Saw

Saw, see?

For these purposes, let us all assume we have not been under any sort of rock for the past few years, and are both familiar with the Saw motion picture franchise and all the tabloid honking and hollering over terms such as torture porn. Another small act of faith on our behalf: let us also assume we know just how soul-twistingly bad movie-to-game conversions have a history of being. Given these two postulates, no one was more surprised than me then when Saw the Game for PS3 was actually not only far from being awful, but aspired to even loftier heights than mere competency.

First Interlude: A man wakes up in a dank, white tiled room. The room has a sense of being abandoned, possibly underground, and is lit by a single white strip light. The man realises he is handcuffed to a rusty iron railing. He looks up and we see he is the head of Seattle based Zombie Studios. An old TV bolted to the ceiling crackles into life, showing a demonic dolls head. A masked, rumbling voice asks: Would you like to make a game?

In Saw you will take on the role of Detective Tapp, a homicide cop who has been apparently hell bent on apprehending the titular murderous engineer for years, who starts the game waking up in that famous grubby white room with a cross between an orthodontic brace and a bear-trap affixed to his face. The countdown to catastrophic cranial realignment starts immediately, and its an impressively chaotic and tense opening few seconds as the player follows the button prompts to escape. A tutorial sequence and an exposition by a maniacal muppet on a TV lets you know that youre now in Saws game inside an old Asylum, along with a few other choice nutters - time to go trap dodging. Saw looks great, and whatever you think about the taste or artistic merits of the Saw movies, the game echoes the visual style with great aplomb. The first few moments in the familiar white room, with that satanic fraggle spelling out the rules of the game, and solving the first couple of puzzles is very likely some of the best opening moments of any game at all. The mood, pace, plot exposition and control system are all dealt with succinctly and by the second or third minute of play you pretty much know where you are and what this disturbed little ghost-train aspires to be.

Second Interlude: A man wakes up in a dank, white tiled room. The room has a sense of being abandoned, possibly underground, and is lit by a single white strip light. The man realises he is handcuffed to a rusty iron railing. He looks up and we see he is the talentless MTV-spawned Director, Kevin Tancharoen. An old TV bolted to the ceiling crackles into life, showing a demonic dolls head. A masked, rumbling voice asks: Would you like to remake Fame?"

Saw does an impressive job of capturing the look and feel of the film franchise, from the oppressive and ramshackle surroundings to the grinding industrial sound effects. The seemingly endless dark corridors give a sense of claustrophobia, an urge to escape and, as nearly every trap and obstacle will kill you outright should you blunder into it, there is a tangible sense of trepidation attached to every door, corridor, searchable drawer and corner. It soon emerges that the seemingly omniscient Saw is theming this little outing on the transgressions of Detective Tapps past, and the game is chaptered by saving associates from Tappss past (abused suspects, unprotected witnesses, etc) who had been hurt by his obsessive pursuit of Saw. As a device it is fairly neat, and the traps in question look the business, many of which seem to be a selection of greatest hits from the movies, all of which will please the fans with a suitably squelchy outcome for failure. For the impatient it will be after about 40 minutes of this impressively atmospheric gameplay, and for even the most saintly it will be by half way through the second chapter, that the realization dawns that Saw has played its one competent trick, and from here on its its just more of the same, and more filler. The game suddenly becomes a greater mirror of the movie franchise than perhaps it intended: an excellent opening act followed by five more movies worth of stodge, repetition, and awkwardly implemented suspense that degenerates into tedium. These shortcomings are most apparent in the tiresome combat, the lack of imagination in the mechanic of both the incidental and boss traps, and the monotony of the sets.

Third Interlude: A small man wakes up in a dank, white tiled room. The room has a sense of being abandoned, possibly underground, and is lit by a single white strip light. The man realizes he is handcuffed to a rusty iron railing. He looks up and we see he is historical figure and short arsed military genius Emperor Napoleon the 1st of France. An old TV bolted to the ceiling crackles into life, showing a demonic dolls head. A masked, rumbling voice asks: Would you like to invade Spain?

What all the Saw movies after the really quite good original, as well as the game, boil down to is a series of money-shots. Spike in the head. Buzzsaw to the chest. Electrocution of the elbows. et al. The increasingly lumbering and ineffectually convoluted plot of the films as they went on meant that any supposed acting was purely a drawn out filler until the next contestant was strapped in. The exact same fate befalls the game, as after the initial punch is delivered and the first series of traps leading to the boss trap is evaded, the game has to kill time until the next big event by distracting the player with repetitions of previous incidental traps and encounters with other contestants. Suffice to say they are compelled to try and kill you, and you return the favor with fists, improvised blunt objects, or once in a while a limited ammo revolver. The action is clumsy, poorly implemented, and generally serves to annihilate whatever spooky tension the game might have been able to recapture from its opening few minutes. There is occasionally the option to lure said goons into traps, or if theyre wearing a ticking trap themselves just lock yourself in a toilet cubicle until you hear them detonate, but these options are under implemented. The under appreciated Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth featured a sequence where you had to escape psychotic villagers by dead-bolting doors and heaving heavy objects in front of them as you fled through an abandoned building. It was terrifying, and although the mechanic in Saw is almost exactly the same, it utterly misses the mark. In instances where the player can see where the game might be encouraging you to lure a goon into an elaborate death, you will end up just sighing and trudging towards them with a clumsy fist raised and a Lets get this over with demeanor. Ennui is not the friend of suspense.

Fourth Interlude: An entire navy crew from World War II wakes up in a dank, white tiled room. The room has a sense of being abandoned, possibly underground, and is lit by a single white strip light. The men realize they are handcuffed to a rusty iron railing. They look up and we see it is the entire cast of Technicolor musical spectacular South Pacific by Rodgers & Hammerstein. An old TV bolted to the ceiling crackles into life, showing a demonic dolls head. A masked, rumbling voice asks: Is there nothing like a Dame?

With the exception of the combat nearly every part of Saw the Game works in isolation. The visual styling is an excellent reiteration of the sets, and the recreation of the movie ordeals is handled well, including such classics as bobbing for a key in a toilet full for syringes or going swimming in vats of liquefied pigs guts. However, as soon as the player is forced to repeat the trials and traps over and over, down identical grimy corridors, pestered by identical combat instances, the excellent head start is blown and what started as a smartly made, genuinely scary experience degenerates into unimaginative straight-to-DVD splatter, gorily painting by its own repeated numbers.

60%

By Duncan Lawson