The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is a virtual reality game that takes place in the same universe as Robert Kirkman’s award-winning comic series. Players take on the role of Clementine, who must survive in a zombie-infested world where every choice matters and death lurks around every corner.
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is a virtual reality game that takes place in the world of Robert Kirkman’s comic book series. The game was released on October 24th, 2017 for PlayStation VR and HTC Vive.
To put it bluntly, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is genuinely terrifying. And I’m convinced the game’s creators started with a pretty simple premise and built everything with that in mind: ‘how to make the player feel insanely distressed in literally every conceivable way’.
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners Details:
Skydance Interactive is the creator of this game. Publisher: Skybound Games are available on Steam (Index, Vive, Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality), as well as the Oculus Store (Rift) Rift was the subject of a review. The film will be released on January 23rd, 2020. Price: $40
Gameplay
Regardless of whether that supposed premise was Skydance’s intended goal or not, that’s exactly how I feel about Saints & Sinners: morally compromised from no-win scenarios, mentally fatigued from a constant barrage of the undead, and demoralized from grasping at what little detritus I can scrounge up along the way in a grey, unforgiving world. With only a few caveats, it is a remarkably fun (and frightening) virtual safari through a gang and zombie-infested New Orleans, and one you can easily slip into for hours of zombie-ganking carnage at a time.
The game is based around a few essential features to help infect you with this unavoidable existential angst: you must scavenge for basic commodities and fashion them into useful tools to aid you in your consecutive leaps around the landscape. Back at your base, a few cork boards display recipes that you can investigate and then make by pressing a single “build” button.
Once you leave your base, you’ll have to keep an eye on your stamina and health bars. Getting physical, such as sprinting or using melee weapons, depletes your stamina and causes hunger, which also imposes a temporary cap on your maximum stamina until you eat something nutritious—not the junk you’ll find in the NOLA wasteland, but just home-cooked fixins. Infection from z-bites, on the other hand, places a temporary limit on your maximum health until you take treatment.
It’s not a difficult balancing act if you’re not surrounded by a shambolic horde of brain-eating monsters, which is generally the case. Killing zombies one at a time is simple, but more than three necessitates keeping your wits about you and having your supplies in order. And it’s not like you have a wristwatch on your arm that tells you when to leave because the sun will set and zombies will descend upon you, chasing you through the streets until you pass out from weariness. Oh, no. That is definitely a thing.
If you don’t get out of the level before the timer runs out, you’ll be overrun by an almost unsurvivable horde, forcing you to either start the level over from the beginning or restart with your accumulated cache from when you last died. If you died close to the special beginning area, but you’ll be going out empty-handed, the latter option can be handy; if you killed deep in the level, you can effectively kiss it goodbye at that point. It’s a devious, anxiety-inducing method of forcing you to assess things rapidly.
In practice, this puts you on the verge of failing at almost every turn. You must be clever about what you put into your finite bag, just like you must be smart about what you put into your finite backpack in many of Bethesda’s popular RPG titles such as Skyrim and the Fallout series. You’ll need to grind it out a little bit for the raw material if you want to make auxiliary badass weapons like assault rifles or machetes. While even the most basic starter kit will get you to the finish of the game, chasing down even nicer weapons had me scurrying around and searching through drawers outside of the main storyline for quite some time.
It’s worth noting that reaching for your controller over your left shoulder pulls your backpack out with it. A big weapon is carried on your right shoulder, and holsters for knives and pistols are carried on your left and right hips. These kinds of holster systems appeal to me, albeit you’ll need some muscle memory to avoid inadvertently throwing away a valuable weapon.
And while there is a single storyline to follow with a few options to make along the way, there aren’t many truly world-changing choices to make. You won’t become the ruler of your own gang no matter how hard you suck up to either of the game’s opposing armies.
I only wish the game had the budget to be a game at the grandiosity of Fallout, with its numerous intertwining stories and large, open-world environment, although I’m happy Saints & Sinners didn’t overextend itself. More on that in the ‘Immersion’ section below.
What about zombie apocalypse, you might wonder. You’ll be snatching zombies by the skull and braining them for the foreseeable future if you’re not a good shot (head shots only, lads and gals), which is purposely incredibly off-putting. You must also be cautious because there are three varieties of zombies: a vanilla zombie, a zombie that emits infectious gasses when killed up close, and helmeted zombies with various exposed regions of their heads. It’s a wonderful technique to make them more tough without turning them bullet sponges.
