SAW: The Video Game is a literal survival horror game simulator developed by Zombie Studios, whose notable previous works include Zork Nemesis, numerous Spec Ops games (minus The Line) and Xbox Original exclusive title “Shadow Ops: Red Mercury”. What do these titles all have in common? Fuck if I know about Zork but what I can say is that these guys would mostly go to develop tactical military games, and would also go on to collaborate with the literal U.S. Military to develop military recruitment video games. So what the hell do any of these have to do with SAW? The development originally started under Brash Entertainment, a company whose games released would include an Alvin and the Chipmunks game, as well as a game notorious amongst me and a buddy for being a horrible game, Jumper: Griffin’s Story. Their backlog isn’t exactly the greatest, but they had apparently been working with Twisted Pictures (the main developers of the SAW movies under Lionsgate) to create a SAW video game before SAW III was released. What followed though were a lot of changes: one of which included following the events of the first film while playing as multiple different characters. The development on their end would be transferred to Zombie Studios, while Brash took a publishing approach and went on to tease the game multiple times through teaser trailers and game expo appearances. They’d also brought in the original creators, James Wan and Leigh Wanell to help develop new traps and story beats. However, Brash went into financial bankruptcy later and the game went into development hell, before Lionsgate and Konami hashed out a publishing deal for a release while Zombie continued to finish development. It would release for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and even a PC port with modding support. However, I haven’t seen much in the way of shit for a PC port. I’ve seen bits and pieces about a PC port with people asking for steam keys, while others are insistent that it never existed on Steam like a Mandela Effect or something. The best place you can get it is on Abandonware, and there was only ever one mod released for the game so the activity around this title wasn’t that great.

However this didn’t matter, as I was always a huge fan of the SAW series, even as a youngin’. I was just getting into horror as a kid, having been introduced to it by the likes of Condemned: Criminal Origins and branching out into other horror movies and franchises. I had enjoyed SAW not necessarily due to the gore, but due to the enigmatic Jigsaw himself, a cancer patient who on the verge of death felt the need to give others life through tests that I know for a fact I wouldn’t be able to solve. Hell, I even remember going to see Saw 3D (aka the supposed final chapter) at the time in movie theaters as a kid for my birthday. In my ever loving fandom to consume all SAW content, I had picked up SAW: The Video Game at some point on the Xbox 360, intending on giving it a full run and beating it. While I never got 100 percent achievements, I sure as hell got most of them which isn’t a surprise considering how honestly easy it was to platinum. However, some of the game's less intuitive puzzles got the better of me, and I had kinda given up beating it and later sold it. Loe and behold, COVID happens right? Then the Playstation 3 store decides they wanna shut everything down digitally, and wanting to make sure I picked up every game I wanted to before they shut down the patches (as apparently even patches for PS3 games were disappearing), I had picked up this game and the sequel for PS3 during the heights of my shitty construction job. However, I hadn’t touched it at all until a friend of mine recently went through my library of games and chose this as one of the games she wanted me to stream for her as she was a huge fan of SAW. A month or so later (having started right after Dino Crisis in December), I’ve not only beaten the game but platinumed it. As is the rite of passage, I have my thoughts on this game.

The plot to the game is a bit of a simple one but for those who need a little bit of background or haven’t watched any SAW movie, I got you. In the first SAW movie, Detective David Tapp (played by Danny Glover) is a cop who becomes obsessed with taking down the “Jigsaw Killer”, who puts many people to the test with only one survivor having been established during his hunt. During the movie, he and his partner Detective Sing gather a lead and end up at Jigsaw’s lair. What transpires is the exact opposite of a movie like Lethal Weapon: their gung-ho attitude gets Tapp slashed in the throat, Sing’s head is blown off by a shotgun trip wire trap and the “killer” gets away. He would later be discharged from the police force and would later attempt to take down Jigsaw at the end of the film, before being shot by one of Jigsaw’s “apprentices” (a test subject) and falling either to unconsciousness or death. The movies and games aren’t really canon so I say death but in the game, he was probably taken and healed before being let loose into another one of Jigsaw’s games.

