2022-04-01 08:11:49

March 2022

Welcome back to the audiogames.net monthly digest, bringing you all the latest news about games playable with no sight. Time marches on, and so we must once again spring into action and Scramble to put all of these updates from around the forum and elsewhere together for you. We should probably also stop with these horrendous puns before we make April fools of ourselves…

But before we get started, a quick update. We now have a newsletter! Subscribe here to get these digests sent straight to your inbox on the first of every month. Perfect for those with busy schedules that want to remain informed about everything accessible gaming.

As always, topics of interest will be marked up with headings to speed up navigation.

Edge Magazine feature on audiogames.net

As you might recall from previous news posts, both audiogames.net and The Vale were featured in Edge Magazine. The article features comments from multiple ag.net staff including Richard, Sander and Jack, as well as a lot of very interesting background information about both the site and audio games in general.

While the Edge Magazine requires a subscription to read, Alex Spencer, the article’s author has graciously given us permission to post it in our articles room.

You can read it here, and if you like what you saw consider supporting the magazine and its staff by buying the issue.

New releases
1428: Shadows Over Silesia - a mainstream game with full blindness accessibility

Though not yet officially released, given the significance of this release we feel it deserves a mention in this section.

Shadows over Silesia is a dark action adventure game with fantasy elements, set in real medieval Europe. With true historical events in the background, you can mainly expect challenging puzzles and difficult battles, but also stealth scenes and important decisions. You will come across possessed devil worshipers, sexual demons, and beasts from hell, as well as creatures well-known from European mythology.
Dark fantasy story
Europe is in the middle of religious upheaval and many preachers predict that the end of the world is near. The year is 1428 and the Hussites have just set out on their Silesian campaign. These heretics appear to be the biggest threat in the kingless country. But true evil of a completely different kind is lurking nearby and it does not intend to engage in religious disputes.
The game is linear and takes place during the entire Hussite campaign. It will be divided into thirteen chapters, with which you will be able to spend about 30 hours of playtime. You will experience everything from the point of view of the two main characters. Hynek, a grumpy Hussite hetman who doesn't hesitate to swear or mess around with anything, and Lothar, a Hospitaller knight, a man of good education and manners who stands alongside his brethren in the front line of the Silesian defence. Each has their own motivations and views of the world around them, and different equipment and abilities. Their fates will soon become intertwined. Will they face one another, weapon in hand, or forge a fragile alliance to stand shoulder to shoulder against a far worse enemy?
Challenging puzzles
The original puzzles you will come across on your dangerous journey will most definitely be tough. Classic adventure games of the 1990s were a big inspiration. You will have to take advantage of your surroundings, look for objects, obtain information, and solve puzzles or encoded messages. Some problems can be solved in multiple ways, or they can be cleverly worked around.
Sneaking in the shadows
Sometimes you'll have to blend into the shadows and sneak past enemies to avoid being detected. Following their patrol routes and habits will help you find the best path. Or you can try to quietly take them out, one by one.
Complex combat
The combat system is easy to understand but it takes practice to fully master it. Remember one thing: being outnumbered is a problem! If three or more opponents attack you at the same time, you will die! The key is to take advantage of their mistakes, wait for the right moment, and then attack. You will face not just knights, villagers, and robbers, but also various supernatural beings who are not to be underestimated.
Diverse environments
In the game, you will move around on foot as well as on horseback. You will visit various real as well as fictitious places in medieval Silesia. You will plunder villages, doggedly defend the city walls, and explore places such as secret dungeons, abandoned mines, or forbidden parts of monasteries. For example, you can look forward to visiting Röwersdorf, Nysa, the Brzeg monastery, or the Rabesberg castle.
Hidden coins
You will have the opportunity to search for two kinds of hidden coins. Only the best of the best will be able to collect them all. Not only will you fill your wallet with them and unlock unique achievements, but you can also occasionally use them to progress through the story.
Accessibility features
1428: Shadows over Silesia will be fully accessible to you. This will make it the first game ever on PC and the second overall (after The Last of Us Part II) to bring full blind support to an adventure of this scale. We're not talking about just some of the in-game text being read or about some kind of rudimentary navigation. The game will bring all-new revolutionary elements that will allow you to enjoy a full experience not only of the story, dialogue and exploring the environment, but also stealth scenes or combat, including large scale battles! Although the accessibility in TLOU2 was a tremendous success and won numerous awards, Shadows over Silesia takes everything to a whole new level never seen before.
The following is a summary of the accessibility features the game will offer you:

  • Full narration of all in-game text

    • Including the reading of pop-up hints, character properties, active quests, journal entries and inventory

