Review: The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners VR

The year 2020 looks like a great year for virtual reality, let's see what Robert Kirkman's zombies bring to the franchise's new game, "The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners"

"The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners" is the new title based on Robert Kirkman's work, the one that sixteen years ago put its grain of sand to elevate a genre, one of the zombies, that (easy joke included) was more dead than alive. Following in the footsteps of Romero's work, in the script Kirkman places more emphasis on the real threat of any apocalypse, human nature. The American author has managed to cross borders and The Living Dead (the name under which comics originally arrived in Spain) have jumped from the pages of the comic book, which saw him born, to the small screen (with two successful series) and of course, to the world of video games.

The Walking Dead not only made zombies fashionable, but it is also responsible for reviving the graphic adventure genre (which we will admit, was not going through its best moment), putting on everyone's lips the sadly closed studio Telltale Games and making the sub-genre "Choices Matters" known to the whole gaming community, attracting a huge amount of new people to the videogame world as collateral.

It would seem that a new franchise title would have it easy to follow the trail of successes already collected in all areas where he has decided to go. Unfortunately, in the world of videogames, the Telltale formula seems, if not completely exhausted, to be sufficiently worn out to require a different approach or, at least, a well-deserved rest time. If we add to that situation the cancellation of the title "Overkill's The Walking Dead" (a first-person cooperative shooter in charge of Starbreeze Studios), things didn't seem to be looking good for Kirkman's walkers.

Luckily, "The Walking Dead" has learned from past mistakes and the new franchise title drinks from both the graphic adventure and the failed action game, resulting in a more balanced adventure where, as usual in this particular apocalypse, our biggest problem will be those who are still alive.

In the wake of Kurosawa and Leone

"The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners" puts us in the shoes of "El/La Turista" (the game lets us choose our sex, in my case I chose to be a woman and therefore I'll speak in female when I talk about our protagonist from now on), the last newcomer to a New Orleans plagued by three natural disasters: the zombie apocalypse, a storm that has flooded part of the city and the cream of the human race in the form of two rival bands.

We did not arrive in New Orleans by chance, it is our encounter with an old man named Henri who will lead our steps to his base camp in what could well be St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 (home to the graves of Marie Laveau and Nicolas Cage). And it is in the cemetery that we will find a badly wounded Henri, who with his last breath will ask us to save a mother and her daughter, drowning all the others who inhabit the cursed city.

It's at this point that the Skydance Interactive title takes us into the most archetypal western, where an outsider arrives to disturb the peace of a small town. Taking clear references to "For a Fistful of Dollars" and the film on which Sergio Leone's film is based, Akira Kurosawa's masterful "Yojimbo". As the Tourist, we are free to choose whether to honor Henri's last request, help one of the two factions, save Casey (the other big protagonist) or think of ourselves and try to keep the prize that everyone is after, a military bunker with supplies and weapons to endure for decades while the end of the world occurs outside.

This freedom of choice is not tied to conversations or colorful roulette wheels to measure our karma level, it is our actions that will shape our history in New Orleans. It is up to us to try to see what is left of humanity in the different actors who will cross our path or we can simply finish them off before they give us the badge. The development team seems to have covered all the possibilities and although my story has been more expeditious at the end than I thought it would be at the beginning, the plot has been able to adapt to my acts of violence without too much trouble.

Trama, which on the other hand has a more than the decent script that, without being a two thousand page madness with hundreds of ramifications, serves so that, even orbiting all the tropes of the genre (both zombie and spaghetti-western), this is more than a game of survival and collection of resources. It's true that the characters are based archetypes, from the leader with messianic airs to the tormented soldier, all of them have something in common, an above-average performance work (more if we take into account that we are not in front of a triple-A of a great company) and that besides improving the experience sensibly (let's remember that we are in virtual reality and everything that helps to immerse is extremely important) it achieves that we connect with a cast of characters that could well have passed without any sorrow or glory.

Among them, I will highlight Casey, not only for being the main thread of the story, being the character that will give us goals to meet day after day. He is, at least at the beginning, the only friendly voice at this end of the world, and as a good voice behind a radio some of us remember Delilah's voice in "Firewatch". Unfortunately, our tourist and Casey never get to have the chemistry that Henry and Delilah show in the Campo Santo title. But even so, it's a pleasure to talk to him every day, getting to know him little by little, without the relationship feeling forced or artificial, the result of that good work between script and performance.