I put “killer” in quotations because Jigsaw’s modus operandi has him putting people in “tests”, addressing some flaw in someone’s personal life and giving them the choice to either die or solve their test and as a result, learn from their mistakes for a second chance. Is this the best way of addressing someone’s personal issues? No of course not (and he’s a killer by proxy), but that’s what makes him a fascinating character. It also just so happens that Jigsaw is a dying cancer patient named John Kramer, whose life was hell after the death of his unborn child, his marriage collapsing and his cancer. Further on in the movies of course some of the people being tested are very flimsy but I’ve also chalked it up to his brain cancer progressing to his worst stage, while also having amazing planning skills and future foresight. Why do I put this all down? Why this game takes place in between Saw and Saw II (the movie versions of course) so I felt that context was necessary, or at least a little bit as for the most part they don’t really address much other than Tapp and Sing’s raid with a few characters thrown in from the first movie.

The game itself starts with Detective David Tapp waking up in one of the iconic “Reverse Bear Traps” inside of a musty ass bathroom, and the rest of the sequence revolves around unscrewing it and taking it off your head. Afterwards he spends his time roaming through what turns out to be Whitehurst Asylum, an old abandoned asylum which goes back at least two centuries and has a notorious history of budget cuts and general lack of safety as well as patient abuse. Going through, he comes across an atrium with a future game but first Tapp is ambushed and almost killed by two separate guys. Killing one in self defense, he later discovers the reason behind this ambush (and countless others in the future): Jigsaw implanted the only key to escape inside of his body, and so anyone and everyone wants him dead to this effect. From here, Tapp travels to the atrium and finds his first game: Amanda Young. See, he has to hook himself up and balance giving the both of them both poison and the antidote in order for some mechanisms to release. Behind Tapp’s game is simple: his search for the Jigsaw “Killer” and his obsession has led to several people being affected and as such, Tapp either has to save them or they die (kind of like Saw 3D in a sense). Tapp had harassed Amanda Young as she was the only survivor of Jigsaw’s games at a certain point, and as such makes her the first test subject (along with the fact she “got back into drugs”). I also want to point out that I’m a bit confused on the timeline (though the game isn’t canon so who cares I guess) as Amanda was supposed to be an apprentice right? So is she just pretending to almost die? Does Jigsaw have a backup plan? Is this before she gets recruited? Who knows, but the rest of the game involves Tapp traveling around the asylum, solving a random assortment of puzzles and saving other people.

She escapes with him but is kidnapped yet again by a dude in a pig outfit (creatively titled Pighead), and later on Tapp is kidnapped and strapped with a shotgun collar (which when placed against other dudes with shotgun collars, it’s either kill/run away or be killed as their proximity activates each other’s collars to explode). Regardless he runs into and saves Jennings Foster, a friend of his on the force who used his position as a coroner to frame another guy for a drunk hit and run to save his own skin. He also encounters both the grave of his dead partner as well as his wife Melissa Sing, who hates his guts and becomes so obsessed with her own hatred that she neglects their child. Later on he encounters Oswald McGullicuty, a reporter who helped coin “The Jigsaw Killer”, which Jigsaw says was perverting his message as well as dogpiling on top of Detective David Tapp, which effectively got him fired (as well as the fact he’s a general scumbag). Fun fact, this is a deep cut as you only find his name on news articles in the first SAW movie so credits to the developer where credit is due. Regardless he fucking dies after being an idiot, and Tapp moves on to save Obi, a mentally unwell arsonist who asked to be put into a game from Jigsaw. For those in the know, he would become a character in SAW II and his character motivations and revelations are more expounded upon then (maybe, I’m reading their pages on the SAW wiki and they don’t seem to match up lore wise to be honest). As for what the motivation was and his connection to Tapp? This one is the shakiest as honestly, other than the whole arsonist angle from SAW II the answer is literally: “I have no fucking clue whatsoever”.