    • Closed captions in cutscenes

    • Subtitle narration for non-dubbed languages

    • The ability to skip forward and backward in text

    • Support for JAWS and NVDA

  • Special environment descriptions

    • Most locations have their own text descriptions, so that even you can enjoy the game's dark atmosphere while receiving additional information you would otherwise miss

  • Advanced navigational features

    • Navigation to important story points, characters and even custom points that can be added on demand in an unlimited quantity

    • Reporting of the remaining distance to the destination

    • Compass narration as well as a coordinate system

    • Assistance with turning towards objects or characters

  • Sonar

    • A revolutionary feature that will finally allow you to freely explore and navigate the entire game world

    • The sonar also announces friendly and enemy characters and determines their locations

    • Alerts for traps or destructible barriers

  • A large number of audio cues

    • Alerts for objects and interesting interactions. Many of these provide additional sounds to let you know what is around you right as you first hear it

    • Alerts for the beginning and end of cutscenes, low health, leaving an area, and many other situations

    • Warnings about enemies

    • Signals to attack or defend

  • Optional simplification of some mechanics

    • Accessible combat, including large scale battles

    • Accessible stealth that maintains its atmosphere as well as difficulty

    • More time to complete timed events

  • And a great deal of other extra goodies

    • Fully remappable controls, even when using a controller

    • The option to receive sonar feedback not just via audio but also as controller vibrations

    • The entire user interface, including all menus and dialogs, completely accessible with both the keyboard and controller

    • The possibility to lock camera rotation or turn the camera off altogether

    • The option to configure sound to play as though in first person view. You will thus be literally in the center of the events and will be able to hear every single murmur and whisper even better, although the game is visually displayed in third person

    • The option to have accessibility cues displayed also visually

    • Separate sliders for the game's master volume as well as music, voices, user interface sounds and others

    • A wide array of graphics settings

    • The possibility to increase or decrease the size of the user interface as needed

The link above also includes an audio trailer for the game. While a public demo is scheduled to come out in June, multiple streamers have already gotten access to an early version and streamed it. These include:

Scramble!

If the 1428 announcement is what wrapped up the month with a bang, Scramble! Is what started it with an equally large one.

Are you ready for fast paced action the likes of which has rarely been seen before? Are you ready for round after addicting round of intense, high speed, and riveting chaos? Are you ready… to Scramble?

Welcome to the latest arcade title from Steven D!

Race against the clock of impending doom to accumulate the highest score possible and leave a legacy of respect by showing up everyone on the scoreboards!

Collect items, avoid high speed cannon balls and lethal flying bricks, and Scramble to grab as many items as you can, all while avoiding a merciless, rapidly expanding pit that threatens to eventually consume everything in its path without yield or consideration!

Fight intense battles for just a few more seconds to beat your high score as the odds stack higher and higher against you! Run, jump, and climb your way to success! These and more are things you’ll be doing, as you climb the ranks in the world of Scramble.

Unlock various game modes to provide new, exciting opportunities to challenge your skills like never before! Show your reflexive, attentive, and strategical prowess by boasting your greatest accomplishments on the scoreboard, complete with detailed statistical logs so everyone can see just how skilled you really are!

Discover tens of badges and achievements for every good thing you do and every mistake you make. Challenge yourself to do better, and keep track of your progress with comprehensive stats systems, and local score listings for each variation!

And finally, if you’re really up for it, unlock the obscure minigame, and prove to us all that you can succeed in diversely hellish environments. This, and more, is what you will get with Scramble, resulting in countless hours of addicting fun!

Members of the audiogames forum have graciously gifted over ten fully registered versions to those who lack the means to purchase it themselves, and will continue to do so this month. The beta team is also buying one copy for every three the community is able to give. Enter into the drawing, or contribute yourself here.

Sku - an accessibility add-on for World of Warcraft Classic

An addon has been developed which allows blind players to play WoW TBC (The Burning Crusade Classic.) The addon allows you to navigate independently, complete quests, manage inventory, read all quest information, interact with npc's, keybind assign skills and spells, communicate with other players and in general progress as far as level 60 and beyond if you ask for a little help in the higher levels

Bizhawk Pokémon Emerald Access script

The Bizhawk Pokémon Emerald Access script is a project aiming to give a screen reader access to the game "Pokémon Emerald" much like the Pokecrystal access project or the Pokémon Access project. This script is released in a rather rough shape, please don't expect a perfect experience.

It looks like the scripts are under very active development, with an update already being released that fixed a few initial crashes. However, like the developer’s description says this is still early stages of development so not all features that you might expect from previous such efforts have been implemented.

