Now in its third year, the Access-Ability Summer Showcase is back to redress the lack of meaningful accessibility information across the ongoing video game showcase season. As we see progress broadly slow down, it’s also a timely reminder of the good work that’s still happening in pursuit of greater accessibility in gaming.

“At a time where we are seeing a slowdown in accessibility adoption in the AAA games space,” organizer Laura Kate Dale says, “we’re showing that there are interesting accessible games being made, games with unique and interesting features, and that being accessible is something that can bring an additional audience to purchase and play your games.”

The showcase is growing, too. In 2025, it’s longer, more packed with games, and streamed concurrently on Twitch, Youtube (where it’s also available on-demand), and on Steam’s front page. That growth comes with its own challenges — mitigated this year by Many Cats Studio stepping in as sponsor — but the AA Summer Showcase provides an accessible platform in response to the eye-watering costs of showcasing elsewhere (it has previously been reported that presenting trailers across Summer Game Fest starts at $250,000), while providing disabled viewers with the information they need to know if they can actually get excited about new and upcoming releases.

It’s lesson Dale hopes other platforms might take on board. “I grow the show in the hopes that other showcases copy what we’re doing and make this the norm,” she says. “If I could quit hosting the AA Summer Showcase next year because every other show in June committed to talking about accessibility as part of their announcements, that would be wonderful news.”

To help that along (sorry, Laura, don’t quit just yet), The Verge has collated the games featured in this year’s Access-Ability Summer Showcase below.

Visual accessibility in focus

A major theme that emerged from this year’s showcase is color blind considerations. The showcase kicked off with ChromaGun2: Dye Hard by Pixel Maniacs, a first-person color-based puzzler. In its color blind mode, colors are paired with symbols for better parsing and those symbols combine when colors are mixed.

A similar spirit is echoed in Sword and Quill’s Soulblaze, a creature-collecting roguelike that’s a bit of Pokémon mixed with tabletop RPGs (dice included). It also pairs colors and icons, adding a high level of customization to color indicators, difficulty, and an extensive text-to-speech function that supports native text-to-speech systems and NVDA.

Later, Gales of Nayeli from Blindcoco Studios, a grid-based strategy RPG, showcased its own color blind considerations and an impressive array of visual customization options.

Room to breathe

A welcome trend carried over from last year, games continue to eschew time pressure and fail states. Dire Kittens Games’ Heartspell: Horizon Academy is a puzzle dating simulator that feels like Bejeweled meets Hatoful Boyfriend. Perhaps its most welcome feature is the ability to skip puzzles altogether, though it also features customization for puzzle difficulty. Sunlight from Krillbite Studio is a chill hiking adventure that tasks the player with picking flowers while walking through a serene forest. It does away with navigation as you’ll always be heading the right way, while sound cues direct you to nearby flowers.

This year’s showcase featured two titles from DarZal Games. Quest Giver is a low-stakes management visual novel which casts the player as an NPC handing quests out to RPG heroes, while 6-Sided Stories is a puzzle game involving flipping tiles to reveal an image. The games were presented by Darzington, a developer with chronic hand pain who develops with those needs in mind and, interestingly, with their voice (thanks to Talon Voice). Both games feature no time pressure, no input holds or combos, and allow for one-handed play.

Single-handed controls are also a highlight of Crayonix Games’ Rollick N’ Roll, a puzzle game in which you control the level itself to get toy cars to their goal without the burden of a ticking clock.

Highlighting highlights

Speaking of highlights, this was another interesting trend to emerge from this year’s showcase. Spray Paint Simulator by Whitethorn Games is, in essence, PowerWash Simulator in reverse. Among a suite of accessibility features that help players chill out and paint everything from walls and bridges to what looks like Iron Man’s foot, the game allows you to highlight painting tasks and grants a significant level of control over how those highlights appear and how long they last. Whitethorn Games provides accessibility information for all its games here.

