by Kestrell
It's one of the ironies of my life that I have a degree in media studies and am married to a game designer, yet have only recently found a game which Alexx and I can share with equal enjoyment.
One of the major issues I've had with accessible games is that, while they may be fully accessible to people with disabilities, they aren't really as exciting for non-disabled players to play, not compared to all the other games they could be playing. Isn't it possible, I often ranted, to develop a game environment which from the very beginning is just as fascinating to the disabled player as the nondisabled player?
Echo Bazaar
http://echobazaar.failbettergames.com/answers that question.
Echo Bazaar is a highly-decorative text-bassed game set in a pseudo-Victorian city called Fallen London. Most of the gameplay occurs through story fragments referred to as "storylets." To get a sense of what a storylet is, you can read an intro page at
http://echobazaar.failbettergames.com/Home/FindOutMoreand you can read more about Fallen London at
http://echobazaar.failbettergames.com/Home/AboutFallenLondonThe description of Fallen London actually implements one of the ideas I often used in my own thought experiment for an accessible game: due to a catastrophic event, natural light and electricity have become extinct, so everyone exists in a strange subterranean world of perpetual twilight full of uncertain shadows and surreal beings. This not only contributes to the gothic atmosphere of the game, it means that vision is not an entirely reliable sense for distinguishing friends from enemies or safe pursuits from dangerous ones.
How to get started
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