[Scaffold-22: Twine Cyberpunk RPG]

As discovered and described by Bladestorm 360:

Cyberpunk RPG with many features not seen in most twine RPGS.
Explore Scaffold-22, a huge space station.
Play as a mercenary, choose from at least three different combat styles. Combat is quite descriptive.
Tasks to complete, much like quests, fit seamlessly into the storyline.
Complete with music and some sound effects.
PDA acts as the game's menu system, containing a messaging system, a codex of all of the game's lore which can also be accessed by clicking links in the game's story section, and also keeps track of the player's statistics.

Trigaea

Could you survive an alien world? Change your genetics and wander the wasteland for answers, all the while aided by your AI companion.
Trigaea is an epic 200,000-word piece of interactive fiction. It's a combination of a sci-fi novel and an RPG adventure game, where you are in control of the story. 
Game Highlights:

  • Augment yourself with animal, insect, robot or alien parts.

  • Decide the fate of a planet. Deal with interesting moral dilemmas!

  • Twelve different endings to unlock. Over 12 hours of gameplay.

  • Deal with enemies by talking, subduing, scaring, or fighting them.

  • Scrounge for microchips to unlock your memories and discover your past.

  • Play as male/female/non-binary or straight/bi/gay/ace.

  • Stunning alien landscapes from a range of professional sci-fi artists.
    Content Warnings: Mild violence, depictions of death. Rated 13+

Fight!

From Dark’s description in our Database:

Fight, the first project by long established forumite and now game developer Sightless wolf, is the perfect solution to get all of your destructive needs met in one place, whether it's for huge multiple melees between teams of warriors? Engaging in adrenaline pumping one on one matchups, or having a good snigger as you set two people you dislike to lambast each other with machine guns and fireballs.

Fight is nothing less than a quite extensive combat simulation program for creating and running turn based battles. To begin, create and modify your fighter. All fighters begin with 50 health, 100 speed, (determining their turn order), 0 defence, and 0 attack, though you can create fighters with different stats if you wish. Then, assign your fighter some moves from the rather extensive list available, a list which ranges from flying kicks and punches to chronospheres and dark magic. Some moves will modify the stats of your fighter or the opponent, some will directly do damage.

After you've created a fighter or two, decide whether to have them fight each other, or team up together, or to take on one of the game's preset arena challenges, though bare in mind, modifying your fighter's tats will disqualify them from fighting in the arena. After this, start the fight, and either watch the action, or indeed select the fighter's moves yourself, .

Though at this point in time, the main focus of the game is simulating battles and creating new fighters, beating arena opponents will award the player with fight tokens which may be used to purchase additional movesets and even custom fighters in the upgrade store.

With a huge range of moves, output to NVDA, Sapi or Jaws, great music, and more features, including a mission mode, to come in the future, fight is definitely the answer to get all your combat impulses met in one place, it's also free! .

[iOS: DDHeroes - Dragon Dungeon Hero]

Another excellent title from Jianfeng Wu which, like his other releases is based on an existing mainstream game. This time it’s Heros of Might and Magic, and the description doesn’t give the game’s sheer complexity and scale justice!

The DDHeroes is a turn based strategy war game. Heroes running around the map with creatures in their armies, battling other creatures and hero armies, gaining experience and learning new skills, collecting resources and artifacts, capturing mines and castles and building improvements to existing castles in order to produce and hire more powerful creatures. Usually the aim is to rule the world by defeating all other heroes and capturing all of their castles. A player can have multiple heroes either running or sailing around the map or garrisoned in a castle.

Each adventure turn (consisting of you and AI moves) is represented as a single day, and days are organized into cycles of weeks and months. At the start of each week, creature dwellings produce new recruits, and in most cases neutral armies will increase in size. The primary resource is gold, which is generated by towns on a daily basis. Gold alone is sufficient for obtaining basic buildings and most creatures. As construction progresses, increasing amounts of secondary resources such as wood, ore, gems, crystal, sulphur, and mercury are required. These resources, as well as gold, are produced at mines and other secondary structures, which are located on the map and require heroes to capture them. As with towns, mines can also be captured by enemy heroes, presenting an additional avenue for conflict.

Combat occurs on a hexagonal grid battlefield, and turn-based too. Creatures in an army are represented by unit stacks, each of which consists of a single type of creature, in any quantity. Five of stacks are available to each army, and army morale suffers with mixing incompatible unit types. Several random factors affect combat result, and hero abilities, artifacts and spells influence a unit's luck and morale ratings. A unit that triggers good luck deals more or receives less damage, and a unit that triggers high morale receives an extra chance to attack. Heroes do not act as units, and cannot be harmed. Surrendering allows the player to keep the remaining units intact after paying a heavy price in gold.

