Just in case you’ve been on the dark side of the moon for the last 5 years, or shy away from schlock-horror movies (then why are you even reading this? Huh?) and thus haven’t ever heard of the Saw franchise; Saw is a third person survival horror game based on the Saw movies. The Saw movies are the story of a mad-as-a-hare-but-imaginative killer named “Jigsaw”, who likes to play games with his victims, always apparently giving them an opportunity to escape, but always at a cost. The “Saw” of the title comes from the first trial that the movie makes you party to, in which “all” a victim has to do to escape is saw their foot off!
In Saw the game, the Jigsaw Killer has healed Detective David Tapp (played by Danny Glover in the first Saw movies) from a gunshot wound, and sets up a “game” for him in an abandoned and decrepit insane asylum. Obsessed by the Jigsaw case and determined to apprehend the nutcase killer, Detective Tapp plays “game” after “game”, discovering clues and newspaper clippings related to who Jigsaw is and also why he’s been victimized. Playing as Tapp you encounter several people trapped in the game by Jigsaw, some with past connections to the case and many of whom seem keener on having Tapp dead than actually escaping Jigsaw’s game, and you soon find out why; while stitching up your bullet wound Jigsaw took the opportunity to place a key inside Tapp’s body, a key that will allow any of the other “inmates” to escape! You will save some of these people from Jigsaw’s traps, but often who lives and who dies is determined by your personal choices. SAW features many of the sadistic and deadly mechanical traps seen in the film, as well as some imaginatively gruesome new ones.
The game starts with you having to frantically remove one of Jigsaw’s head-squishing devices (by twiddling the left stick and matching button prompts) before it goes off and ruins your day. Exploring the nauseating, dingy surroundings of the derelict loony bin is done via an over-the-shoulder third person view. Tapp doesn’t move very quickly at the best of times but moving around new surroundings has to be done cautiously because of the boobytraps that have been placed on many of the doorways. As the scene is mostly poorly lit, your light sources are usually next-to useless and the game’s graphics tear so badly (v-synch is turned off), spotting tripwires is often harder than it should have been. You also have to avoid broken glass on the floor because Jigsaw has removed Tapp’s shoes and Tapp is apparently too dumb to steal some from any of the many shoed people he kills during the game. Perhaps he’s worried about catching athlete’s foot?
Many of your fellow “guests” will try to attack you, with a variety of improvised weapons from spades to broom handles, water pipes, baseball bats, hatchets, guns, and even the occasional Molotov. These weapons have a limited amount of strength and will break after a certain number of hits, and you can only carry one at a time. Combat is brutal but not in a good way, it’s sluggish and clunky because the button response is slow and despite being a cop Tapp fights like he’s been doped. You have to press two buttons (hold L2 to enter combat stance & press ‘X’ for a quick attack or L2 & Square for a strong attack). The strangest thing about the fighting is that it’s often better to drop your weapon and simply resort to punching an enemy, because Tapp’s fists tend to be a lot more effective than a melee weapon due to the painfully deliberate and slow way he swings one. Occasionally you’ll find a gun and as long as you hit centre body mass these usually mean a one-shot kill, so should be used wisely.
Pressing ‘Triangle’ turns on your light source if you have a flashlight, a camera with a flash or a lighter. Some areas have broken floors so you have to tip-toe across planks using the Sixaxis feature to balance. Selecting found items (improvised weapons etc) and even simple actions like opening and locking doors is made trickier than it need have been by the game’s fussiness as to where you’re standing or pointing when trying to perform an action.
If you get hurt by an enemy there are bandages and drinking sources to top up your health, or health hypos can be found all over the place; you press square to make Tapp inject himself for an instant health boost. Tapp is rendered unconscious at one point and Jigsaw’s mysterious assistant fits him with a shotgun collar” (as seen in the films – I think it’s Saw 3?) Encumbered with this horrific millstone throughout most of the game, you are warned that should an enemy fitted with a similar collar get too close to you then it will start to flash and beep. If you don’t get far enough away from them in time, your collar’s shotgun cartridges will go off, and you will die – but at least you won’t have to worry about headaches or bad hair days anymore. However, you can often evade an enemy for long enough that their collar will go off and kill them instead. In order to put some distance between you and another “contestant” you can knock them unconscious or shut and bolt doors to stop them getting to you.
