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ZOMBIES IN YOUR FACE!! | The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners

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Markiplier straps on a VR headset and finds out zombies bite a lot harder up close.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners hit SteamVR and Oculus Rift headsets on January 23, 2020, and within weeks it had YouTubers wrestling walkers with their bare hands instead of just shooting them from a safe distance. Markiplier’s playthrough, titled “ZOMBIES IN YOUR FACE!!,” shows exactly why the game caught on so fast: it turns every encounter into a physical fight rather than a shooting gallery. Developed by Skydance Interactive and published alongside Skybound Entertainment, the title drops players into a flooded, decaying New Orleans built from the world of Robert Kirkman’s original comic series rather than the AMC show.

• The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners launched January 23, 2020, on PC VR headsets via SteamVR and Oculus Rift.
• Combat is entirely physics-based — players must physically grab, push, and restrain walkers by the head while driving shivs, knives, and axes into their skulls, then yank the weapons back out.
• The survival loop runs from a home base at a cemetery and a wrecked school bus out into individual New Orleans neighborhoods to scavenge supplies while managing stamina and dodging both walkers and rival human factions.

Combat That Fights Back

What Markiplier’s video makes clear almost immediately is that Saints & Sinners isn’t interested in letting players keep zombies at arm’s length. Every walker encounter is a wrestling match — grabbing a head to hold it still, angling a knife into an eye socket, then having to physically pull the blade free before the next one closes in. It’s the same tactile philosophy that made games like Half-Life: Alyx a talking point among VR fans, but pushed further into pure survival-horror territory.

That physicality is exactly what critics and players singled out when reviewing the game in late January and early February. Where most VR zombie titles boil down to shooting range mechanics, Saints & Sinners forces exhaustion into the equation — stamina drains as you swing an axe or drag a body out of sight, and running out of breath mid-fight can be a death sentence.

Players don’t shoot their way through the horde in Saints & Sinners — they have to grab it, hold it down, and stab their way out.

New Orleans, Not Atlanta

Unlike the AMC series that popularized the franchise, Saints & Sinners is set squarely in the comic book continuity created by Robert Kirkman, and the setting shows it — a drowned, storm-battered New Orleans standing in for the more familiar Georgia backroads. Players operate out of a resting cemetery and a gutted school bus, using those spots as a staging ground before pushing into discrete suburban zones to scavenge crafting materials.

Those zones aren’t just walker territory. Warring human factions control pockets of the city, and Markiplier’s run shows the tension of never knowing whether the next building holds a scavenging opportunity or an ambush from survivors just as desperate as the player.

Early Reception

By the time Markiplier’s video went up, Saints & Sinners had already built a reputation across Steam and the wider VR community as one of the more punishing, physically demanding entries in the genre. The praise centered less on spectacle and more on how uncomfortable the game makes basic survival — scavenging runs feel like a genuine risk rather than a checklist, and every zombie encounter costs real stamina and real nerve.

It’s a similar appeal to what’s driven interest in other VR-first survival efforts, and fans hunting for more of that immersive, hands-on tension have also gravitated toward titles like this terrifyingly immersive VR flight sim and other co-op survival experiments such as the most ambitious open-world co-op zombie survival game currently making the rounds.

Markiplier’s video caps with him bloodied, out of stamina, and still short on supplies for the night — which, for a game built entirely around making players sweat over a single knife swing, is about as honest an endorsement as Saints & Sinners could ask for.