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The horror movie genre has always been peculiarly vulnerable to sequelitis and the Saw series is surely its most obvious victim still plopping out an annual Omen child to entertain halloween movie-goers. So it was perhaps inevitable that the similarly afflicted horror game genre would find itself knocked up with a little jigsaw-puzzler of its own.[br]
Set in the aftermath of the very first Saw movie, the game casts the player as Detective David Tapp, long presumed dead by fans but here apparently saved by the Jigsaw Killer who has brought him to the derelict Whitehurst Insane Asylum to subject him to a trademark lesson in life appreciation.[br]
Gameplay<hr size="3" noshade color="#ED761C"></strong>[br]
The dark and decaying ruins of Whitehurst accurately mimic the dank setting of the movies and the presentation throughout is suitably faithful to the tropes and general spirit of the franchise. In each chapter, Jigsaw's doll peers at you through fuzzy televisions as you go about completing your rat-in-a-maze tasks, with his sinister voice (Tobin Bell) narrating you through the challenges he has set. Unfortunately, these tasks include far too many fetch-quests, constantly sending you after the key to the door to the office which opens the gate to the ward with the electric coupler for the fuse box. And despite the all too infrequent documents, bloody messages and sideshow "how did this guy die?" corpses, the asylum itself remains a somewhat stereotypical, characterless place.[br]
[br]
Porting Issues<hr size="3" noshade color="#ED761C"></strong>[br]
Like an increasing number of third-person titles, the PC version of Saw is a frustrating console hand me down. Playing the game with a mouse and keyboard feels totally unnatural: the action buttons (shoot, fighting pose etc.) have been bizarrely mapped to the numbers 1 through 6, and whilst movement is on the WASD keys and looking is delegated to the mouse, these inputs pick up all kinds of strange uses in puzzles that were clearly never designed with the PC in mind. The very first puzzle is particularly telling, and has you scrubbing your desk with the mouse and completely missing the fact that the 'countdown' on the helmet is actually a visual prompt to which of the oddly assigned, un-customisable action buttons you should be using. The sane option is definitely to plug in a controller, but be aware that the puzzle button prompts correspond to the Xbox 360 controller for Windows.[br]
[br]
However, even if you have this ideal controller set-up, the fact is that controlling the player character is never as fun as it should be. Punctuating the game's many puzzles are encounters with inmates after a front-door key supposedly sewn into Tapp's body. These close-combat encounters involve the player character unenthusiastically responding to any suggestion of attacking, and you have to learn to request a swing of even a lightweight scalpel a few too many seconds before your enemy is in front of you. To its credit, Saw does leave fighting somewhat optional even despite its impressive collection of makeshift weapons: there is usually a puddle of water to electrify, or a way of barricading a door shut in order to avoid or delay combat. But even in these situations, getting a switch activated or closing and then bolting a door involves unnecessary manual turning and slow button responses that usually end in an unfair and frustrating death.[br]
Puzzles<hr size="3" noshade color="#ED761C"></strong>[br]
The game resists having end of chapter boss battles, demanding instead that you solve various puzzles against the clock. However, all too often these are simply time-trial marathon versions of the various pipe, switchboard and cog style-puzzles you find attached to chests and doors in the environment, and others draw inspiration from board and card games like Downfall and Pairs, which is jarring to say the least. Whilst there is not a complete lack of good ideas behind the puzzles in the game, many are recycled altogether too far: by the end of the game, you'll have discovered so many lock combinations in mirrors that you'll be quite embarrassed you ever considered the first one you saw a good idea.[br]
[br]
The lack of inspiration in the puzzle-bosses has a more sinister element of course. The 'timer' you're racing against isn't a clock, but a needle, spike or circular blade mutilating a restrained character. If you fail, you're subjected to their violent death scene... or are you rewarded? Ultimately, there is the question of who Saw, movie or game is aimed at. To me, the game's almost unrelenting sequence of exploding body-parts and painful screams seem to be trying to overcompensate: the fact is that the functional but hardly photo-realistic graphics don't recreate the relative unsettling believability of the violence in the movies. Games are simply a medium where pain and death are meaningless, and this is bad news for a franchised game about how pain and death can be used to construct meaning.[br]
In Summary<hr size="3" noshade color="#ED761C"></strong>[br]
It's certainly not all bad, and because the well-acted story adds further detail to the twisting Saw lore, I find myself concluding that the game is worth a playthrough for fans of the film. But I'm disinclined to recommend the game to fans of the genre, particuarly as the shoddy port-work reduces the impact of what is already an unsurprising survival horror title. Sadly, I suspect that the chapter-selection and harder gametype options will seem like overly optimistic inclusions even to Saw devotees.[br]By Kupocake[br]