Not all of the people you find around the asylum will want to fight with you, and you’ll have to rescue several from Jigsaw’s nastiest, most sadistic puzzles in order to progress through the “game” that Jigsaw has planned out for you. It’s probably no accident, but finding your way around the asylum could drive you nuts because the in-game map (even on the 42inch HDTV we reviewed the game on) is almost useless. It shows you how complex and large the floors of the asylum are, but the markings are vague with ambiguous icons that leave you lost and bumbling around most of the time. Although doors are usually locked behind you ensuring you go in vaguely the right direction to progress, the fact that the marker of your position doesn’t show which direction you’re facing doesn’t help, and you have no compass to orientate yourself with it anyway, so a good memory and sense of direction is extremely useful or you might be wandering around the asylum even longer than Jigsaw would like.
Every few rooms Jigsaw will have set you a puzzle to solve, frequently against the clock. There are “cog” puzzles that are an ever-present challenge throughout the game. These consist of a board with a rotating cog and a static one, with randomly spaced holes that you can plug more cogs into to connect the two. They start off being relatively simple, but a few hours into the game there’s a sequence of four that will cause much hair pulling, gnashing of teeth and be the end of the game for many players. The first 3 weren’t too tricky but the 4th was extremely complex and set against a tight time limit, it’s the sort of challenge that only masochists could enjoy. There are also gas pipe puzzles that require you connect concentric rings so that the inlet and outlet pipes line up, and electrical circuit puzzles with one or more power sources that you have to connect to light bulbs by rotating the different pieces of circuitry into the correct orientation. There are also some clever visual puzzles in which figures or letters may have to be lined up in a mirror. These puzzles are, without doubt, the best part of the game, but as we mentioned, some seem a lot tougher than others, some can be ignored altogether and the time limits seem inconsistent. Many will involve dying at least a couple of times in order to discover the trap or the solution, no one is going to play through Saw the first time without dying, Jigsaw simply wouldn’t allow that. The inevitability of some of the death traps can be annoying, but the game wouldn’t have felt right if you could cruise through it nimbly side-stepping every single one and finishing it on a single run-through, would it?
The game’s strong point is that it looks and feels a lot like the movies. The grungy surroundings are well modelled and Jigsaw acts just like he does in the movies, taunting, mentally torturing and kind-of encouraging you as you go. The level of hatred you build up for him will be proportionate to the number of times you bumble into a shotgun trap or fail a puzzle and die - Jigsaw is a nasty piece of work, but in my book the designers of some of the rooms and puzzles are just as nasty.
Saw supplies a reasonable if slow-paced survival horror fix. The clunky controls will irritate and the game is very picky about where you look to use specific items, making things a lot fiddlier than they should have been, particularly when you’re being chased by someone who wants to kill you. Despite the gripes, the game is good enough that you’ll probably want to see the conclusion and if you can get past the more testing puzzles and the game’s stodgy controls it’ll even answer some previously unanswered questions from the films; you’ll find out about Jigsaw’s origins and why he devoted his life to “games”. While Saw doesn’t really do anything new, the puzzles add a brain-taxing element that few other survival horror games have thought to use, and while some of them will have you tearing your hair out, many others will give you a feeling of satisfaction when you complete them. Despite having no more than average visuals and terrible tearing (especially considering that 99.9% of the game is set indoors) the game captures the yucky, desperate and doom-laden atmosphere of the movie series well, and you always feel like a pawn who has a painful, violent and probably messy death awaiting him just around the next corner. Putting a score on a game like this is highly subjective, although my masochistic side actually kind of enjoyed this one, I’m glad it’s over.
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