Cairn, by contrast, is a challenging climbing game from The Game Bakers which looks like transplanting Octodad onto El Capitan. As it encourages players to find new routes up its mountains, the game allows players to highlight their character’s limbs, as well as skip quick reaction minigames and rewind falls completely.

Highlights are also important to Half Sunk Games’ Blow-up: Avenge Humanity, in which players can desaturate the background and customize the size and tone of enemy outlines to make its chaotic gunplay more visible. Something Qudical’s Coming Home, which debuted during the showcase, also offers in its tense horror gameplay as you evade a group of murderers. You can switch on a high-contrast mode that highlights objects to distinguish them from the environment (including said killers).

Unsighted

If this year’s been challenging for accessibility, it’s been even more disappointing for blind players when it comes to games that are playable independently. The AA Summer Showcase, however, included an interlude showing off the best titles from the recent Games for Blind Gamers 4, a game jam in which all games are designed with unsighted play in mind and judged by blind players. Four games were featured: Lacus Opportunitas by one of last year’s standouts shiftBacktick, The Unseen Awakening, Barista, and Necromancer Nonsense. This was chased by a look at Tempo Labs Games’ Bits & Bops, a collection of rhythm games with simple controls and designed to be playable in its entirety without sighted assistance.

A difficult subject

Accessible indie games often favor the cozy, but this year’s AA Summer Showcase brought a standout game that bucked that trend. Wednesdays by ARTE France is a game that deals with the aftermath of childhood abuse. That’s certainly in keeping with the host of trauma-driven indie games out there. Wednesdays, however, positions itself as a more hopeful examination of that trauma, both through its visual novel style memories and theme park manager gameplay.

Like so many of the showcase’s games this year, Wednesdays includes mitigations for color blindness — though no essential information is tied to color in-game — as well as a comprehensive text log for cognitive support, manual and automated text scrolling, and customization options for cursor speed, animations, fonts, inputs, and more. Better yet, all those options are displayed at launch and the game always opens in a windowed mode to allow for easier setup of external accessibility tools.

It’s a curious title, for its wealth of accessibility features, naturally, but also for how it handles its subject matter — because maybe we all need a little more hope this year, yeah?

Video game consultants like Laura Kate Dale came into 2023 with a lot of hope. Since 2020, accessibility in games had become a mainstream discussion, bolstered by high-profile releases like The Last of Us Part II, and it appeared things could only get better. Yet, as the year drew on, she says, “there started to be signs that, behind the scenes, accessibility advancement was slowing down.”

Now, that momentum has come to a relative standstill. Consultants speaking to The Verge paint a picture of repetitive conversations, fighting to maintain basics that should already be established, and a sense that the broader industry has taken its foot off the gas after the early months of the incipient covid-19 pandemic provided a real sense of hope that accessibility was here to stay.

“The gaming culture of that time is a reflection of catering to the disabled experience, because accessibility was sorely needed by everyone,” says Kaemsi, an online broadcaster. “The rise of accessibility back in 2020 was almost a promise that, when we started recovering from the lockdowns, the world would start considering everyone in all facets of living, and all we needed to do was give people a chance to recover from having to deal with such an unprecedented time.”

But as that recovery set in, the world instead brute-forced a return to 2019 norms. Following lockdown successes such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the bubble burst. As industry-wide downscaling started partway through 2023, dedicated accessibility roles were among the first culled to save cash, according to Dale. “Gigs started to be cancelled without clear explanation,” she adds, while those accessibility champions that remained were told “their budgets were shrinking, or they were expected to fight harder to justify any new or more experimental investment in accessibility.”

Things are yet to improve. Layoffs and studio closures continue, while consultants who led the charge in 2020 are still fighting the same battles years later to maintain basics. “It can feel a little defeating to focus energy on fighting for standardizing things already proven to work and proven to win positive headlines from the games media,” Dale says.