The strategy logic and user interactive concept are inspired by the original Jon Van Caneghem's Heroes of Might and Magic II. Most maps in the game come from public domain generated by fans and licensed by the creative commons license or free to use license.

Let's start playing with the following features: 6 types of castles/heroes, 4 primary skills, 14 secondary skills, over 70 spells/artifacts/structures, 9 terrain types and 66 creatures.

Truly a complex and involved RPG, the likes of which have not been seen since old-school fantasy strategies like Heroes of Might and Magic.

note: The current release is an initial stab at accessibility. Workarounds have been found for many of the issues faced by VoiceOver users, and we look forward to seeing more in coming builds.

grim Quest origins. A prequel to Grim Quest

Grim Quest: Origins is a classic turn-based RPG / Dungeon Crawler with clean aesthetics and a retro vibe. It puts a lot of emphasis on atmosphere and immersion with lots of written text, carefully picked music, and fitting visuals that paint a colourful world of an exotic tropical archipelago. Some rogue like elements are thrown in for good measure. Reminiscent of pen and paper DnD.

*** FEATURES ***

  • immerse in a rich fantasy world with its own history and lore

  • defeat enemies and fight boss battles in a classic turn-based combat system

  • customise your character with many unique spells, as well as active and passive skills

  • select one of 7 character backgrounds and personalize your character with 50+ special perks that each affect gameplay in their own way

  • experience the game world through a variety of interactive, text-based events

  • manage your own ship and crew as you explore a wild tropical archipelago

  • acquire weapons, armors, acessories, consumable items, crafting ingredients and more

  • complete quests, collect bounties and find scattered pieces of lore

  • relax or add suspense with 4 difficulty levels, optional permadeath and other adjustable settings

Black (Android puzzle game)

Black is a multi-touch blind puzzle game with a black screen and without any video content.

Discover objects in the scenes using auditory cues and interact by tapping and dragging to solve puzzles.

Drag and connect pairing objects, tap others at the same time, while avoiding obstacles.

Try this ad-free blind game if you like solving puzzles.

Game updates
  • Apotheorasis - Lab of the Blind Gods received 2 major updates in March. The first introduced the Game’s 3rd act, while the second added proper voice acting.

  • Shooter got a minor update introducing support for the ZDSR screen reader as well as some bug fixes

  • The Bard's Tale - Warlocks of Largefearn is now also available as an app for iOS and Android in addition to the voice assistant skills

  • The ErionMud staff posted about everything that’s happened to the mud since November, which is quite a lot - more rooms, new areas, new features and more.

  • Say the Spire - a mod making Slay the Spire accessible is now at version 0.3.3, which speaks more events automatically and adds extra hotkeys to quickly read the most important information like your health.

  • System Fault got a bunch of updates in March which changed and improved some sounds and mainly felt with various bug fixes and balance tweaks

  • Blind Survival now at Beta 2 now lets you use your screen reader for game messages. It also introduces subtitles, a settings menu and other features to make navigation easier

  • The GTA 5 access mod started by Liam Erven, which has been abandoned for a while was just picked up by a new developer. A new version is already out adding additional feedback for aircraft and fixing the altitude tones. More updates are promised

  • The 2nd DLC pack for Haunted House was just released, adding 2 more games to the mini game collection

  • Your_Adventure Now at version 4.1 introduced better harvesting and woodcutting activities as well as made the sewers more exciting and dangerous

  • Fantasy Story 2 now at version 2.6 with a number of bug fixes, simplifying the options menu and a number of other small bugs

  • Alter Aeon’s March update post mentions extending mines, making the library system work and more

Other news

The “Audiogames association” - the group of companies and people responsible for games like the inquisitor series or A Western Drama are transitioning to a new company. Part of this process will cause their previous activation codes to stop working. New codes will be issued, however many of their older games will no longer be supported or available for purchase after April 13th, so there is currently a blowout sale in progress on their existing store. More details in the official Email below:

Hello there,
on 13th April audiogame.store will change!
Our website will pass under the company Operaludica srl and renewed.
New store but same address.
With this change the usercodes you bought will no longer be valid but we'll send you the new ones for the games you purchased.
Because of the old age, some games are impossible to update to the new standard and will not be avaible on the new store. Before deleting them from our catalog you can buy them at half their price.
The games that will not be updated are:

  • Audiomoto Championship

  • Space Encounter

  • Audio Rally Racing

  • Flarestar

  • Audiospeed

  • Blind Gladiator

  • She Noire

  • Inquisitor Audiogame Adventure Chapter 2 e 3
    Obviously these titles will remain playable for those who have already bought them or will buy them before April 13th!