Resident Evil Village Demo — Accessibility Deep Dive

Ben Bayliss5 minute read

It’s nearly time for the release of Resident Evil Village, a horror game in which players can expect to rummage around a castle trying to escape from the horrifically tall Lady Dimitrescu and her daughters. But with no accessibility information being shared, disabled players are unsure of what to expect in regards to playing the game.

Thankfully, Capcom has a demo available that allows players to try 60 minutes of the game which was what was allowed with previous titles such as Resident Evil 2. Players can either spend that time in the village area outside the castle or spending their time in the castle running away from spooky sounds and creepy beings. However, seeing as this is a demo, it may not be indicative of the final product when it releases this month. The following was from the PC demo.

First Boot

Admittedly, the first boot was a bit troublesome for me, with it automatically launching in a windowed state and me accidentally skipping 2 of the brightness and screen size adjustment areas because I was trying to ALT + Enter to force Resident Evil Village to go full-screen before I looked into accessibility.

Besides that, you are presented with an “Initial Settings” screen from the off, and this allows you to set your voice and display language, enable subtitles that are turned off by default, and select your audio output device. After that, the display settings appear.

Options

Controls

The first options that are made available are the controls that allow you to change a range of options. Controller vibration can be toggle off or on and a control type can be selected from a choice of 4 presets with the additional option to toggle or hold to run.

Cursor lock can be enabled, which constrains the mouse to the game screen. Mouse buttons can also be inverted as can the mouse scroll wheel. There’s also some primary and secondary key bindings available that spans gameplay, inventory navigation, menus, and puzzles but it looks as if the freedom of binding actions isn’t available.

For example, you can bind a key for crouching in Resident Evil Village, but there’s no way to bind a key for holding a button to crouch, instead, it’s forced on you to be a toggle input. The same for aiming, it’s forced as a hold input…not that I did much aiming, I was mostly running.

Camera

For camera settings, you’ll be able to change the speed of camera movements, be that for controller or mouse. These settings let you adjust how quickly the camera or aiming speed moves and there’s also options to invert aiming or camera movement. You can also turn off camera wobble.

At default settings, camera and aiming speeds were at 10 was actually fine. But mouse sensitivity was down to 4, and there was a lot of dragging the mouse involved until I decided to go and increase it.

Game Settings

Game settings has a nice selection of options to adjust. You’ll be able to choose to have aim assist on or off, choose how intense the damage display is, enable tutorials, enable/disable the HUD, and turn the reticle on or off and adjust its colours.

Aim assist didn’t seem to do much for me, and I did find that the damage display at default setting was quite intense. So it’s nice to see the option to decrease or increase that.

Audio

The audio options allow for adjusting voice, background, sound effect, and menu volumes. It also allows you to enable virtual surround sound, your output device, and your dynamic range volumes.

Language

Here, check out this wonderfully charming elder and her subtitles.

In this area, you can change the voice and display language presented to you. But there’s also the option to enable subtitles. However, if you’re looking for customisation, the demo of Resident Evil Village had none. What you can expect though is a simple font that’s actually not that bad in size, and no background nor speaker labels.


And that’s it for the options menu on PC, and I imagine it would be similar on consoles. The display options were mostly for those wanting to make the game run better on their platforms, such as enabling ray tracing and subsurface scattering. Either way, it does feel as if Resident Evil Village is a bit bare with accessibility, but we’ll have to see how the game actually plays with these in action. It’s also worth remembering that this is a demo, not the full product.

Enjoy our work? Please consider supporting us!

Donating through DAGERSystem / AbilityPoints with PayPal may be tax deductible

Ben
BaylissEditor-in-ChiefHe/Him

Ben is the one in charge of keeping the content cogs at Can I Play That? turning. Deafness means that he has a focus on discussing captions, but with experience in consultancy and advocacy, he covers what bases he can. Having written about accessibility in video games at DualShockers, GamesRadar+, GamesIndustry.biz, Wireframe, and more he continues his advocacy at CIPT. He was actually awarded a Good Games Writing award for an article he wrote here! He enjoys a range of games, but anything that’s open-world and with a photo mode will probably be his cup of tea. You can get in touch with him at: ben@caniplaythat.com

See all articles by Ben

Follow CIPT

Latest from CIPT

(Opens in new tab) starting with