The Vale: Shadow of the Crown, or The Vale, is an action adventure game from Falling Squirrel and Creative Bytes studios.

You play as Alex, a blind princess sent to a distant castle in her brother’s kingdom. After surviving an invading army’s surprise attack, you need to find your way back to safety while learning about the world, the war and your place in both.

The Vale is uniquely experienced only via audio. Its only visuals are particle effects indicating motion, weather, and time of day. The game even reads the menus aloud, presumably allowing people with visual disabilities to enjoy the game without aid.

Much of The Vale relies on the player deducing directions and distances using only sound. For example, enemy combatants telegraph upcoming attacks with yells, allowing you to raise a shield or time counterattacks in that direction. Evading enemy camps may require listening for their crackling fires or banter. Good headphones help, as does enabling any 3D or directional audio enhancement. 

The Vale executes well. Most challenges are intuitive or quickly learned. You return to the challenge’s start if you fail, sometimes with a short hint. However, discerning multiple incoming attacks while using your abilities can be tricky in the more complex fights. 

Communicating setting and dialog solely via voice can be slow. However, The Vale‘s script is tight. Descriptions are vivid and concise, and I never got bored or frustrated waiting for dialog. The choices of accents and voice acting are brilliant, immediately identifying the speaker. 

The story is similarly tight and has many twists and reveals. Flashbacks teach skills and build relationships. “Flash forwards” unexpectedly show incorrect paths.

Removing visuals also awakens the player’s imagination. Like reading a novel, you wonder what characters and scenes look like based on accents and the occasional brief but lucid description.

The Vale makes you realize how visuals dominate games. Even for games that use stylized or simplified graphics, simple things like art and animation dominate the language used to describe them.

The Vale also reinforces that game accessibility is not about reducing the difficulty. Accessibility is about reimagining and redesigning game interaction and content. 

That said, The Vale is still niche. Visuals are more effective at quickly communicating information and adding emotional context than sound. Using sound for feedback means the game cannot have a soundtrack. The Vale will not dethrone any AAA games from the top sellers’ charts.

The Vale is also short, requiring about eight hours to complete, including all side quests. The game introduces ideas, uses them a few times then moves on to the next ones.

The Vale succeeds as a game, experiment and tech demo, and it will appeal to those looking for something unusual, those with visual impairments or students of game design.

Hopefully, these ideas spread and are enhanced or included in other games. Imagine the same techniques applied to imaginative, story-rich, graphics-lite games like Disco Elysium or Planescape: Torment.