Regardless, Tapp trucks on through multiple painful tests in order to save one last victim in a painful test: Jeff Ridenhour. For those who don’t know, he was the guy that Tapp and Sing saved from a drill trap during their police raid. The motive for Jeff’s game was due to his attempted suicide. However, after the fatal raid that led to Sing’s death, Jeff would get harassed nonstop by Tapp for any and all information on the Jigsaw and as such would attempt to kill himself again. Tapp would solve Jeff’s game, which involved matching several different symbols on TVs, which I’ll be honest was a frustrating game (I’ll go into it later). The rescue doesn’t go so well personally however as Jeff would basically tell Tapp to go fuck himself for the harrasment and would run off. Tapp would then commit to the final save of the night: saving himself. Delving deeper into the asylum would be a gauntlet of tests to his resolve which later culminates in a battle against Pighead (whom throughout the game you’ll see going rogue and killing people). Tapp eventually ends up killing the apprentice through the environment in a semi-difficult boss battle before making his way to the heart of Jigsaw’s lair: the library. It’s here after one last gauntlet that Jigsaw forces him to make a choice: will he seek Freedom and escape Whitehurst once and for all? This will also let out the other victims of Jigsaw’s game, OR will Tapp give into his obsession and go through the door with TRUTH plastered all over it in an attempt to take down Jigsaw once and for all.

Freedom is the canonical ending to the game as it’s followed up in SAW II: Flesh and Blood, as well as confirming Tapp’s death later in Saw V (the movie). It involves everyone escaping, and shows Tapp in his apartment building surrounded by Jigsaw evidence and newspaper clippings where victims thank Tapp for helping them escape, and he’s labeled a hero. However, Tapp hasn’t given up his obsession and losing his one chance to capture the notorious Jigsaw, he shoots himself as the credits roll up on the TV. The Truth ending however is the non-canon/bad ending, as it has Tapp chase Jigsaw through his lair before seemingly cornering him and beating him up outside on asylum grounds. However, this cloaked figure isn’t a HE as much as they are a SHE and it’s revealed to be Melissa Sing, his partner’s wife. Melissa was in her own game, which revolved around keeping Tapp alive and following the rules after Jigsaw kidnapped her son. While Tapp is shocked, she attempts to escape only to get her fuckin’ wig peeled back, and it results in Tapp finally going mad from the whole ordeal with no killer captured and his partner’s widow dead. The final piece of the puzzle shows Tapp strapped to an asylum bed, hallucinating being in another one of Jigsaw’s traps.

The plot to SAW: The Video Game for the most part is one that I found to be simple but enjoyable, something that felt true to form for the series as a whole. Though sometimes I felt the connections to Tapp to be strenuous, I enjoyed all the fan service moments between the numerous traps taken from the films, Tobin Bell coming back as Jigsaw, the ability to finally put Pighead down, like it all felt like it could actually be a game from the cloaked fucker himself. My main problem with the plot boils down to something I’ll point out later in the Atmosphere section of this review: realism or where it detracts. The movies generally have a couple of victims and traps, not seventy to eighty unnamed goons in one abandoned mental asylum. Jigsaw doesn’t talk to his victims live like in the game (for the most part), he leaves a video tape which describes the reasons that the victim is in the position that they are in. How are there so many traps and people here? How did Jigsaw even capture them all? Who is Pighead? There’s no clue to any identity or anything. It’s the little stuff like this that as a SAW fan, kind of takes me out of it a bit and makes me question certain aspects of the game’s background regardless of the game’s need to shove in enemies to fight and numerous puzzles to solve in order to keep the engagement high for players.

The gameplay is honestly perhaps the game’s weakest feature anyways sadly, and as a survival horror game doesn’t always add up properly. Playing as Tapp in the third person, you roam from asylum location to asylum location while getting into fights, looting stuff, dodging traps and solving puzzles. Let's start with the combat: it’s not great. Fighting someone tends to be a slog, especially with heavier weapons like bats or pipes. The wind up for this is so slow that other than getting trophies, I barely used any of these at all. In fact, the only way I could get them to swing properly is by either holding down or slamming down the Square or X button on the Playstation controller. This is a chore if the enemy is using their fists as you can get stunlocked and trapped into a corner unless you think on your feet. If you fight with anything, either use your fists or a smaller weapon as they’re both quicker and you’ll be able to stunlock them into oblivion which is a great thing. The one trophy that was annoying and difficult to do however was the Curb Stomp mechanic, which I was only able to get by repeating a checkpoint multiple times as the chances that you’ll knock someone over enough to stomp them out are very slim to probably barely. You can also get enemies killed by using your environment, such as reactivating shotgun traps or electric panels that shock nearby water puddles (or if it’s a shotgun trap guy, you simply run away until his timer goes off and his melon goes splat on the walls nearby). You can also find schematics (three different types in total) multiple times over the course of the game in order to create traps of your own, which are Stun (which clearly stuns), Gas and Explosive Traps. I’ll be honest, other than for getting the trophies (which are again painfully easy), or for the Pighead boss in the last stage of the game (which is honestly kind of painful to deal with), you’re not really going to use this unless you go out of your way to do it. I certainly never did, and barely kept remembering its existence. Hell, even going out of your way to use it is a pain in the ass, which involves holding down the aim button and pressing either R1 or R2 (which I had to look up on the internet).

