The Haunted Hoard: Saw (PS3)

The Saw franchise of films is one that is surprisingly grounded in reality. There are no supernatural monsters or undying killers, just a specific serial killer whose own impending death inspires him to try and help others see the value of their own lives with terrifying traps. With victims forced to make some physical sacrifice or endure intense pain to escape these alive, Jigsaw’s unusual psychosis is clearly flawed but makes for a horror movie villain with more complex goals than just killing everyone that’s wronged him. However, after the first film, the franchise seemed to get out of hand, and while seeing the creative traps Jigsaw created for these survival tests was always the biggest appeal, soon it became more about the suffering of the individuals involved than their successes. By the time a video game adaptation of the Saw series was complete, it had already reached its fifth movie installment and become mired in its fascination with torture. Thankfully, the game doesn’t lean into that angle, but playing through it can still be a tortuous experience.

Set between the first and second films, the main focus of Jigsaw’s traps and survival tests is a detective named David Tapp who had been investigating the serial killer. Tapp’s obsession with solving the case lead to his relationships straining, and the people he used to try and get close to Jigsaw were used as stepping stones rather than properly protected by the police officer. Having converted an old asylum into a building filled with traps and dangers for Tapp to overcome, Jigsaw hopes to show the detective the toll of pursuing Jigsaw so obsessively, but even once you have all the narrative pieces to understand who has been hurt by Tapp, Jigsaw’s death toll and faux morality make it hard to argue with Tapp’s drastic efforts to take him down. Even within Jigsaw’s supposed ideals of giving everyone a chance to survive, he still has plenty of victims placed in the asylum who can only save their own lives by killing Tapp, with some situations like the portion where shotgun collars attached to Tapp and other people that will trigger if they’re in close proximity to each other clearly designed for mutually assured death rather than either party escaping alive.

Jigsaw’s warped mindset is easy to pick apart in the films as well, but the guilt trip that makes up the entirety of the plot is far less effective with how transparently false Jigsaw’s ideals seem to be. He seems to be trying to worm his way out of having his most dogged pursuer on his tail while weakly moralizing it to himself, the only point where it really feels like the game is truly making a point about Tapp’s destructive pursuit of Jigsaw being a choice the player makes near the end that determines the ending. While exploring the asylum you can find notes that give details about the people who lived and worked in it while it was a functioning place and none of it seems particularly relevant unfortunately, these notes at best serving as clues on how to understand the place and its puzzles.

Speaking of puzzles, despite Jigsaw being renowned for his creative traps in the film franchise, the game definitely leans more into generic puzzle concepts rather than ideas that really evoke a life or death situation. There are definitely some good and unique trap concepts to be found, mostly near the start where it’s trying to make a good impression. Your first act as Detective Tapp is figuring out how to undo the bear trap mask around his head before it can activate and a trap where you need to balance poisons and antidotes properly to ensure you and another victim don’t overdose on either really feel like the moments where the game is trying to concoct something unique to overcome. Other times though, it might have you do tests of endurance where Tapp plunges his arm in something dangerous like a toilet full of syringes or a barrel of acid to grab a key… a key that always seems to be right next to his hand without much of a search. More importantly, these key grabbing scenarios have a huge pain bar you’re meant to worry about but don’t spend enough time actually doing the task to ever feel like you’re in danger, let alone suffering the horrific situation Tapp is meant to be experiencing.

At least grabbing keys goes quickly so its repeated appearances are not irritating. However, Jigsaw’s main “traps”, even the ones that are meant to be the climactic finale to a chapter where Tapp has to try and save himself and one of the people whose lives he supposedly ruined by pursuing Jigsaw, are often the kinds of puzzles that have been found in PC games since the turn of the 21st century. Jigsaw’s hilariously limited set of ideas means he is constantly whipping out the same batch of puzzles like one where you need to place the right gear sizes so they all turn properly, one where you rotate circuits so electricity reaches its destination, and another where you need to make sure pipes line up in a way that connects an entry and exit point properly. Not only do these crop up just as normal puzzles for doing things like unlocking a door or opening a case with a special item inside, but these are tied to traps that could have been interesting like a man resting under a swinging guillotine or a man cooking alive in a metal box. Rather than something really related to these tasks, you instead do a gear puzzle and a pipe puzzle respectively and need to do so within a time limit unless you want to see the character die and have to do all the puzzles over again. Some areas in the game also try to make these a bit more dangerous for you as gas is pumped into the room you’re doing a boring pipe puzzle in, but beyond that first chapter where everything is still novel and diverse, the rest of the game’s blatant rehashes makes completing Saw involve surviving a lot of dull content.

