The Saint
Review
Terrifyingly Broken
by Samuel Corey
reviewed on PC
Creepy Forest
There are roughly a million games out there that ask the player to wander around through a creepy, fog-shrouded forest. However, very few of those games actually manage to make said forest scary. Maybe it's just all the nocturnal misadventures I had in my local woods during my wayward youth, but a run through a dark woods fills me with more excitement than dread. However, I have to say that The Saint bucks the trend, as its dark forest is actually quite scary! Maybe it's the fog, maybe it's the VHS filter, or the constant hallucinations plaguing the protagonist, but I found myself genuinely unnerved as I made my way down the gloomy forest paths.
There is a missed opportunity at the start of the game, where the opening text describes how the player character took a detour on his way home, gradually seeing the familiar sights and sounds of his commute give way to a landscape that became ever more creepy and unsettling. This would be something ideally represented in gameplay, as we watch the mundane fade away, and the landscape around us becomes ever more sinister and unfamiliar. Just telling the player this is what happens really doesn't have the same impact. However, I can understand why this may be prohibitively difficult to implement, and it is a waste of time and resources for a horror game to spend so much time cultivating a non-frightening atmosphere, especially if it's just for a few minutes at the game's start.
A Horror Slideshow
From the very beginning of my play-through, it was obvious that The Saint was going to have some performance issues. Graphically, the game looks like an ambitious PS3 project, which in and of itself isn't something to complain about, as out-dated or even outright primitive graphics don't stop a game from being scary. The Convenience Store, for instance, is a game that looks extremely primitive, but it is nonetheless terrifying.
The issue with The Saint is that this less-than-impressive-looking game runs horribly. Even on the lowest possible graphics settings, I was getting debilitating stutters. In some cases, the frame-rate would get so bad that the game resembled a slideshow. Now, my PC may not be the latest and greatest piece of hardware, but a GTX 1080 and 32 GB of RAM should be able to get a consistent 30fps on a game that looks like this! The problems were most noticeable when trying to turn around in certain locations, which sometimes resulted in the game freezing up for 30 seconds on end. Since the environments were often dark and confusing to start with, I would have no idea just how far I had rotated when the game came back online, contributing to an ongoing problem of getting lost and disoriented.
Less serious but more bizarre than the frame-rate issues is the way the game handles pop-in, namely that it seems to be doing the opposite of what I expect. I am inclined to forgive a game when a distant object pops into view suddenly; however, in The Saint, the opposite happens, and distant images pop-out of view when I approached them, leading to some unusual scenarios where I can see the walls of a cave from a distance but when I get closer they disappear and I can see the misty landscape beyond.
Soft-locked and Crashing Out
The performance issues on their own are just an annoyance. I have more patience than most people, and while I'm not exactly thrilled when it takes me five minutes to turn around, I can manage the frustration well enough and soldier on with the play-through. Unfortunately, The Saint has a much bigger problem in the form of numerous soft-locks.
At one point, my character entered a hallway. The door is supposed to slam shut behind the player character, but for whatever reason, that failed to trigger, and the door was left hanging open. Without really thinking about it I turned around and walked out the door I'd just come in through and found myself walking through the void with no ability to progress any further or find the hallway I was supposed to be trapped in.
At least in this case, you can argue that I did something wrong and at least partially deserved to lose my progress and reload the checkpoint. However, shortly thereafter, you are supposed to be transported from the locked hallway into another room, but it is possible to somehow miss the trigger and remain stuck permanently in the locked hallway. This particular issue happens in more than one location, and later on in the same level, I found myself trapped once again in a similar situation when the door that was supposed to swing closed behind me and trap me in a house instead swung closed in front of me, leaving me standing around like an idiot on the porch.
These soft-locks would be annoying at the best of times, but pair them with how stingy the game is with checkpoints, and you can quickly find yourself replaying long sections of the game. This issue is further exacerbated by the fact that the game will periodically crash back to Windows.
I hate to say it because there is a good deal of potential in the The Saint, and its obvious that the solo developer has put a great deal of effort into it's spooky atmosphere, but it is not worth playing in its current state.
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5.0
fun score
Pros
Creepy atmosphere.
Cons
Abysmal performance issue, Constant risk of soft-lock, Checkpoints are few and far between.