Despite the media’s value as a way to start, and maintain, accessibility conversations, those positive headlines are also disappearing in a media landscape reckoning with its own calamity (most recently evidenced by Polygon’s sale to Valnet). As consultant and content creator Steve Saylor suggests, outside tired cyclical discourse such as difficulty in Souls-likes and yellow paint, accessibility topics have mostly fallen out of public consciousness. “There’s no nuance to that conversation,” he says. “People understand accessibility is important, but they’re not willing to learn more beyond that.” 

But that coverage is also critical for moving accessibility forward, providing publishers with a marketing incentive for accessibility features. “The less publishers are imagining their big stab at getting similar press coverage, the less they seem willing to take a chance on a feature nobody’s tried to offer before,” Dale says. She points to the extensive coverage The Last of Us Part II received for its accessibility prior to release as a major motivator for others to follow suit in the immediate aftermath.

Now, she adds, accessibility consultants are increasingly employed in scaling back accessibility, with the least backlash, to help mitigate the industry’s lockdown-era overspend. This creates an environment that isn’t conducive to change and improvement, and saps energy from an already frequently exhausted community. Professional opportunities have dried up to the point that many advocates are looking elsewhere for work, where only a few years before there was hope accessibility could become a full-time pursuit.

“We’re still trying our best, but it’s rough,” says Saylor, before adding that he’s barely had consultancy work over the past year. “I don’t know when it’s going to pick back up again. It’s been getting worse since 2023.”

Even when the call does come, often those offers will end up being rescinded. “I’ve had at least three major AAA studios offer me accessibility consulting work in the past 18 months,” Dale says, “only for them to cancel the planned consulting work because the budget for that work was withdrawn by management.”

“People in the accessibility community are tired,” Kaemsi says, summing up how many speaking to The Verge feel. Nor does it look to be improving in 2025. As relations fray between Donald Trump’s government and other nations, with many countries issuing travel advisories to the US, “it’s getting harder and harder to even potentially cross the border,” Saylor, who lives in Canada, says. “90 percent of my work was in the US and if that’s gone, I don’t know what that means for me going forward.”

Similarly, with so much of the gaming industry tied to the US, federal-level attacks on anything resembling inclusion in the name of pushing back against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies (DEI) are making it dangerous for many advocates to continue fighting for inclusivity.

A side effect of so many consultants leaving the industry is that they’re also taking much of their knowledge with them. While many studios are maintaining features implemented in previous games, Dale says “knowledge of why those features are implemented, and why they’re handled in a specific way, is being lost.” 

Per multiple sources, this has only worsened as the industry embraces contractors instead of full-time work, in which consultants are employed for a single project and then let go, often without leaving a record of their knowledge and practices behind, making communication even harder. 

Dale cites multiple occasions where she was brought in to consult on separate projects for a studio only to find information wasn’t being disseminated across teams. “The end result is me being brought in to teach the same lesson more than once, a sign that somewhere along the line that knowledge isn’t making it from one project to the next,” she says.

Yet there is still some cause for hope. Games like South of Midnight, which includes among its impressive accessibility suite the ability to skip boss fights, prove that accessibility remains a concern for many studios. In announcing the Switch 2, Nintendo has signaled its first stuttering steps toward a more holistic approach to accessibility after years of stubborn resistance. Elsewhere, major publishers, including Nintendo of America, have agreed to share clearer and consistent information about accessibility on storefronts.

These are small wins in spite of a broader industry slowdown around accessibility. If repetition is one signal of how profound that rut has become, it’s also perhaps an important tool for arresting this decline.

“Being repetitive, asking for features nobody is delivering, and asking for teams to try features until it’s embarrassing not to offer them,” Dale says. “That’s the only way things are going to change.”

Billy Tolley swings a Microsoft Kinect around an abandoned room in sudden, jittery movements. “Whoa!” he says. “Dude, it was so creepy.” On the display, we see an anomaly of arrows, spheres, and red lines that disappears almost as soon as it arrives. For Tolley and Zak Bagans, two members of the Ghost Adventures YouTube channel, this is enough to suggest they should leave the building. Because for this team and other similar enthusiasts, that seemingly innocuous blotter of white arrows means something more terrifying: a glimpse at specters and phantoms invisible to the human eye. 

