The gaming industry has made significant strides in recent years toward inclusive design, but the newly released Internal Incident demo demonstrates that accessibility barriers continue to plague survival horror games.
As a professional accessibility auditor with lived experience as a deaf, autistic gamer with vestibular disorders and dexterity challenges, I conducted a comprehensive assessment of this top-down survival horror extraction shooter, evaluating it across three critical accessibility categories: visual accessibility, audio accessibility, and cognitive accessibility.
Understanding the Accessibility Audit Framework
Gaming accessibility audits assess how inclusive a game is for disabled players by examining features across multiple categories. Industry standards like the The full list of Game Accessibility Guidelines provide frameworks that evaluate games on text display, contrast, audio cues, input customization, and cognitive load.
To learn about getting your game tested, check out Microsoft Gaming Accessibility Testing Service
For this audit, I used a 0-10 rating scale, where zero represents a completely unplayable experience with no accessibility features, and ten would indicate near-perfect accessibility (though no game has yet achieved this).
Visual Accessibility: Critical Failures
The most glaring visual accessibility problem in Internal Incident is the extremely poor text contrast. Instructions like “Press Tab to view your inventory” appear with insufficient color contrast against the background, making them virtually impossible to read for players with low vision or visual processing difficulties.
Even more problematic, the game displays sideways and diagonal text as tutorial instructions. Text orientation should always be horizontal and front-facing to ensure readability for all players, regardless of disability status.
The font size compounds these issues. Instructions appear in “tiny, tiny, tiny font,” as documented during the audit. WCAG guidelines recommend adjustable text sizing options, with An Introduction to Video Game Accessibility shows that a readable font sizes support players with visual differences.
The game lacks any colorblind mode or color customization options.
It’s crucial to ensure these experiences are developed with accessibility as a priority and inclusion as the goal. –Our Impact, AbleGamers
The demo provides no brightness adjustment options. Dark environments are central to horror atmosphere, but accessibility requires giving players control over visual presentation. Games like Dead Space demonstrate how to balance atmospheric darkness with adjustable brightness settings that accommodate visual accessibility needs.
The curved menu screen creates depth perception difficulties, further complicating visual navigation. This design choice adds unnecessary visual processing challenges for players with vestibular disorders or visual processing conditions.
Audio Accessibility: Complete Absence of Essential Features
For players with auditory sensitivities, tinnitus, hyperacusis, or those like me who are deaf or hard of hearing, the lack of audio control makes the game immediately inaccessible.
The game provides no audio voiceover and no visual indicators for audio cues. Industry standards require that all critical audio information have visual equivalents.
Effective audio accessibility includes:
- Closed captions for all dialogue and narration with adjustable text size and background opacity
- Visual indicators for directional audio cues (showing where sounds originate)
- Subtitles that identify speakers and describe relevant sound effects
- Audio description options for conveying visual-only information
Internal Incident implements none of these features.
Cognitive Accessibility: Navigation and Comprehension Barriers
The top-down isometric perspective creates significant cognitive and spatial orientation challenges. When viewing gameplay from above, directional navigation becomes counterintuitive moving “forward” on the screen doesn’t align with intuitive spatial reasoning. This issue affects players like me; those with vestibular disorders, spatial processing difficulties, and those with certain neurodivergent conditions.
Accessible games should include options to:
- Reduce or eliminate motion effects and camera bobbing
- Disable loading spinners and rotating elements
- Adjust field of view and camera sensitivity
- Enable reduced motion modes
None of these options exist in Internal Incident.
“Game creators should provide users with options for configuring displays, controls, and other settings to make experiences work for them.”
3 Ways to level up video game accessibility
Inadequate Tutorial and Instructions
The demo attempts to use its opening sequence as a tutorial, but the illegible text renders this approach completely useless. Players cannot read instructions to understand basic mechanics like movement controls, inventory management, or item interaction.
The interaction prompt system suffers from inconsistent visibility with some instructions appearing more readable than others, but none meet accessibility standards. I experienced a bug in the demo prevented proper item interaction despite following visible prompts, compounding the cognitive load.
The control scheme requires simultaneous mouse and keyboard input with different directional mappings—using the mouse to look around while WASD keys control movement. This dual-input requirement creates significant barriers for players like me with motor disabilities, dexterity challenges, or those who play one-handed.
The Accessibility Score: 0 Out of 10
After comprehensive evaluation across visual, audio, and cognitive accessibility domains, Internal Incident receives a score of 0/10. It is completely unplayable for disabled gamers.
How Internal Incident Can Improve Accessibility
While the current demo demonstrates severe accessibility failures, the fact that this is a pre-release demo provides opportunity for improvement before starting early access.
- Implement scalable font systems with user-adjustable sizing to prevent “container overflow” at high magnifications.
- Maintain a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for body text and 3:1 for large-scale text and UI components.
- Eliminate vertical or diagonal text layouts to reduce cognitive load; prioritize horizontal, left-to-right (or locale-appropriate) orientation.
- Provide adjustable text-background opacity (high-contrast backing) to improve legibility against complex or moving backgrounds.
- Motion Reduction: Toggleable controls to disable screen shake, motion blur, and “head bob” effects.
- Optics Customization: User-defined Field of View (FOV) sliders and camera sensitivity curves to prevent nausea.
- Chromatic Adaptation: Native filters for Deuteranopia, Protanopia, Tritanopia, and Achromatopsia, calibrated for both UI and 3D space.
The Bigger Picture
Until Internal Incident addresses these fundamental accessibility barriers, the game remains unplayable for large segments of the gaming community, including deaf players, blind and low-vision players, colorblind players, those with vestibular disorders, players with motor disabilities, and neurodivergent gamers.
Accessibility benefits everyone. Not just disabled players. Subtitles help players in noisy environments or those playing with sound off. Adjustable difficulty accommodates varying skill levels. These features expand potential player bases and improve user experience universally.
Survival horror games like Internal Incident can absolutely maintain their atmospheric tension while being accessible. Games like Dead Space demonstrate how comprehensive accessibility features enhance rather than diminish the horror experience.
Disabled gamers deserve equal access to the immersive worlds, compelling narratives, and thrilling gameplay.
The question isn’t whether games should be accessible—it’s whether developers will prioritize inclusion for all players.
This accessibility audit was conducted based on lived experience as a disabled gamer and professional accessibility auditing training. Rating methodology follows established gaming accessibility frameworks including Xbox Accessibility Guidelines, Game Accessibility Guidelines, and WCAG standards. For more resources on gaming accessibility, visit Game Accessibility Guidelines and Xbox Accessibility.
Tas The Artist 
Leave a comment