Mortal Kombat 1’s accessibility options include audio description in fatalities, and don’t cut out any gore details for blind players.
Mortal Kombat 1 goes on sale on September 19, and has been one of the protagonists at Gamescom 2023, with a new trailer introducing characters like Sindel and General Shao.
As its release is imminent, several game tests and betas have already been held. And from the last beta a very interesting detail has been discovered regarding the accessibility options: audio description of all fatalities.
Mortal Kombat 11, in 2019, already included numerous accessibility options for people with visual disability: reading the menus, gamma adjustments, centering the health bars on the screen and sounds to highlight interactable points on the map.
But Mortal Kombat 1 seems to introduce new features. Although WB Games has not commented on them, it has drawn attention that the fatalities movements have audio description, as Edmond Tran of GamesHub has highlighted on Twitter.
“Li Mei pierces the victim’s stomach and rips out his guts. He clenches his fist and a purple spark of energy slides along an intestine into his victim. He kicks his head off and the spark explodes his severed head like bloody fireworks,” says a voice on the screen.
Mortal Kombat 1’s narrated fatalities are no joke
On TikTok you can listen to other narrations from finishers who don’t skimp on any gore details, and which can be “weird” or even funny to people with functional eyesight.
But it’s no joke: as accessibility journalist Laura Kate Dale points out, this isn’t a “humorous” feature, but rather a huge step forward in accessibility. The narratives are not funny, but accurate.
Less than a month left for it to come out Mortal Kombat 1so NetherRealm has yet to release accessibility details on its new game, which allow players with partial or total vision impairment to enjoy the game down to the tiniest, gory detail.
