The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners on the Oculus Quest is a game that came out in 2018 for the original Oculus Rift, which sets it before the official timeline of The Walking Dead series. This game follows your character as you uncover secrets during your time at an old orphanage while also trying to stop some maniacal villain named Brandon Foster.
While this game certainly isn’t award-winning material, it does deliver a similar gameplay experience to Telltale Games’ rendition of The Walking Dead. In fact, much of the UI and mechanics are very Telltale-Esque from how the info was displayed in dialogue boxes to the quick-time events when fighting zombies. It has been noted from multiple sources that this game is more of a fan project than an actual game. Even still, there are plenty of features in the game that will keep you busy if getting your Walking Dead fix is what you’re looking for.
The graphics are actually pretty impressive given how long ago this was released. While it does look like an average “PS2” title, I think the graphical style works well with the time period The Walking Dead takes place in. However, there are some obvious bugs when running around certain areas where NPCs would get stuck miraculously so they wouldn’t be able to follow me. When these glitches happen, I could tell that the developers were really trying to make sure their quests and objectives were still relevant despite these issues popping up.
As far as the story goes, it’s pretty much what you’d expect from a Walking Dead game: everyone has their own problems that hinder the process of completing objectives. I felt really bad for some of these characters because they were underdeveloped and had no real personality outside of the dialogue choices you could make. Of course, there are multiple endings that can depend on certain actions throughout your playthroughs. This brings me to my next point…
Every choice you make at any given time will have an effect on future dialogue. It doesn’t affect how people view or think about you all too much but certain choices do change conversations with NPCs in subtle ways while also having an impact on player interactions later on down the road. For example,I could choose to be kind or harsher when convincing some people I had to meet up with. These interactions don’t affect the story as a whole but will make you think about how your actions can possibly change what comes next.
I really enjoyed the length of the game on my first playthrough. Considering that this is a short experience and it’s probably on sale for $5 or less, I was definitely satisfied with getting my money’s worth out of this title. It will take you roughly 2-3 hours on the first playthrough and even less if you’re replaying it without making new choices so it’s pretty quick considering everything else offered here.
There are also some bugs where certain events wouldn’t trigger properly which made me unable to proceed through quests. For example, I was supposed to have a conversation with someone but the person never came so this made me unable to access certain areas or continue along with the story. Even if you do run into these bugs, there are plenty of hints throughout the game that will let you know how much you’re missing. These aren’t bad enough to hinder your progress through Saints & Sinners, but they were definitely frustrating since I had to keep backtracking myself over and over again just to find out what would trigger them.
Also, be prepared for some intense sound issues when playing this game on Oculus Quest. While the voice acting is fine without headphones plugged in, background noise tends to overpower any dialogue which makes it very difficult to hear anything at all. This becomes a problem because certain dialogue choices will have you choosing from a list that appears onscreen. Without audio cues, it becomes very difficult to determine which choice you’ve selected making these sections even more frustrating if you can’t hear anything going on around you.
Overall, I’d say The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is a pretty accurate representation of the original series and gives fans something to play around with while we wait for the next season to come out. It’s not perfect by any means but given how dated this release is, I think it does well enough in creating an interesting story where players need to make tough decisions in order to progress through each chapter.
I hope my review was helpful! Thanks for reading!