VIDEOVERSE Accessibility Review
VIDEOVERSE by Kinmoku is a real blast from the past. Anyone who was in the online forum community from the late 90's to the early 2000's will instantly recognize this particular era of the internet. Even those of us who weren't, like myself, can still find a lot of love and nostalgia. The game is filled to the brim with references and doggo cameos!
Like many visual novels, the gameplay is simplistic and easy to understand. It tells a story about online communities, both the good and the bad. The main art style looks like old-school internet pages with a simple and clean UI. Not only that, it features some fantastic animated cutscenes for a fake rpg game and animation for online video chat segments!
Clearly, this is a game made with love.
When it comes to accessibility, VIDEOVERSE hits the three single most important accessible features a game in this genre requires: easy-to-see visuals (high contrast between backgrounds and text), a screen reader, and the ability to change to a dyslexic-friendly font. It also has a full content warning list. The list shows every applicable content warning via broad label, but you can click on each warning to see details. These details do contain spoilers, but it's nice to see that it lets you pick.
That's the key to accessibility: the more options you have, the more accessible it is.
VIDEOVERSE's accessibility doesn't end there. The game offers subtitles for sound effects, separate volume controls (sound, music, and voice), and the ability to type your replies instead of selecting them from a list. It even gives you several different "themes" from the start so that you can pick and choose which visuals are best for you.
VIDEOVERSE isn't perfect though. It falls short in a few areas. The biggest issue is with flashing graphics. One of the fake internet ads is a fairly large box that flashes every time it runs. There's no way to turn this off or avoid the ad. It's rng if the ad will pop up. But seeing as there are only a handful of these fake internet ads for the game to choose from, you WILL see it. The desk pause screen also has a subtler flash in the background, but it's large enough that it bothered me. Finally, the ending segment has a full-screen glitch effect that includes flashing. It's a shame I can't turn these off or select altered versions of the effects.
Other accessibility features I'd like to see is the ability to make a custom theme from the get go. It doesn't need to be anything in-depth, but the ability to choose which background and text colors work best for the player would be golden. I'd love to see a UI adjuster as well. Though the font is by no means small, some people have smaller screens or struggle to see and require larger fonts.
Another place VIDEOVERSE falls short is controls. While the controls are simple and it does have two different options for controls, I'd like to see custom keybinding. This way players can adjust as needed to specialty controllers or simply more comfortable mapping.
At the end of the day, I've enjoyed my time with VIDEOVERSE. It's a cute, well-crafted game that clearly had a lot of love put into it. If you're a fan of retro games and visual novels, this one will be a delight. The accessibility options are a great start, though I'd like to see a couple extra features or some currently implemented options in a more in-depth way.
VIDEOVERSE is available on Steam and Itch.io for PC, Mac, and Linux. It currently costs $12.99, €12,79, and £10.99.
Thank you, Kinmoku for providing me with a review copy!