The end of the world in Virtual Reality

Here begins the bad news with "The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners". Let's start with the elephant in the room, the latest interaction of the walkers in the world of video games is an exclusive game for virtual reality, for PC (Oculus and SteamVR) and soon for PSVR users. This makes it difficult for me to explain certain sensations to the uninitiated in the world of VR and may scare away those who are not interested in that particular way of playing.

With this said, I ask for patience to the converts while I try to clarify my sensations, and to the laymen who hate technology (perhaps the result of the betrayal of a rebellious virtual reality viewer, those who ruin your marriage, burn down your house and melt your savings while laughing) I urge them to stay, to see if I can get them to consider giving a chance to this particular way of enjoying video games.

Although popular opinion says otherwise, virtual reality is loaded with titles (and good titles), and more and more are coming out every day. The reality is that, what is scarce, are titles like "The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners". Works of an acceptable duration (we are talking about fifteen hours to spend the main story, more if we are complete) created and thought with the virtual reality in mind.

Unlike all the arcade titles we can find, the two-hour-long experiences or the VR adaptations of such pantagruelic works as "Skyrim" or "Fallout", Skydance's work feels like a true triple-A (even if it doesn't fit the traditional triple-A metrics) in a technology that, although it has been with us for several decades, has been affordable to every pocket for just under six years. A bet in a market that is still taking its first steps and looking for the mechanics and formulas that will bring out the true juice of the new/old technology. While we wait for the equivalent of Mario 64 to appear in 3D worlds, let's see what Robert Kirkman's undead have to offer.

At first glance, the title of the Californians doesn't seem any different from the myriad of first-person games that populate the VR catalog. Luckily, the disappointment of the known is short-lived, and as soon as we take our first two-handed knife (more specifically the axe in the tutorial) we realize that the objects pretend to have weight, it's going to be crucial that we get used to hitting our heads with all kinds of instruments (cutlery included) and making our way through the houses of "Big Easy". These physicals are also present in the walkers that populate Phil Anselmo's hometown, giving us the opportunity to hold heads in order to ensure the joyful penetration of the skull or simply to keep the zombies away from our person.

Being able to avoid combat (even if it's just by pushing) will help us keep our precarious weapons from breaking, which will happen every few uses. This will force us to choose our battles well and to collect materials to make new weapons and healing objects (like bandages and food), bearing in mind that our backpack has its holes counted. As a mechanic, it fits very well into the universe of "The Walking Dead", and although it is well carried, it is more than what is seen in any conventional game (from now on we will call them "poor games") and I would have liked something more consistent with the game environment. Something like the "Red Dead Redemption 2" mini-games to keep our weapons ready for combat might fit better when it comes to increasing the immersion in the title.

Speaking of immersion, let's talk about two points that unfortunately break with the work of the rest of the game. Cargo screens and the Force (yes, the one George Lucas sold to Disney), both of which are, at the very least, questionable design decisions. Let's go for the most justifiable, the power of telekinesis. "The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners is a game that can be played standing up or sitting down. That's why there's an exclusive button to duck (although the option to duck is present anyway) and that's why it makes sense that, despite making a dent in the total immersion of the title, we can attract objects with the Force.

It's clearly a necessary concession to expand the number of people able to enjoy the game, and in this house, that's always important. Although, on the other hand, it could well be one more accessibility option instead of an immovable mechanic.

The next point is more complicated to defend. I understand that this is a more or less restrained budget game with a linear story. So it makes sense that New Orleans is not a big open city where we can get lost, but a series of small areas where we can fulfill a series of objectives, which once opened we can revisit to get more materials or perform certain secondary missions. That is why our New Orleans is flooded and to go from one area to another we will have to use an improvised raft. We just won't use it. Instead of a covert loading screen as we navigate the flooded city streets, what we get every time we get on our boat is a huge black loading screen with some gameplay advice.

I don't know what they were thinking, but if in any other title the loading screens take you out of the water, in a virtual reality one, they do it in capital letters. Not long ago, "The Sinking City" (yes, we're talking about a "poor man's game") posed a similar situation, but in that case, we could go through all the Oakmont channels by boat without any loading screen.