Set in the aftermath of the very first Saw movie, the game casts the player as Detective David Tapp, long presumed dead by fans but here apparently saved by the Jigsaw Killer who has brought him to the derelict Whitehurst Insane Asylum to subject him to a trademark lesson in life appreciation.[br]
Gameplay<hr size="3" noshade color="#ED761C"></strong>[br]
The dark and decaying ruins of Whitehurst accurately mimic the dank setting of the movies and the presentation throughout is suitably faithful to the tropes and general spirit of the franchise. In each chapter, Jigsaw's doll peers at you through fuzzy televisions as you go about completing your rat-in-a-maze tasks, with his sinister voice (Tobin Bell) narrating you through the challenges he has set. Unfortunately, these tasks include far too many fetch-quests, constantly sending you after the key to the door to the office which opens the gate to the ward with the electric coupler for the fuse box. And despite the all too infrequent documents, bloody messages and sideshow "how did this guy die?" corpses, the asylum itself remains a somewhat stereotypical, characterless place.[br]
Porting Issues<hr size="3" noshade color="#ED761C"></strong>[br]
Like an increasing number of third-person titles, the PC version of Saw is a frustrating console hand me down. Playing the game with a mouse and keyboard feels totally unnatural: the action buttons (shoot, fighting pose etc.) have been bizarrely mapped to the numbers 1 through 6, and whilst movement is on the WASD keys and looking is delegated to the mouse, these inputs pick up all kinds of strange uses in puzzles that were clearly never designed with the PC in mind. The very first puzzle is particularly telling, and has you scrubbing your desk with the mouse and completely missing the fact that the 'countdown' on the helmet is actually a visual prompt to which of the oddly assigned, un-customisable action buttons you should be using. The sane option is definitely to plug in a controller, but be aware that the puzzle button prompts correspond to the Xbox 360 controller for Windows.[br]
However, even if you have this ideal controller set-up, the fact is that controlling the player character is never as fun as it should be. Punctuating the game's many puzzles are encounters with inmates after a front-door key supposedly sewn into Tapp's body. These close-combat encounters involve the player character unenthusiastically responding to any suggestion of attacking, and you have to learn to request a swing of even a lightweight scalpel a few too many seconds before your enemy is in front of you. To its credit, Saw does leave fighting somewhat optional even despite its impressive collection of makeshift weapons: there is usually a puddle of water to electrify, or a way of barricading a door shut in order to avoid or delay combat. But even in these situations, getting a switch activated or closing and then bolting a door involves unnecessary manual turning and slow button responses that usually end in an unfair and frustrating death.[br]
Puzzles<hr size="3" noshade color="#ED761C"></strong>[br]
The game resists having end of chapter boss battles, demanding instead that you solve various puzzles against the clock. However, all too often these are simply time-trial marathon versions of the various pipe, switchboard and cog style-puzzles you find attached to chests and doors in the environment, and others draw inspiration from board and card games like Downfall and Pairs, which is jarring to say the least. Whilst there is not a complete lack of good ideas behind the puzzles in the game, many are recycled altogether too far: by the end of the game, you'll have discovered so many lock combinations in mirrors that you'll be quite embarrassed you ever considered the first one you saw a good idea.[br]
The lack of inspiration in the puzzle-bosses has a more sinister element of course. The 'timer' you're racing against isn't a clock, but a needle, spike or circular blade mutilating a restrained character. If you fail, you're subjected to their violent death scene... or are you rewarded? Ultimately, there is the question of who Saw, movie or game is aimed at. To me, the game's almost unrelenting sequence of exploding body-parts and painful screams seem to be trying to overcompensate: the fact is that the functional but hardly photo-realistic graphics don't recreate the relative unsettling believability of the violence in the movies. Games are simply a medium where pain and death are meaningless, and this is bad news for a franchised game about how pain and death can be used to construct meaning.[br]
In Summary<hr size="3" noshade color="#ED761C"></strong>[br]
It's certainly not all bad, and because the well-acted story adds further detail to the twisting Saw lore, I find myself concluding that the game is worth a playthrough for fans of the film. But I'm disinclined to recommend the game to fans of the genre, particuarly as the shoddy port-work reduces the impact of what is already an unsurprising survival horror title. Sadly, I suspect that the chapter-selection and harder gametype options will seem like overly optimistic inclusions even to Saw devotees.[br]By Kupocake[br]
