There Are No Saints

Getting Your Hands on There Are No Saints

There Are No Saints is an indie survival horror RPG built with RPG Maker. It's not a AAA title with cinematic cutscenes or motion capture. It's a small, text-heavy experience with turn-based combat and a focus on atmosphere. If you're looking for something like that, here's how you actually get it and what you should know before diving in. The game is available on itch.io. Search for "There Are No Saints" directly on the site. There isn't a Steam release or an official console port as of my last check. The developer, Solipsis, hosts it there. The download is typically free or pay-what-you-want. Just be aware that since it's an indie RPG Maker project, the file will likely be a Windows executable or a browser-based HTML5 build. If you're on macOS or Linux, you may need an emulator like Wine or a compatibility layer, and some people have reported input issues there. I ran it on Windows 10 without problems, but my colleague tried it on Ubuntu and had to use Proton to get the audio to work properly. Not a dealbreaker, but something to factor in if you're not on Windows. The story follows a character named John who investigates a series of gruesome murders in a small town. You explore a top-down map, talk to NPCs, collect items, and fight enemies in turn-based encounters. The combat system is straightforward: attack, defend, use items, and manage your MP. There's no deep skill tree or branching progression. The weight of the game comes from its narrative choices and the way the world reacts to them.

One thing most reviewers gloss over: the game is roughly 3 to 5 hours long for a first playthrough. If you miss certain dialogue options or make suboptimal choices, you might replay to see alternate endings, which bumps it closer to 7 hours total. That's important context if you're deciding whether to invest time. It's not a 40-hour epic. It's a tight, contained experience.

How the mechanics work in practice

Exploration is the core loop. You move around the town and surrounding areas on a point-and-click or arrow-key basis. Interacting with objects triggers events. Some items are required for story progression; others are just useful for combat. The inventory system is limited, so you'll need to make decisions about what to carry. I found myself clearing out low-value consumables fairly early because hoarding them never paid off — the game doesn't reward accumulation, it rewards usage at the right moments. Combat uses a standard RPG Maker battle engine. Enemies appear as sprites on the overworld, and engaging them triggers the battle screen. Your stats grow slowly through leveling. The key tactical nuance is managing MP for special attacks. Most players waste MP early by spamming skills that aren't cost-effective. I learned this the hard way during the second boss fight, where I ran out of MP halfway through and had to survive on basic attacks alone. The workaround was simple: I saved my stronger skills for phases where enemies had high defense or were casting healing spells. It wasn't obvious from the UI alone, but once I figured out the enemy patterns, it made a real difference.

What to watch out for

The game has known issues that you should be prepared for. The difficulty spikes in the middle act. Early sections are quite forgiving, but then the game introduces enemies with high damage output and limited healing options. If you go in unprepared, you will die repeatedly. I spent about 40 minutes stuck on a single encounter before realizing I needed to grind a few lower-level areas to raise my stats. The game doesn't telegraph this well. There's no difficulty setting either, so you're on your own to figure out the balance. Another issue is the save system. The game uses manual saves at designated points. There's no auto-save. If the game crashes or you close it unexpectedly, you lose progress since your last manual save. I lost about 30 minutes of exploration one evening because the game froze on my machine. It happened once, and it hasn't happened since, but it's worth keeping in mind. I started saving more frequently after that, which is just good practice for any game in this state. The audio can also be problematic on certain systems. Some users report that the music stutters or that sound effects are out of sync. This seems to be related to how RPG Maker handles audio playback rather than a fundamental flaw. If you experience this, closing other applications and running the game in fullscreen mode usually helps. I also found that updating my audio drivers resolved the issue entirely.

Is it worth your time?

If you enjoy narrative-driven RPGs with a dark tone and don't mind a modest scope, then yes. The story is genuinely unsettling in places, and the writing is better than what most RPG Maker games produce. The combat is functional but unremarkable. If you're primarily looking for deep mechanical systems, you'll be disappointed. This is a story game that happens to use RPG combat as its vehicle. For comparison, if you want something similar but more polished, you might look at titles like Katana Zero or Omori, which share thematic DNA but have far more refined execution. There Are No Saints occupies a middle ground — ambitious for its size but clearly limited by its engine and budget. That's fine. It does what it sets out to do, just not flawlessly. I'd recommend downloading it, playing through the first hour to get a feel for the pacing, and then deciding if it's clicking for you. The investment is low, and the payoff is real if you're in the right headspace for it.