Sure, You'd Like to Play a Game
SAW proves that not all licensed games are as bad an idea as one might think.
Published: December 1, 2009
You review enough games over the years and you start to build up set of unfortunate biases; it's an inevitability. Licensed games, by and large, continue to re-enforce, almost without fail, the idea that they're made simply to cash in on a popular movie or TV show or toy (often all three), and while that's hardly fair to the folks that work their butts off to create a game that's entertaining within what most rational people would think is impossible, the end results often speak for themselves.
Every once in a while, though, a game will come along that seems so impossibly ill-suited for this medium of ours that when it's actually done right... well, it can be downright disorienting. Such is the fate of SAW, which at first blush probably sounds like the kind of dumb idea that only money-hungry execs from the film and games industries could concoct. Indeed may parts of the game feel as though they run counter to the spirit of the original couple films (which the game takes between), but then this is a movie series that will be on its sixth iteration in as many years, so why not milk it 'til it's dry, right?
Except it's patently obvious that developer Zombie Studios saw this as an opportunity to cram the preconceptions of guys like me right up our collective asses. SAW doesn't suck -- and I don't mean that in the "for a licensed game" sense, I mean it as plainly as I can. It's actually a good game. Not a great game, but certainly something that ventures into an odd mix of melee combat and devious puzzles and emerges as a flawed but ultimately enthralling experience, short though it may be.
You wake at the start of the game as Detective David Tapp (played by Danny Glover in the first movie, though not voiced by him in the game), caught in the now-familiar bear trap device on his head. In an obvious show of adaptation from feedback, Zombie tweaked this trap to be rather blatantly obvious (early builds of the game only showed a brief light corresponding to a face button, but it's now a clear series of prompts), but it nonetheless starts things out on a fairly fathful track that starts to meander quickly. You'll still fish around in a toilet full of dirty syringes to get a key, for instance, but you'll also grab just about anything that's not nailed down and thwack all manner of booby-trapped bad guys across the face in between traps (the logic being that series killer Jigsaw sewed the key to free them inside your body).
It's the first sign that not everything here is going to be as rigidly adherent to the big screen flicks, but that doesn't mean things stray all that far. The combat may be clunky and a bit out of place, sure, but when the game does go for puzzles, it often does so in a way that has you thinking under pressure, quite accurately putting you in the shoes of the victims from the movies with the added benefit of getting a do-over when you often can't quite figure things out the first time around. Puzzles that play with perspective or quick reaction times are littered throughout the abandoned asylum you'll have to explore to first find your escape and then free the other "good" people trapped inside with you.
It's a testament to the obvious fan nature of the dev staff that there's at least an attempt to explain why people are here. Jigsaw, though his rather warped sense of morality, is often trying to make a point -- bloody and gruesome though it may be -- about the value of life and proper choices. Rarely does this crop up in any meaningful way in SAW the game, but what (slightly heavy-handed) instances there are were certainly done well enough to appease fans of the series without making it all feel like a string of loosely connected death traps.
And make no mistake, this is a game about death traps. Some no doubt will take offense to that, and while I'll make no excuses for the level of gore present here (like the movies, it's something you either get offended by or laugh off and try to tackle as an actual puzzle first and foremost), I will admit that some of them are actually pretty damned ingenious. They can also be rather puzzlingly vague; the first major death trap you'll come across after freeing yourself tasks you with routing a series of falling cylinders to keep a pair of syringes from injecting lethal poison into either you or the person you're trying to save. I ended up getting through it not by figuring out what I was doing (as it all happens a bit too quickly), but by just memorizing the sequence through trial and error. It took over a dozen tries.
Every once in a while, though, a game will come along that seems so impossibly ill-suited for this medium of ours that when it's actually done right... well, it can be downright disorienting. Such is the fate of SAW, which at first blush probably sounds like the kind of dumb idea that only money-hungry execs from the film and games industries could concoct. Indeed may parts of the game feel as though they run counter to the spirit of the original couple films (which the game takes between), but then this is a movie series that will be on its sixth iteration in as many years, so why not milk it 'til it's dry, right?
Except it's patently obvious that developer Zombie Studios saw this as an opportunity to cram the preconceptions of guys like me right up our collective asses. SAW doesn't suck -- and I don't mean that in the "for a licensed game" sense, I mean it as plainly as I can. It's actually a good game. Not a great game, but certainly something that ventures into an odd mix of melee combat and devious puzzles and emerges as a flawed but ultimately enthralling experience, short though it may be.
You wake at the start of the game as Detective David Tapp (played by Danny Glover in the first movie, though not voiced by him in the game), caught in the now-familiar bear trap device on his head. In an obvious show of adaptation from feedback, Zombie tweaked this trap to be rather blatantly obvious (early builds of the game only showed a brief light corresponding to a face button, but it's now a clear series of prompts), but it nonetheless starts things out on a fairly fathful track that starts to meander quickly. You'll still fish around in a toilet full of dirty syringes to get a key, for instance, but you'll also grab just about anything that's not nailed down and thwack all manner of booby-trapped bad guys across the face in between traps (the logic being that series killer Jigsaw sewed the key to free them inside your body).
It's the first sign that not everything here is going to be as rigidly adherent to the big screen flicks, but that doesn't mean things stray all that far. The combat may be clunky and a bit out of place, sure, but when the game does go for puzzles, it often does so in a way that has you thinking under pressure, quite accurately putting you in the shoes of the victims from the movies with the added benefit of getting a do-over when you often can't quite figure things out the first time around. Puzzles that play with perspective or quick reaction times are littered throughout the abandoned asylum you'll have to explore to first find your escape and then free the other "good" people trapped inside with you.
It's a testament to the obvious fan nature of the dev staff that there's at least an attempt to explain why people are here. Jigsaw, though his rather warped sense of morality, is often trying to make a point -- bloody and gruesome though it may be -- about the value of life and proper choices. Rarely does this crop up in any meaningful way in SAW the game, but what (slightly heavy-handed) instances there are were certainly done well enough to appease fans of the series without making it all feel like a string of loosely connected death traps.
And make no mistake, this is a game about death traps. Some no doubt will take offense to that, and while I'll make no excuses for the level of gore present here (like the movies, it's something you either get offended by or laugh off and try to tackle as an actual puzzle first and foremost), I will admit that some of them are actually pretty damned ingenious. They can also be rather puzzlingly vague; the first major death trap you'll come across after freeing yourself tasks you with routing a series of falling cylinders to keep a pair of syringes from injecting lethal poison into either you or the person you're trying to save. I ended up getting through it not by figuring out what I was doing (as it all happens a bit too quickly), but by just memorizing the sequence through trial and error. It took over a dozen tries.
