Blind Gaming: PlayStation’s Spider-Man

Growing up I played a little bit of PlayStation with my dad and brother. We played racing games and Guitar Hero. Even when I was eight, I was tired of doing beginner on Guitar Hero because all you do is push the bar to the beat. I wanted to start learning the sequences of color buttons on the Guitar, so my parents worked with me and helped me memorize Eye of the Tiger on Easy difficulty! Unfortunately, it’s been so long that I don’t remember how to do it now, but I’m very grateful to my parents for taking the time to create more of a challenge for me and I loved it! Thinking about it now, it wouldn’t be that hard to add a screen reader to it. It would just need to say, “Green, yellow, blue,” Etc. but it would have to be able to keep up with the music.

As much as I love Manamon and all the other PC games for the blind, nobody really knew about them except a couple of my blind friends, and I wanted to talk about these games with everyone. Then I started thinking about trying to find some mainstream games that might be accessible. In late 2022, a friend of mine showed me a playthrough of Marvel’s Spider-Man for the PS4 from Insomniac Games that came out in 2018, and I absolutely fell in love with it! I wanted to play it so bad, but I was sad it didn’t have any accessibility features for the blind. Since then I’ve watched THREE more playthroughs and got a PS5, Spider-Man, and The Last Of Us in July of 2023! Spider-Man is for the PS4, but you can still play it on the PS5.

It would be nice if Spider-Man had accessibility, but it was getting to the point where I didn’t care and I just wanted to play! It does have an option to skip puzzles and automatically complete quick time events, but that’s about it for someone who is blind. Of course I started with Spider-Man and it did take me quite a while to find the first part of the first mission, but I was happy I did it myself. Sometimes when people on YouTube play, they’ll read the instructions out loud so I used that to help me during the tutorial. I already knew a few things because my friend who showed me the playthrough has played it before and he’s visually impaired, so I knew it had to be possible.

My friend would help me over the phone because we could start a shareplay, which means the other person who has a PlayStation can see my screen instead of me holding my phone up to the TV. One of the big things I could do on my own was the combat. It took a little while for me to get the hang of it, but I’m pretty good at it now. On the very first boss fight I told him I didn’t want any help, so I found an article that explained everything. It took about three hours, but I did it on my own and I was very happy! The mission leading up to the first boss fight took me a week, but I recently started a new game and the entire mission including the boss fight took me three hours!

I had to have a lot of help with navigation because there wasn’t any way for me to know where to go. Sometimes I didn’t want help because I love swinging around the city looking for crime, and that helped me level up faster. The big thing that helped me with combat was enemy bases. Six waves of enemies come at you and you have to fight them off. If you die, it starts you all the way back at the beginning. If I died, I would be sad for a split second, but I started noticing I’d get further and further each time, and that was a huge motivator. The combat is very sound based, so once I got used to it, I loved that I didn’t need help with it.

Sometimes my dad and brother will stand in my doorway and watch, and they’ll excitedly tell me how good I did. Then they will try with their eyes closed and make me die! The very first time it happened it made me a little sad because I was struggling with crime anyway, but now it’s just funny. My favorite parts are the boss fights, and I did not want help with them at all. I did need a little bit of help with the last one because the middle section had fire everywhere and I didn’t know how to avoid it. I was a little bummed, but I was proud of myself for doing the first and third parts on my own!

The second game in the Insomniac Spider-Man series is Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I wasn’t as excited for that one as I was the first one, but I wanted to play it at least once. They added more accessibility, and the most notable feature for a blind player is when you push R3 to activate your Spidey Sense, it also points you towards the main objective! It works great when swinging, but if you’re trying to get around in a house for example, it will point you in the right direction, but it won’t make a path, so I could be walking right into a wall. I still needed help with that game, but not nearly as much as the first one when that feature would work correctly.

