A lot of movie based games have a lot of potentials, but fall flat due to shortcuts, bad production values, or just rushed and unfinished work. Saw is one of these games that suffer this disease, but it’s not a terrible game. You play as Detective Tapp who must find and help various people seen in the movies through traps, but there are small little traps you must get through to advance through areas, and find items to also advance through areas. This is where Saw should be great: Gore. It falls flat there in a sense that everything feels stale and noting have any weight or impact to it. When head pop it’s no more exciting than a bubble. There’s not much gore other than a red blob on someone’s head and no cringe factor. The movies made me even feel sick and queasy, but the game does nothing for me.


Controlling the character feels floaty and weightless kind of like those first generation PS2 games. Combat involves a simple lock-on button and attacking, and it works except that it’s as simple as A-B-C. You can pick up various weapons such as crutches, lead pipes, scalpels etc., but they have a damage meter so after a few hits they break apart. Enemies are as dumb as they come, and blocking their path by shutting doors can help, but they really can’t kill you since they even struggle targeting you.

When it comes to exploring the game is linear to a fault with literally narrow corridors everywhere. Sometimes you’ll come to a candle with a tape from Jigsaw or some type of document you can read, but the clues in the game are very vague or too obvious. Most traps that you must get through to advance through the levels are pretty mundane and not very interesting. These range from finding a code on the wall to a lock, reaching inside some nasty thing to grab a key, or timed lock mini-games. I want to see gruesome stuff not silly interpretations of things we’ve seen before. Saw is a game that could really innovate the mature audience inspired games with some pretty brutal stuff.


After you slog through this you can finally get to the finals which are a bigger main trap, but not all these are interesting and pretty much are more glorified versions of the advancement puzzles. Neither are very gory, look brutal, or are as convincing as the movies, and it’s the graphics that really transpire this. They look very dated and the technology doesn’t allow a lot of detail. If these guys could get a sophisticated engine they could make this game look fantastic, but they opted out for the cheap engine instead. They did capture the Saw atmosphere really well, but the shock value is pretty much nonexistent.

Overall Saw is a decent rental, but it’s not one that you’re going to walk away feeling great about, but instead depressed at how lame the game is instead of how great it could be. The game does support an Xbox 360 controller, but people who prefer the keyboard and mouse will be clueless as to what controls what because numbers don’t really help and there are no tutorials. The puzzles, however, are varied enough to keep you interested and there are some fun doozies in there, but other than that this is a huge disappointment.

This is almost really good.
I was a bit worried about the story of this game taking place in between the first and second films since the gap between those two was easily the biggest stumble in the series' footing, but this game sticks to horror more than goofy, over the top action and it mostly works. I mean, it is absolutely ridiculous to believe that Jigsaw and Dr. Gordon alone set up this ENTIRE asylum with well over 50+ people in it, but since the atmosphere is so foreboding and the story itself takes place in the very horror-soaked beginnings of the series I can sorta look passed that. The story offers two endings that do not retcon or shake up the series at its core, and the way you save and interact with certain people add to their characters in Saw II.

Conceptually, this game absolutely shines. I find it pretty easy to separate myself from the happenings on screen of the film but adding a layer to actually PLAYING Jigsaw's game is a great premise in and of itself. Your character has a key sewn inside of them that the others trapped in this building want, so these people mercilessly attack you in order to gain their freedom in the same way you are. There's a constant reminder of urging the player to find a new perspective that is played with interestingly in many visual puzzles, and this theme is carried throughout each story-ending choice this game offers. The game does a good job making you care about your actions through attempting to reconcile trauma inflicted on innocent others through the destructive pursuit of Jigsaw with many audio logs, TV cutscenes, and generally frantic tone. Jigsaw is constantly watching you, so the way this game offers "tips" is through the sarcastic, know-it-all tone of the man himself (ex. "be careful to watch your footing, detective!" as the game hides a million shotgun traps around corners you need to be careful not to set off).

Mechanically is where this game falls apart though. I very much like the idea of a Saw game being mainly puzzles, but I don't very much like solving the same recycled puzzle 25+ times each in order to achieve my goal. I liked some of the final zones where you save people related to you with unique traps, but nothing was really thematic or entirely fresh the entire playthrough. Luckily these puzzles required a bit of thinking even after you've solved them so many times, but seeing the same circuit board and pipe puzzle over and over got a bit frustrating. I like the idea of using multiple different weapons and light sources to traverse my way through the crumbling asylum, but the starting lighter is by far the best light source in the game and absolutely nothing beats stun-locking enemies to death with the standard fist attacks, I even beat the final Pig boss in one grab cycle just like this. I don't mind the brevity of this game at all either, even if it would've felt much more impactful with an array of many puzzles instead of scaling about 3 unique ones over and over.

Overall, as a Saw fan, I do like this game and think it offers something unique to the series by simply existing and trying something novel. As a budding fan of third-person survival horror games, I can easily recognize how much it drops the ball with many underdeveloped, glitchy mechanics and a severe lack of variety when it comes to its gameplay. Even still, I had a fun time shuffling my way through several dozen traps and saving others through puzzle solving skills, always having a looming sense of danger around every corner due to some effective atmosphere that captured the spirit of the film's editing perfectly.

The lore papers didn't make much sense to me though. Jigsaw a victim of not only Reaganite politics that defunded healthcare but also of MKULTRA? This is super awesome and has late-stage Saw film energy but for essentially a Saw 1.5, what????

Such a fucking mess of a game in terms of survival horror mechanics, something where it does too many things for its own good - most of the mechanics feel less like innovations and more like broken gimmicks, like "How about we have your character sticking his arm into a toilet full of needles about 20 times throughout the game. Exploding neck collar. Oh, let's sick dozens of people after him too" and so on.

It's a mess, but it's also like the inverse version of the movie Postal (2007) - where it's a video game adaptation that's kind of a piece of shit, but manages to capture the appeal of the movies, that is where it's just a bunch of absurd set-pieces one after the other - and I kind of like the atmosphere in this one as well. It's very dark and brooding and otherwise would have worked if it didn't feel broken most of the time. Like, they do a lot to capture the Saw franchise - but then the fact that it's a whole 5 hour long video game is absurd, just from the level of torture Detective Tapp goes through - and also the fact that he would have killed dozens of people by the end of this game.

But remember "Jigsaw has never murdered people. He finds that word distasteful because he gives people choices." and really it's just uh... yeah. Either he was expecting Detective Tapp to die with the amount of shit he puts him through, or he also grossly underestimates just how much he's willing to put up a fight.