The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners: Zombie fans now need VR glasses

Zombies always go. They are grateful, brainless cannon fodder and scary eating machines at the same time, which makes them the perfect opponent in survival games. The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners proves that the undead also have an effect in virtual reality. Thanks to the feel of the Oculus-Rift-S motion control, my blood froze at times.

If designed carefully, virtual reality can completely overwhelm a player, even if the graphics have no penchant for photo-realism. Every time I get into this zombie massacre, I temporarily forget where I really am, how much time has passed and whether the sweat on my forehead comes from the nerve-wracking immersion or just from the rubber vignette of my headset.

Through VR glasses, I see a street in New Orleans that has fallen prey to the apocalypse. Randomly standing cars block the way, rubbish lies around, gray clouds fill the sky. If my study hadn't been pleasantly heated, I would probably imagine that a cold wind was blowing around my neck just for the sake of mood. Wind that carries the sick gurgling and groaning of the surrounding undead to me.

In the series The Walking Dead they are called Walkers, even if they shuffle more slowly. They only spike when they discover my avatar. What to do if someone really comes? Pull out the gun? Unfavorable, so without any ammunition. Ram a knife in the head? To do this, I would have to laboriously reach into my inventory backpack. Instead, I grab the next best beer bottle from the street and thunder it on his skull. The bottle breaks. All the better! Now I can push the sharp glass edge across the eye into the brain mass. A macabre affair, because the rest of the bottle gets stuck in his skull and only slips out again with a violent jerk.

Zombie hunt with physical effort

Watching something like this may be uncomfortable for the faint-hearted. It only gets really oppressive through the haptics. The two Oculus touch controllers in my hands work for everything I hold in my hands during the game, be it knives, ratchets or clubs, so I have to punch or stab with a lot of goodies if I want to roast one of the walkers , The speed of the movement is less important than the radius of the swing. You have to swing the knife properly so that it sinks into the head of a zombie, just as you have to pull the ax out fully to behead it.

It feels uncomfortable because it is an action that I would never do in reality. But it immensely increases immersion. Driven by the virtual fear of ending up as a walker snack, I waggle wildly in the air. When I'm unarmed, I try to at least grab the next undead's head and push him away so I can make room for escape. In the meantime, the adrenaline is splashing out of my ears, mouth and nose.

Immersion through understandable physics is the be-all and end-all in this game. Menus and displays were only implemented where it was absolutely necessary. If I want my inventory, I get the backpack from my back, a flashlight hangs on my left chest, if I want to get my pistol, I grab the virtual holster on my belt. I even have to load the revolver drum manually, which is not only funny, but also increases the tension when things get tight. Apart from rare misinterpretations, all gestures are wonderfully successful. If such systems are refined, we can really immerse ourselves in "The Oasis" in a decade or two, as in the film Ready Player One.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is by no means limited to pure action. The estimated 15 hours of play are not just about survival, but also about long-term planning, fulfilling tasks and searching eight areas. A large part of the areas consists of intersections with artificially limited areas. Most of the time, you should infiltrate a house there to find certain objects that continue to knit the storyline. Occasionally it is also only a small favor for standing NPCs, whom I assure by multiple-choice conversation, to get memorabilia from relatives, bandages or the like.

Collect, craft, complete quests

The time for this is limited to half an hour per area and can be estimated using the avatar's wristwatch. When the church bells ring, hordes of walkers storm the area. That usually ends unhappily. It is also not possible to just run away, because you have to use resources. Ammunition is scarce, medicine and food are even scarcer. I have to save, so the only option is to avoid the shufflers. I have to look around carefully, cross back yards, climb walls, climb garages or crawl through cellars.

Such athletic insoles cost my main character a lot of stamina, which only fills up slowly and decreases through repeated actions because she gets tired. On the other hand, eating food helps. One or the other snack is just lying around. Should I munch him? Nah, better not! The consumption of rotten chocolate and beverage cans, which according to the description contain 0.00001% fruit juice, is at the expense of health.

Only fresh food is healthy, but I have to make it myself. To do this, I need raw materials that I store in my backpack and bring to my base in an old cemetery in order to cannibalize them. Phew, that's a pretty demanding cycle of needs, and fulfilling it takes several hours of play.

Theoretically, raw materials are everywhere, but the space in the backpack is limited, especially since not only food and medicine are to be crafted, but also weapons and ammunition that regularly go out or break. Half of the half hour of each exploration tour is easily spent on rummaging through drawers, cupboards and showcases.

The longer I take my time, the worse the yield, because a trip to the eight locations is only possible during the day and the number of undead increases with every night, while fewer and fewer raw materials can be found. This inevitably ends up in a supply dead end if I take too much time or bless the time too often. The latter is bad enough. Having to pick up the backpack in dark soul style from where it failed is annoying, but necessary if I don't want to lose the painstakingly gathered content.

Full-fledged survival horror with little quirks

It all sounds pretty complicated for a VR game, doesn't it? It is. No comparison with the many gaming snacks that are cheaper for Rift and Vive by the dozen. Apart from the VR haptic, which sometimes requires compromises, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners fulfills all the requirements that would be placed on a normal game of this genre.

A compromise, for example, would be the somewhat cumbersome crafting in the cemetery. Instead of processing collected items at the workbench, you throw them into a recycling container and receive raw material points in various categories. Only after a certain number of such points are important recipes unlocked using upgrades, but this does not guarantee that they can be implemented. Instead, you activate a tracking function that notifies you when you have gathered the necessary raw materials.

The must-play title for VR? – VR gaming session for The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is a perfect example of what VR games should look like in 2020. A full game with a lot of content and depth.

This looks a little overambitious, especially since it teases the horse from behind. And that's not particularly exciting in terms of execution either, because you make objects by selecting them on the sticky note notes. Especially here the haptic control could have been rolled out even more, because there is not much else to do in the cemetery at night. You can search for a key, radio with quest givers or explore the area, but that does not irritate the cemetery as the central hub of the game.

Especially since there are objects that you can craft early in the game, but not allowed to take with you because the backpack doesn't give it away. See, for example, the large clubs or the bow and arrow set. The cemetery is therefore somewhat underrepresented. But overall this is not a serious lapse. VR games are more demanding than normal games due to the headset and (at least today) require clear boundaries and manageable goals.

The fact that the peripheral locations were noticeably limited and many tasks no longer represent simple fetch quests is forgiven for the game, since the VR experience and the wondering of the environment distract from it to a large extent. Apart from running with an analog stick, nothing works automatically here, and the more you hang in there, the more fun it gets. So my personal advice to all buyers is to play it standing up. It also works while sitting, including small subtleties like squinting around the corner, but you are only right in the middle when you stand.

Moving with an analog stick naturally entails the risk of motion sickness. Developer Skydance uses the usual means to prevent this, for example with a black vignette on the edge of the screen, which is shown whenever you move. I also had the feeling that I was able to escape the nausea particularly effectively if I walked on the spot while running virtual, which is another argument for standing games.