Although there are a lot of guns on missions, they aren’t as durable as home-made equivalents, which take a lot of time to research, create, and feed with the right ammo.
Save states are equally as harsh, as you can only save when you get up in the morning and when you arrive at your destination, making exploring larger levels a genuinely difficult chore. You’re back to square one after one bad move, albeit with a better understanding of the map’s layout and overall zombie positioning. It’s a double-edged sword in that it keeps you on your toes while also frustrating you when you have to rush through the same dialogue tree over and over again.
This game really got under my skin, and I mean that in the greatest way possible. The Walking Dead, like the comics and the TV show, is less about the zombies and more about the people fighting for survival. To that end, you get to decide who lives and who dies, and there are no simple answers. You can try to talk yourself out of firing the gun, but NPCs have human motives for doing the horrible things they do. And everyone is bad, including you.
In the end, it took me around 11 hours to complete Saints & Sinners. After the credits rolled, you’re tossed back into the game for infinite scavenging, crafting, and zombie ganking throughout the world. I hoped there’d be a little more to it than that to cap off an ultimately satisfying story filled with warring factions, betrayal, loss, and enough zombies to shake a stick at, but I was more than happy with putting down the headset and leaving the game’s fractured, depressing verion NOLA behind.
Immersion
To begin with, the game’s sound design is fantastic. When zombies detect you, they thrash around visibly, but they also make a series of warning noises that should save you from having to keep your head on a swivel. Constant moaning offers you a fair idea of their general mood, and more aggressive moaning indicates that they’ve noticed you and are approaching. There are also several levels of ‘da-dump’ sound effects that occur when a zombie becomes interested in you.
The soundtrack is also packed with noises that, if you’re not paying attention, could pass for breathing or screaming, effectively putting your perceptual system into overdrive as you try to keep your ears alert for the nefarious ghouls. Furthermore, the voice acting isn’t hammy or overdone, which is a rare feat in the world of Southern accents.
Because the game is exceedingly gloomy, even in the ‘daytime,’ which is more like a transitory twilight, sound is vitally crucial. Of course, you have your military-style flashlight to aid you in navigating dimly lit crypts and passages, but you’ll have to get used to how gloomy and grey everything is. Although the zombies in the screenshot above appear to be a touch scruffy, it’s not something I noticed (or cared about) in the game. However, the animations are excellent, so zombies feel quite genuine when they grab you and you nearly break your monitor in terror.
If you’re hoping for unbridled exploration, level design is intentionally on the small side—only the size of a few small city blocks—and only offer a few areas to explore, which shunts you to what few NPC side missions there are alongside the comparatively overbearing main quest line. Again, I’m more glad that Saints & Sinners is reducing complexity and not tossing it in where it doesn’t belong in the name of making a technically larger game. Instead of putting emphasis on pure exploration, the clock is constantly ticking away, so you really only have a few minutes to dash in to admire the actual craftsmanship of the game’s levels.
Last but not least, sure, this is a physics-based game, though it isn’t as devoted to the notion as, say, Boneworks (2020). Weapons have weight, and your hands don’t clip through the world, which is something I strongly believe in. Low stamina makes objects heavier, and as a result, your virtual hands won’t be able to keep up with your physical hands, which can seem strange at first.
I walked away after a few hours with a clear ‘off’ sense to the real positioning of my physical body, which lingered for about an hour after playing, due to a bizarre hand placement issue with the Oculus Touch controllers. There is a setting that allows you to see a ghostly image of your controller’s actual position rather than the simulated position, but it makes the experience feel less immersive.
Comfort
Saints & Sinners offers up a fair bit of comfort options that should keep most player happy, as it includes snap-turning and smooth turning locomotion. Variable FOV blinders help keep forward and turning movement comfortable as a default, but can be toggled off in the settings menu.
There is very few moments when your point of view is forced in a slightly uncomfortable way, like when you’re climbing on a ledge or being grabbed by a zombie, although these are few and far between. Otherwise, Saint & Sinners is extremely comfortable for both standing and seated players.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the point of the walking dead saints and sinners?
The Walking Dead is a popular TV show and the Saints and Sinners are characters that were introduced in Season 2 of the show.
What is the difference between the walking dead saints and sinners?
The Saints are the survivors of the zombie apocalypse who are trying to rebuild civilization. They are led by Rick Grimes. The sinners are those who have abandoned humanity in favor of their own selfish needs.
Do Saints Sinners Walking Dead?
It is not known if Saints Sinners Walking Dead.
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