The DualSense will let you ‘feel’ dialogue in The Last of Us PS5 remake

Naughty Dog’s remastered and enhanced rerelease of The Last of Us for PlayStation 5 will bring new visuals, new game features, and, as detailed on the PlayStation Blog Friday, a host of accessibility options both new and returning from The Last of Us Part 2. One of those new features exploits the PS5’s DualSense controller features in an intriguing new way.

The Last of Us Part 1 game director Matthew Gallant said that Naughty Dog will enhance subtitles for in-game dialogue using the controller’s vibration features. New in The Last of Us Part 1 is “a feature that plays dialogue through the PS5 DualSense controller as haptic feedback. That way a deaf player can feel the way a line is delivered, can feel the emphasis, along with the subtitles to give some sense of how that line is delivered,” Gallant said.

“We’re expecting this to be an accessible experience for blind players, for deaf players, for players with motor accessibility needs,” Gallant said. “The biggest new feature we have are audio descriptions for cinematics. We partnered with Descriptive Video Works, a professional service whose background is TV, movies and video game trailers, and integrated it into the cutscenes and across all our localized languages.”

You can see and hear a preview of those accessibility features in The Last of Us Part 1 in the video above. At the PlayStation Blog, Naughty Dog outlined the very long list of accessibility features coming to its PS5 game, which include presets aimed at vision, hearing, and motor accessibility, as well as granular control options, visual aids and magnification, anti-motion sickness considerations, game difficulty settings, and interface options.

The Last of Us Part 1 will be released on PS5 on Sept. 2.