Fifteen years after its release, just about the only people still buying the Microsoft Kinect are ghost hunters like Tolley and Bagans. Though the body-tracking camera, which was discontinued in 2017, started as a gaming peripheral, it also enjoyed a spirited afterlife outside of video games. But in 2025, its most notable application is helping paranormal investigators, like the Ghost Adventures team, in their attempts at documenting the afterlife.

The Kinect’s ability to convert the data from its body-tracking sensors into an on-screen skeletal dummy delights these investigators, who allege the figures it shows in empty space are, in fact, skeletons of the spooky, scary variety. Looking at it in use — the Kinect is particularly popular with ghost-hunting YouTubers — it’s certainly producing results, showing human-like figures where there are none. The question is: why?

With the help of ghost hunters and those familiar with how the Kinect actually works, The Verge set out to understand why the perhaps most misbegotten gaming peripheral has gained such a strong foothold in the search for the paranormal.

Part of the reason is purely technical. “The Kinect’s popularity as a depth camera for ghost hunting stems from its ability to detect depth and create stick-figure representations of humanoid shapes, making it easier to identify potential human-like forms, even if faint or translucent,” says Sam Ashford, founder of ghost-hunting equipment store SpiritShack.

This is made possible by the first-generation Kinect’s structured light system. By projecting a grid of infrared dots into an environment — even a dark one — and reading the resulting pattern, the Kinect can detect deformations in the projection and, through a machine-learning algorithm, discern human limbs within those deformations. The Kinect then converts that data into a visual representation of a stick figure, which, in its previous life, was pumped back into games like Dance Central and Kinect Sports.

When it was released in 2010, the first-gen Kinect was cutting-edge technology: a high-powered, robust, and lightweight depth camera that condensed what would usually retail upward of $6,000 into a $150 peripheral. Today, you can find a Kinect on eBay for around $20. Ghost hunters, however, typically mount it to a carry handle and a tablet and upsell it for around $400-600, rebranded as a “structured light sensor” (SLS) camera. “The user will direct the camera to a certain point of the room where they believe activity to be present,” says Andy Bailey, founder of a gear shop for ghost hunters called Infraready. “The subject area will be absent of human beings. However, the camera will often calculate and display the presence of a skeletal image.”

Though this is often touted as proof we’re all bound for an eternity haunting aging hotels and abandoned prisons, Bailey urges caution, telling would-be ghost hunters that the cameras are best paired with other equipment to “provide an additional layer of supporting evidence.” For this, Ghost Hunters Equipment, the retail arm of haunted tour operator Ghost Augustine recommends that “EMF readings, temperature, baseline readings, and all of that are essential when considering authentication of paranormal activity.”

That’s because the Kinect isn’t always seeing what it thinks it is. But what is it actually seeing? Did Microsoft, while trying to break into a motion-control market monopolized by the Nintendo Wii, accidentally create a conduit through which we might glimpse the afterlife? Sadly, no.

The Kinect is actually a straightforward piece of hardware. It is trained to recognize the human body, and assumes that it’s always looking at one — because that’s what it’s designed to do. Whatever you show it, whether human or humanoid or something entirely different, it will try and discern human anatomy. If the Kinect is not 100 percent sure of its position, it might even look like the figure it displays is moving. “We may recognise the face of Jesus in a piece of toast or an elephant in a rock formation,” says Jon Wood, a science performer who has a show devoted to examining ghost hunting equipment. “Our brains are trying to make sense of the randomness.” The Kinect does much the same, except it cannot overrule its hunches. 

That suits ghost hunters just fine, of course: the Kinect’s habit of finding human shapes where there are none is a crowd-pleaser. The Kinect, deployed in dark rooms bathed in infrared light from cameras and torches, wobbling in the hands of excitable ghost hunters as it tries to read a precise grid of infrared points, is almost guaranteed to show them what they want to see.

