It’s been nearly a decade since Vertigo Games released Arizona Sunshine (2016) on PC VR headsets, serving up one of the industry’s first immersive zombie-shooting adventures. Now the Netherlands-based studio is bringing the franchise to PC and console as a “reimagined” flatscreen game.
While names can be deceiving, the flatscreen version of Arizona Sunshine isn’t a VR-to-flatscreen port of either the original 2016 version or the more recently released Arizona Sunshine Remake (2024) as such, but rather a fully reimagined third-person action game that takes the series’ zombie combat and combines it with the story introduced in Arizona Sunshine 2 (2023).
From the trailer, it also appears to be designed around larger zombie hordes and spectacle combat rather than the slower, more methodical pacing of VR. Weapons include shotguns, flamethrowers, grenade launchers, machetes, and more, with Sunny’s canine pal, Buddy, actively taking part in combat.
Slated top release on PS5, Xbox, Switch 2, and PC sometime this year, the flatscreen game promises both solo and co-op gameplay, the latter of which lets you play as Buddy.
Vertigo Games seems to be following some recent precedent set by Moss studio Polyarc Games, which announced in May it was working on a flatscreen adaptation of the VR puzzle-platformer series, which combines both Moss (2018) and sequel Moss: Book II (2022) into a single PC/console title, Moss: The Forgotten Relic.
Like Polyarc, Vertigo Games has experienced some recent turmoil, which puts the Arizona Sunshine flatscreen game announcement under an odd spotlight; last week, the studio announced was closing its Amsterdam-based satellite studio known for VR action-adventure Metro Awakening VR (2024).
Granted, this isn’t the first flatscreen game by Vertigo Games. Founded in 2008, the Rotterdam-based studio released a number of flatscreen adventure games before working exclusively on VR games.
Still, it’s a marked shift in priorities prompted by Meta’s recent Reality Labs XR pivot division, which not only saw the closure of a several internal game studios and a torrent of cancelled projects, but also the revelation it was pulling funding from a number of third-party VR projects as well.
