In one of the game design discords I’m in, someone posted the following IGN article: Hollow Knight: Silksong Reinforces the Metroidvania Genre’s Accessibility Barriers. The article was written by Grant Stoner, someone who’s written plenty about accessibility across the field of games, and he argues that Silksong lacks accessibility options to make it more inclusive to people with disabilities.

The game’s demands of speed and precision, combined with a lack of accessibility features and my own disability, has meant that I physically can’t play it. And so I’m unable to give an accurate analysis of gameplay, story, and even the art direction of different zones, all of which can be examined through an accessible lens. Instead, I want to talk about the overarching problems of the Metroidvania genre itself, and how Silksong is just perpetuating and reinforcing inaccessible barriers.

I’d recommend reading the article yourself, but in short, Stoner comments on the game’s lack of difficulty settings, lack of button remapping, and how some of the features that do help with accessibility are only unlocked if you’ve sunk enough hours into the game first.

Silksong’s difficulty and lack of accessibility offerings make for an inaccessible challenge, but that’s not why I can’t play. As my disability progressed and I lost function in my hands, I found the speed and precision required to play Metroidvanias became too much. Even The Lost Crown, with its accessibility offerings, was too taxing for me to finish. […] Therein lies my biggest critique of this genre – beyond what we’ve seen in The Lost Crown, no accessibility settings or system designs have yet to address the speed and inaccessibility of the core combat and platforming gameplay. I am the first person to admit I am no game designer. I also acknowledge it’s virtually impossible to make every game accessible to every disabled player. Yet, as a lifelong fan of the genre, I genuinely miss playing these games. I’m not critiquing them out of baseless anger, but rather a desire to play one of my favorite genres once again.

While I understand his perspective, the more I thought about it, the more I came to a possibly cruel realization - difficulty is inherently exclusionary. At a basic level, making something difficult is making it so that less people can accomplish it, but at deeper level than that, there is no test of skill that one could produce that would not alienate some disability.

If you make a rhythm game, you’re excluding anyone with auditory issues. If you make a game that requires precise movement, you’re excluding anyone with eyesight problems. If you have realtime mechanics, you’re excluding people who have trouble with reaction speed. Hell, merely having a puzzle could be a problem if someone has cerebral issues.

Any challenge you create needs to put some player’s capabilities to the test, and there will necessarily be players who have an issue with said capability. The more tests of this kind you have, the less people can enjoy your title.

Now is this a bad thing? I don’t think so. The discussion of “who should a game be made for” is one that’s far older than me and I do not know enough about to opine on, but a game designer may intentionally choose to limit some tool’s utility in order to make the median player have more fun. For example, the article brings up the following supposedly missing feature:

[Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown’s Memory Shards system] allows you to take a screenshot of a location and pin it to the map, which provides a persistent reminder of previously-visited zones that may require specific items to traverse, or places to return to once you’ve become stronger. […] I understand Team Cherry may not have the same resources as Ubisoft, but to offer nothing that aids accessibility beyond the bare minimum in the form of map markers is frustrating.

However, I don’t think this was left out as an accident nor as a budget constraint: Silksong’s limited map is a feature. The map is intentionally very vague, not even showing the player where they ara. This is carried over from Hollow Knight, and in my opinion, made exploration more fun. I needed to actually pay attention to the map, build a mental model of the world, and take care that I didn’t end up lost in the middle of some trecherous area. If I were allowed to use this screenshot system, I would have enjoyed exploration less.

“You control the buttons you press” and all, I know - I could choose not to use this system - but a common game design idiom is that “if you let them, players will optimize the fun out of the game.” A player plays a game because they want to struggle and feel some sense of victory afterwards, sure, but a player consciously believes they are playing a game in order to win. So, if the optimal method is less fun, they’ll still choose the less fun method because they want to win. This choice on the part of team cherry forces you to enjoy the game and its world, instead of looking for ways to free up your mental processes from having to interact with the beautifully designed map.

This isn’t to say that there is no reason to consider disabilities at all - I do agree with Stoner that the lack of button remapping is somewhat annoying. With the exception of fighting games and QWOP, there are very few titles where the input method is supposed to be a challenge to overcome; the controller is supposed to melt away as you feel you’ve become one with your character, with the game not stopping you from executing the ideas you’ve conceptualized. There are many moments where I’d suggest a game designer sits down and thinks “do I really need a quick time event in my puzzle game? Does this add to the core experience, or am I just tossing in something that sounded fun to me, but may end up excluding some of my audience?”

But no matter how much you add, you will always be excluding someone. Fundamentally, there will be someone out there who cannot play your game in the way you intended.

And we can’t fix that FOMO, no matter how much we try.