Much of ghost hunting depends on ambiguity. If you’re searching for proof of something, be it the afterlife or not, logic suggests you’d want tools that can provide the clearest results, the better to cement the veracity of that proof. Ghost hunters, however, prefer technology that will produce results of any kind: murky recordings on 2000s voice recorders that might be mistaken for voices, low-resolution videos haunted by shadowy artifacts, and any cheap equipment that can call into question the existence of dust (sorry, spirit orbs) — bonus points if battery life is temperamental.

“I’ve watched ghost hunters use two different devices for measuring electromagnetic fields (EMF),” Wood says. “One would be an accurate and expensive Trifled TF2, that never moves unless it actually encounters an electrical field. The other would be a £15 [$18], no-brand, ‘KII’ device with five lights that go berserk when someone so much as sneezes. Which one was more popular, do you think?”

Given the notoriously unreliable skeletal tracking of the Kinect — most non-gaming applications bypass the Kinect’s default SDKs, preferring to process its raw data by other, less error-prone, means — it would be stranger if it didn’t see figures every time it’s deployed. But that’s the point. Like so much technology ghost hunters use, the Kinect’s flaws aren’t bugs or glitches. They’re not tolerated — they’re encouraged.

“If a person pays good money to enjoy a ghost hunt, what are they after?” Wood asks. “They prime themselves for a ‘spooky encounter’ and open up to the suggestion of anything being ‘evidence of a ghost’ — they want to find a ghost, so they make sure they do.”

If it were just the skeletal tracking that ghost hunters were after, better options are now possible with a simple color image. But improved methodology wouldn’t return the false-positives that maintain belief, and so skeletal tracking from 2010 is preferred. None of this is likely to move the needle for those who believe towards something more skeptical. But we do know why the Kinect (or SLS) returns the results it does, and we know it’s not ghosts.

That said, even if its results are erroneous, maybe the Kinect’s new lease on afterlife isn’t a bad thing. Much as ghosts supposedly patrol the same paths over and over until interrupted by ghost hunters, perhaps it’s fitting that the Kinect will continue forevermore to track human bodies — even if the bodies aren’t really there.

Another Crab’s Treasure isn’t shy about its inspirations. If an area titled “The Sands Between” isn’t clue enough, this colorful soulslike about a crab questing to retrieve his shell serves up constant reminders of FromSoftware’s oeuvre, especially Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. That doesn’t make Another Crab’s Treasure just another FromSoftware clone in an increasingly crowded field. Another Crab’s Treasure is a different beast: a rare soulslike with a sense of humor, plenty of undersea pizzazz, and a surprisingly accessible take on the formula.

The difference is immediately apparent as our crustacean hero, Kril, is dropped into a vibrant world of undersea hijinks, murderous sealife, and oil slicks, all presented in primary colors. Even the mountains of junk that litter the seafloor are colorful. That junk becomes your friend, both as currency (in the form of microplastics) and as, in lieu of his shell, Kril dons shot glasses, soggy tennis balls, and even a gun for protection.

Another Crab’s Treasure’s SpongeBob-esque color palette isn’t just an inviting alternative to the gloomy worlds of typical soulslikes, however. For the first time in years of playing these games, I could reliably see what was going on throughout my playthrough. Kril pops from the background, and enemies are easily distinguishable. Combined with a simplified combat loop consisting of only four stats, Another Crab’s Treasure boasts an impressive baseline accessibility compared to its predecessors.

To bolster this strong foundation, Another Crab’s Treasure also includes a raft of assist features that rebalance the game’s combat. Players can reduce incoming damage, lower enemy health, improve the durability of your improvised shell, increase dodge invincibility frames and parry windows — though, the game never actually tells you how to parry — and even slow the game down. Fall damage, which is only taken when falling into the abyss, can be reduced or removed, as can the risk of losing your microplastics on death. Dying at a boss will also see you respawn nearby, with items in tow, rather than at the last checkpoint. Of course, as developer Aggro Crab’s marketing has spotlighted, you can also replace Kril’s shell with a gun that one-shots everything.