Leaving aside the questionable decisions of the development team, let's talk about ours. The freedom I was talking about earlier when choosing how we will interpret our story is reflected in the purest gameplay. Every mission, every scenario, we can approach from several different points, from the stealth to the rawest carnage, through all the intermediate stages.

The choice will always be ours, but to go to the heart of the matter, delivering death left and right like a fast-food delivery girl on a tricked out electric scooter, does not usually work out well. Mainly because of a rather poor AI, partly to not frustrate the player too much (shooting in virtual reality is much more difficult than in a "poor man's" video game) and partly because we remember that this is still a limited budget game. Even so, it's notorious how our human antagonists, alive and kicking, stand still like fairground ducks, missing half the shots they make at us and leaving plenty of time for a motivated tourist to finish off five or six of them before being shot down.

At this moment, the ghost of From Software appears when our Tourist reappears in the barge along with a message in which they will exhort us to recover our souls from the backpack. We will appear with our weapons, so we will only have to go, pick up the backpack souls and finish with the enemies that remain (those that we have shot down do not reappear). This remains in immersion, difficulty, tension, and general fun. It's time for the companies to move on and understand that a mechanic isn't good just because he's in a game signed by Miyazaki-san. Mechanics need context and in this case, it doesn't have any context at all. The solution is to manually load the automatic saving that the game does every time you enter an area.

Revelation 20:13

Let's talk about artistic design, "The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners" opts for the cartoon aesthetic, and it does so for a couple of good reasons. The main one is that it's based on Kirkman's comic book and not on AMC's series, the secondary one is that the virtual reality demands an important amount of raw power (besides, from what I could see, some of the work from the canceled "Overkill's The Walking Dead" has been reused). We are talking about high resolutions at important image per second rates (90 FPS in the most usual case), so the realism would not only break with the aesthetics of the product but also it would make that less people could enjoy the title (with my GTX 1070, I couldn't play it with the full quality without suffering FPS drops).

All in all, the work is done by the studio is impressive. In spite of the repetition of assets (something normal in resource gathering games), the similarity of the locations, and the use of some textures worthy of the 32-bit generation, the immersion feeling is not broken (until a black loading screen appears and gives you a real beating).

In addition to this very successful visual section, with dusty houses immersed in darkness, there is a sound section that shines in the dubbing, do an acceptable job with the ambient sound (being quite easy to position zombies and humans using stereo headphones) and a soundtrack that usually comes in when it doesn't play, in another questionable design decision (and somehow correctable if we turn down the music volume manually).

And it's not that the music composed for the title is bad (it hasn't made me crazy either, but it does its job well), it's that it comes in when it shouldn't and at an excessive volume (if we keep it at the same level as the rest of the sounds). Every time we get to a location, we'll have a maximum time to do missions or to plunder resources before the church bells ring and the area is filled with zombies. At that moment, tense music begins to sound at full blast, which only serves to hinder the gameplay, preventing us from hearing the walkers and thus breaking all the tension of being surrounded only by using our ears.

Conclusions

I couldn't shake off the feeling that I was forgiving the title for being exclusive to virtual reality for the duration of this analysis. It's a feeling that has also accompanied me throughout my journey through Skydance Interactive's New Orleans, that itch of missing things that would normally bother me in return for the extra immersion that virtual reality gives.

It's true that if it had been a conventional (poor man's) title, it would have remained just another title, one of those that pass without any glory, designed just to attract the fans of the franchise. But it's a virtual reality exclusive, and in that context, not only is it a more ambitious product than the average, but it also takes risks with mechanics and decisions that, although they don't always work, at least serve to find the way forward for this new/old way of enjoying digital entertainment.

Having said that, I enjoyed the twelve hours or so it took me to do a first lap of the title (giving way to a second lap to see different endings). I don't think it's the Mario 64 of the VR, but it can be a great title for those who don't know technology to get into it and start to see its possibilities. Virtual reality needs more games like that, just like it needs all those short arcade experiences where new things are being tried out every day.

You can find The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinner at PC (SteamVR, Oculus Store, Official Title Store) and PSVR (Coming soon)