Marvel’s Spiderman Remastered is one of the games that was ALMOST playable by the blind in the early days of the PS5. I have said many times that it was so close to accessible it hurt. And now, the PC version is on its way to us. How does it stack up to the PS5 version? Are there any differences at all? Thanks to Playstation for providing me a steam key for the game, we can talk about it.

For starters, it should be said that there are no additional accessibility features. What was there is still there for the most part, and works in the same way. The feature list for the game was very focused on visual elements, such as ray tracing and so on. To be fair, there are quite a few accessibility features for all sorts of disabilities, so this isn’t entirely a bad thing, but we do have some things to talk about.

I said that every accessibility feature was there for the most part, and sadly this is true. There is a missing accessibility feature, and it does affect what the blind can do in the game. The PS5 version of Spiderman Remastered has a vibration option that can be set to off, normal, or assisted. The assisted option adds some additional functionality to the haptic feedback in the game, allowing us to use it to locate collectables, tune radios, and receive notification of triangle prompts. This feature is not present in the PC version. To be clear, the PC version does support the Dualsense, but this feature is missing. Indications may be that it might surface in a later patch, as work is still apparently being done on the haptics, but as of this writing, it is not there, making the game somewhat less accessible to us than its original version.

To be fair, though, the game was never going to be exactly as accessible, because of another missing aspect. Not specifically an accessibility feature, the 3D audio on the PS5 version is nevertheless very helpful, even when identifying whether enemies are above or below you based on their weapon sounds and dialog. Sadly, 3D audio is not a part of the PC version, removing yet another helpful source of information for us. The audio is still good, and some tricks are used to clue you into enemies that are far away, but the lack of true 3D audio absolutely stands out to me.

So there you have it. The sighted will be able to drown in the bevy of features made for them. Tons of configurable visual options from crowd and traffic density to ray tracing and more. These are great. The fact that many of the accessibility features are still here, including all of the wonderful configurable hud settings for enemies, allies, bosses and so on, is great. And OK, yeah, I acknowledge that Spiderman Remastered was never fully playable by the blind, but still… If you want to try Spiderman Remastered as a blind person, the PC version is not the place to do it. In this case, Playstation remains the best place to play. Thanks for reading!