The enemies themselves often come in two sizes: medium sized white guy and big hulking white guy. Either way they’re out to kill you and the only difference is usually what weapons they use along with the traps they’re in. I already brought up the shotgun collar trap, but there’s also people with Reverse Bear Traps, Venus Fly Traps and even guys with bombs on their hands who die and explode when killed. You’re told to use your environment to block doors and activate traps that’ll kill them from a safe distance, but oftentimes with the bomb guys I just stabbed them once and moved five feet to the left and you weren’t touched at all. Honestly, while the combat is mediocre it’s also kind of easy to deal with once you get the hang of it and in fact the game for the most part other than the puzzles is a pretty smooth sailing ride to begin with. It’s the puzzles and traps where everything becomes convoluted, and here’s what I mean.


How do you create these traps? You loot your environment for materials like leftover shells, wire, bleach, fuses and the like in order to have the components to activate and/or build these traps. You’ll also loot your environment to find “Health Hypos”, needles that will refill your health which caps out at 4. You can find these in the environment (mostly through unlocking medicine cabinets with a minigame), or on dead bodies and containers scattered around. Other puzzles that surround the environment include gear puzzles (depending on the location will include rare weapons like the Nail Bat and the Gun, or health items and components for traps) which involve connecting a set moving gear to another gear that doesn’t move. There are pipe puzzles (my least favorite), which include lining up to ends of a pipe and matching each individual circle within the center in order. Usually this is under the threat of death by gas or in Obi’s trap later, his own death. This shit fucking sucks, and I’m not great at these pipe puzzles so what I always ended up doing is just looking up the solution online while matching it up in-game as generally speaking the pipe puzzles are always set. In fact, let me just say that obvious game design has it getting harder and harder the more experienced you become with the mechanics. I feel that the puzzle difficulty past Oswald starts to grow into more and more bullshit levels of difficulty and start to feel tedious and old, especially with the repetitiveness. Other puzzles include electrical grid puzzles, which I’m pretty solid at but get bigger and more convoluted as it goes on and others I’m sure I’m forgetting about at the moment.

Other things I’ll mention are the fact that you always have to look out on the floor as walking over broken glass will drain your health with Tapp being barefoot for pretty much the entire game. There’s also a light mechanic where you can use your lighter to see in the dark (which is a huge portion of the game) but you can replace it with either a camera or a flashlight; avoid the camera as it’s useless and stick with the flashlight any chance you get. You’ll search through toilets (hope you don’t mind hepatitis) and acid barrels for certain keys as well, and I want to point out here that other than the late game difficulty spike that most of the puzzles in the first half to three quarters are pretty intuitive and easy to figure out on your own volition, and that’s coming from someone who blows fat cocks at puzzles. That being said, no shame in using a guide if you need it. I also find it pretty strange that there’s a companion mechanic, though it’s barely elaborated on as after each main trap most of the time the rescuee will follow you for all of five seconds before either dying or disappearing due to some excuse or another, to the point where I question why they have an NPC follow you for five feet only to go bye bye. Otherwise, truth be told I don’t really have much to say about the gameplay other than I encountered a glitch where a TV mysteriously appeared on the wall in front of me after walking away from it late game but that’s about it.