On October 20, 2023, the latest game in Insomniac’s Spider-Man series came out called Marvel’s Spider-Man 2! It has both Peter Parker and Miles Morales, and that’s the main reason why I played Miles’s game. He has different attacks than Peter, so I wanted to make sure I knew how to do them before playing Spider-Man 2. It had mostly the same accessibility features as Miles, but Insomniac did add more audio cues this time around like different beeps to find collectables around the city when the game first came out. One of my favorite new features is where you have to scan your environment with your camera, and there’s a beep that let’s you know what you’re looking for so I just follow that beep until it speeds up and I find it. Even though none of them had audio description or a screen reader at the time, I’ve noticed even the slightest accessibility changes made a huge impact on how I play the games. Spider-Man didn’t really have any accessibility features for the blind, and it took me two months to finish it because of how much sighted assistance I needed. Both Miles Morales and Spider-Man 2 took me three weeks, and that really helped me realize even the smallest amount of accessibility goes a long way.

Another thing I love about Spider-Man 2 is how helpful the controller is! There’s a mission where you have to turn to face different things in your environment, and if the statue of liberty is on your left the controller will emit little taps on the left side so I just turn until the taps are in the middle. Without going into too much detail about Spider-Man, Peter gets the Symbiote suit, which is weak to a loud noise like a bell. One of the boss fights includes ringing a bell to disorient him. It was hard for me to hear where the bell was to web it up because it was echoing, but I noticed the controller would pulse when the bell would ring. If the pulses were on the right side, I would turn so they were in the middle and I was able to quickly web up the bell and make it stop ringing. It was so cool because in the past I had to have help webbing things up because the webs don’t auto aim.

On March 7, 2024, Insomniac Games added a huge update to Spider-Man 2 that includes New Game Plus, a few new suits for Peter and Miles, mission replay, and more accessibility features. The most notable features for me are audio description, a screen reader, and an audio ping that works by looking at the waypoint to let you know how close or far away you are from your objective. The screen reader allows me to upgrade my gadgets, unlock suits, take down enemies stealthily, and so many other things I needed help with in the past! Before this update, I finished the story three weeks after it came out, but I wasn’t able to do much side stuff to 100% the game because of how much help I needed. Because of the screen reader alone, I went from 86% complete to 95% just this past weekend!

I’m so excited to start a new game with these features and see if it takes me any less time than my previous playthrough. I was a little worried that the audio description wouldn’t describe some scenes because The Last of Us does that sometimes, but I was blown away with how good it is! If there’s a scene happening while you’re walking, it will even describe that! The Last of Us won’t even do that! There are a few bugs here and there with the screen reader and look-at-waypoint features, but this is still very new and I’m sure there will be smaller updates to fix those bugs. I would love if Insomniac could add these features to the other two Spider-Man games as well!

The Last Of Us Parts One and Two are 100% accessible for someone who’s blind or visually impaired. There are so many accessibility options, including an audio cue glossary so you know what all the audio cues mean. If you have the screen reader enabled on your PlayStation already, the screen reader on both of The Last Of Us games as well as Spider-Man 2 will automatically turn on. There is a tone that plays letting you know when to turn, but you can also push L3 as you walk, and it will point you in the right direction. You can also scan for items and enemies, and it will take you directly to those. When you find one it will play an audio cue letting you know so you don’t pass it up. There are also audio cues for ledges, generators, different pitches indicating where you’re about to shoot an enemy so you can properly aim, an audio cue to dodge, audio described cut scenes, and so many others.

I haven’t had to ask for sighted assistance once during either one of The Last of Us games, and I’ve finished them both. This is how all games should be! Playstation, Xbox, and PC mainstream games seem to be heading that route and I’m really looking forward to it. I saw an accessibility preview of God of War Ragnarok, and the features sound like they’re just like the ones on The Last Of Us. It’s very annoying that blind people have to wait to get the accessibility features we need. They should be available when the game launches. It’s sad that it took so long for game developers to include proper accessibility, but I’m glad it’s being done now.