In other menus, players can also remap buttons, switch sprinting from a hold input to a toggle, customize sound balance, and reduce motion blur and camera shake. Perhaps most notable outside of its assist options: you can pause Another Crab’s Treasure. This may seem like a strange thing to highlight, especially as pausing shouldn’t be rare in the genre. Last year, however, Lies of P demonstrated that being a single-player, offline soulslike doesn’t guarantee a pause function.

It all adds up to a host of options — gun, perhaps, excluded — that many players have been begging soulslikes to implement for years. That Another Crab’s Treasure takes the plunge is a clear demonstration that the formula can be made more accessible without compromising its challenge. Because even with these settings, Another Crab’s Treasure is tough. Accessibility doesn’t dilute the game’s difficulty. Rather, it creates a positive interplay between the game’s inherent difficulty and the player, in which the player is granted control over their own experience. This shifts Another Crab’s Treasure from a grind in places to something more enjoyable. 

Take the game’s first boss: Nephro, Captain of the Guard. He’s an undersea facsimile of Sekiro’s Gyoubu Oniwa and a relatively simple enemy with only a few attacks. Despite quickly learning his dodge timings, I found it difficult to capitalize as his attacks invariably carried him away from my dodges. It lengthened the fight, and mistakes started to creep in with the fatigue — and so did frustration. Yet, through being able to mitigate incoming damage and improve my shield, I was able to remove the grind, give myself room to make new strategies, and start having fun.

This happened multiple times throughout my playthrough, and whether the accessibility was mitigating my errors or the developers’ or both is perhaps moot. The important thing is it allowed me to enjoy what otherwise might have been frustrating — and painful — sticking points. It’s a strange, almost emotional, feeling to play a soulslike that surrenders control over your experience back to you after years of the exact opposite.

That said, much of the accessibility in Another Crab’s Treasure is combat-focused. This means, in other areas, the game still falls short. Though players are generally pointed in the right direction and the game encourages you to get a “little lost,” there are plenty of times when it wasn’t clear where I was supposed to go next — from missing a waypoint character or just confusion. This wasn’t helped by a static map that appears designed solely as a reference to Elden Ring. In other areas of cognitive accessibility, there’s a welcome directory of past tutorials, accessible at any time, but there’s information missing (including, as previously mentioned, how to parry).

This and more will be a particular issue for blind and visually impaired players, as none of this is voiced, with no audio description or built-in text-to-speech functions. But for a few short, voiced cutscenes, Another Crab’s Treasure is a fairly silent game outside a varied collection of sound effects. Slippery platforming and levels full of pitfalls mean, even with assistance, this game also isn’t fully accessible to visually impaired players, especially when it comes to a certain area bathed in darkness that is difficult even for seeing players to get around.

Other smaller elements also creep in, like the uncharacteristically subdued indicators for unblockable attacks and the frequent slowdowns in loading zones — which include a visually uncomfortable blurring effect on-screen. Mileage may vary on how annoying they are, but even these small moments work against the relative accessibility of Another Crab’s Treasure.

Though it references them often, perhaps it’s unfair to compare Another Crab’s Treasure too often to its predecessors. But it is noticeable that when it is at its weakest — in general and in terms of accessibility — Another Crab’s Treasure bears a striking resemblance to its influences. Another Crab’s Treasure thrives when it’s as removed from its FromSoftware roots as possible, when it becomes a tight distillation of those fundamentals but washes them in a colorful presentation, an irreverent attitude, and accessible play.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Another Crab’s Treasure is how plainly — how readily — Aggro Crab understands it has no authority over its players’ experiences. Instead of chafing against that like so many soulslikes, Another Crab’s Treasure leans in and grants us an unprecedented level of control over how we play. In doing so, it lays down a marker for all that comes after, opening the genre to a wider spectrum of players.

More than anything, Another Crab’s Treasure, is a timely reminder that, for all of their challenge, soulslikes can still be fun.

Another Crab’s Treasure launches on April 25th on Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PC, and PS5.