Star Wars Outlaws features an accessibility mode aimed at people afflicted by the most debilitating phobia in gaming, a fear of slightly annoying hints

Are you physically terrified of the idea that a game might tell you what to do? Or, rather, that a game might signpost the ideal path to an objective for you by making ladders and ledges look a bit like they’ve just been paid a visit by someone who’s dunked themselves in custard? Good news, then. Star Wars Outlaws has a special mode aimed right at you.

According to PC Gamer, Ubisoft’s space scoundel sim features an “Explorer Mode”, which does away with bits of “guiding color on core navigational elements” in the game’s environments. Yes, that means no more yellow paint.

This is another in a long string of landmark moments in the movement for accessibility features aimed at the folks who really need them – pedants that might bang on about having been robbed of the ability to discover a short ledge in truly immersive fashion. Forget the fact that the moment we miss something important and have to spend half an hour aimlessly jumping at a wall, we’ll probably all start bleating about whichever game we’re playing not having done enough to help us navigate swiftly to the next bit that we actually care about.

Lifting the veil of sarcasm for one moment so you can see that I’m not made of yellow paint, I can see why the particular brand of unmissable lemon staining that some games – Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth got some flak for it earlier this year – use to denote things you can do a thing with annoys some folks, especially given that it can be done in ways that aren’t quite as in-your-face. In fact, it sounds like Outlaws does that last part a lot of the time, and then daubs the yellow paint over the bits in question anyway, making it feel even more unnecessary than it’s often argued to be.

However, is it funny that Outlaws and a number of other games have essentially taken to offering folks complaining that they don’t need accessibility aids a togglable mode that delivers this much in the same way a lot of games deal with actual accessibility features like anti-arachnopobia changes? Yes.

What’s the ideal solution to this never-ending debate, you ask? Maybe offsetting the annoyance the yellow paint causes by replacing it with something funny – a ledge that just says ledge perhaps, in the same way Lethal Company’s arachnopobia modeswaps out creepy crawlies for the word spider.

Outlaws is releasing on August 30 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, and you can read our preview of it here.