shouts something in her impatience, which leads me to believe there’s definitely someone at the door.
Nope. It’s not the door. Is it the phone? Who knows! There’s no visual cue of the ringing phone, so Jill will just bumble around her apartment as we search for the phone that I failed to notice earlier.
I’ve said it before and I’ll keep repeating myself until games stop this:
If your game has a phone players need to answer to progress the story you need to give a directional, visual cue.
The subtitles are far from great. You can’t resize them, there’s no dark background.
Most annoyingly of all, there are no speaker names with the subtitles. In scenes like the one shown above where Jill is talking on her radio with her back to the camera, there is absolutely no way for players to determine who is talking.
In the scene above, hearing players will have the immersive benefit of hearing the zombie commotion going on around the corner. While the lack of full captions hurts immersion in the RE3 Remake world, in my time with the game, I didn’t find any of the enemies (aside from Nemesis) fast enough or surprisingly close enough to catch me off guard and make the game harder.
All in all, while it doesn’t suffer from all the Deaf/hoh accessibility problems RE7 and RE2 do, Resident Evil 3 Remake is yet another accessibility failure for Capcom and the Resident Evil franchise.