The creatively bankrupt serial killer known as Jigsaw also likes to use the same environmental clues again and again as if repeating them would somehow be just as clever the second or seventh time. You’ll enter a bathroom with backwards writing on a wall and a mirror on the other side so you can read it, you’ll need to look at things in the dark to see glow-in-the-dark symbols, and sometimes you’ll need to stand in the right spot so your perspective allows things to line up. None of these are quite as bad as whipping out the pipe puzzles again and again at least, but it certainly undermines the idea that a mastermind is behind this all when he can barely muster up unique trials for what is clearly his most intricate albeit unimaginative series of traps yet.

One thing that can be said for the puzzles though is at least they’re built properly. The gear puzzle is at least a test of spacial awareness and the circuit grid is about laying out those wire paths the right way, and while the constant appearance of them and their variety mostly just comes from taking longer to solve due to the increased requirements to complete these puzzles, at least they aren’t done awfully like the combat. As you run around the asylum you might find one of the unfortunate souls that Jigsaw is blackmailing into killing you. You can fistfight with them or swing one of the weapons you find around the game world to kill them so you won’t die, and the amount of weapons and the presence of some instant kill options on top of strong tools means that you’ll never really be found unarmed and sometimes might be too well armed for these small skirmishes. However, strength is rarely the issue as the space you have to fight can make it one-sided in either direction. A computer controlled enemy can repeatedly smash you before you have the chance to wind-up because of frequent bumps into the tight spaces around you, or you can stand in place and have the enemy dumbly charge before you bash them back without worry.

The game gives you healing needles to carry as well and the ability to make and carry some special tools to make your own traps. However, placing a trap like the gas bomb will likely lead to you being caught in it as well due to the tight quarters of the asylum and the fact that you will often have an enemy too close to truly shake and they’ll probably activate the trap before you can get clear of it. The only reliable traps are environment dependent interactions like setting up a tripwire shotgun trap at the designated spots or flipping a switch to electrify nearby water. Those options are definitely better than standing and fighting due to the problems that experience faces, but the other dangers of the asylum aren’t too interesting either. Sometimes you’ll need to avoid stepping on glass, your flashlight and its alternatives mostly for making sure you don’t step barefoot on the shards or avoiding the tripwires. There are points you cross a beam and need to use the motion controls of the controller to stay on board but it ends quickly so it barely feels like a challenge, and the earlier mentioned shotgun collar situations usually just involve you running away so your collar stops beeping but theirs still kills them. Oddly enough I was able to have Tapp actually touch someone with the shotgun collar but neither character died from being so close and the escape was just as easy as always. With most of the difficulty coming from broken combat, stumbling into instant death tripwire traps and the like, or running out of time in rehashed puzzles, it’s very hard to find a moment in Saw where the challenge design succeeds at what it is attempting.

THE VERDICT: The Saw video game likely wanted you to stop playing shortly after the first chapter since that opening section does a decent job of providing some varied puzzles and fewer moments of the flimsy combat. However, stick with it beyond that opener and you’ll start to find yourself doing the same gear, pipe, and circuit puzzles constantly but with annoying external pressures like gas or ticking clocks. The majority of the game constantly recycles ideas that mean there is little to look forward to. Any time you need to fight someone you either struggle or all too easily succeed based on the surroundings, and the story does little to motivate you to push through to completion with its weak written messages. Rather than being a game about escaping the brilliant trap designs of a deranged mastermind, Saw for PS3 feels like Jigsaw had neither the ideas or the budget to do anything but throw the same boring ideas at you and pad out the time between unimaginative puzzles with pointless fights.

And so, I give Saw for PlayStation 3…

A TERRIBLE rating. While I don’t want to oversell the quality of the first chapter, if the game had continued to build on what was shown before you free the first major victim in the story, Saw could have been a much more tolerable experience. The puzzle formats like the gear placing and pipe arranging aren’t thrilling in most games they appear in no matter the context, so having them reoccur so often is a fundamentally flawed idea in a game that is trying to deliver on the idea that you’re surviving a madman’s machinations. Falling back on the same designs again and again with the only gameplay interruption often being flawed fights or fruitless exploration leaves Saw with no leg to stand on. It can be cute to see a familiar trap from the franchise off to the side while moving around the asylum, but spotting the barbed wire maze loses its luster when it has also cropped up over ten times in the same way the game can’t help but repeat its actual playable portions.

Honing Saw down into an experience that prioritizes variety and creativity is a must to deliver on its premise and the premise of the entire franchise, but the game likely wanted to be long rather than good. It put what might be called its best foot forward with its opening chapter where things are still fresh and new ideas are being introduced regularly enough, but Saw chops that foot off and keeps presenting it in the following chapters again and again as if it could still have the novelty just because it’s a bit harder or there’s gas piped into the room this time around. Continuing onward once you realize the game is just going to throw the same bland ideas at you while the story flounders to make a point really isn’t worth suffering through, this truly being a game you’ll wish was over well before you’re even near that disappointing climax.