The sound design for the most part is pretty dope in all honesty, I can’t complain at all about it. The soundtrack isn’t there very much, it’s minimalist and not present but when you do get a couple of tracks here and there it’s a very tense soundtrack, created by someone named Alex Guilburt. You won’t get any “Hello Zepp” tracks sadly or variations of it, which fucking blows because I was hoping to hear the iconic tune at least ONCE during my playthrough though you don’t really get much in the way of any real twists unless you go with the Truth ending to the game. The Main Menu theme isn’t bad, a bit on the ominous side but feels like it could tangentially work itself into the movie franchise as an actual theme with the large percussion and heavy amount of strings used. The track labeled “Countdown” is fucking tense and make my clutch my own asshole as I was searching for the answer to whatever puzzle usually surrounded the area (mostly bombs or gas lol). As for the actual sounds in the area of the game, you’ll hear a lot of shaky cam sounds, crunching glass sounds great, the creaky doors are phenomenal. It all adds up to an experience that I can at least say sonically sounds like SAW. If I were to add criticism, I’d say sometimes the explosion sounds were a bit mixed (the smaller ones being particularly weak sounding) while other times using certain weapons felt weak and stale. The gear puzzles on the other hand trigger some sort of dopamine brain kick because honestly it sounds great. There’s a lot to love here with the Audio Design of the area and I can confidently say yeah this part’s pretty good. The only other thing I have yet to address is the voice acting.

Voice Acting on the other hand, I don’t know. I guess I could sum it up to average-ish? I mean for the most part the only voice actor who comes back from the main series is Tobin Bell, and he’s always fucking phenomenal as Jigsaw so I can’t say much of a bad thing about him in the slightest as he IS Jigsaw to me. The others on the other hand are okay, with the best one probably being Jen Taylor as Amanda. Earl Alexander isn’t bad and played Louis in Left 4 Dead fantastically, but here he just sounds a bit odd. Granted, it’s probably because it’s not Danny Glover and I’d be surprised if Zombie Studios would’ve been able to get him but truth is I guess he does alright for the most part. I didn’t recognize David Scully as Oswald either, because he apparently played Sergeant Johnson in the Halo series and that just shows the range that this guy has from badass alien killer to sniveling reporter. As for a lot of the goons you’ll be fighting? They all sound like they’re voices from the same one or two people and you’ll often hear a lot of the same voice lines after a while so everyone just kind of blends in to this symphony of “angry white guy who wants to kill Tapp to get out and live” that sounds okay. I don’t know, I don’t really have much to say about the voice acting other than “it’s okay” but my immersion wasn’t really broken so I guess I’ll just shrug to this.

The graphics to this game I’ll just come out point blank and say it: it’s not great. Having played this on Playstation 3, I obviously know it’s not always going to have the best high resolution models. Tapp has no resemblance to Danny Glover (probably because the game was made on a smaller budget), you’ll run into multiple dudes that look the same, and honestly sometimes the game is just too damn dark for its own good. The animations are stiff for the most part and I guess just overall I don’t know, it was just kind of an ugly game for me. Granted I wasn’t really bothered with that, as graphics aren’t really a huge sticking point to me so I didn’t give a shit. What I can say is that in the areas where you’re able to go outside, the former asylum looks a lot better environmentally wise than one can give credit for. The atmosphere I’ll say on the other hand is a bit of an astounding and mixed bag. I say it’s astounding because it’s such an uncomfortable and decrepit place (taking place in a former insane asylum) that you not only could see Jigsaw setting up a whole game here but the place is in literal shambles. You’ll find everything abandoned, walls that can be destroyed, broken glass shattered everywhere, dirty bathrooms, like the grunge is just perfect for the type of setting that any sort of SAW game would take place in and that mixed with the asylum’s former history (riddled in documents) showing a place of cutbacks, despair and frankly negligence towards all patients. What I’ll say is a mixed bag isn’t necessarily because of anything it did bad, but more so comes from a place of “I’m a huge SAW fan” and “I know this is a video game but it’s way too unrealistic”.

In the normal SAW movies, you’ll know Jigsaw went all out when you see the most elaborate traps; however in this game you’ll see a lot of the same stuff from the movies, plus recent games and dead bodies everywhere. Usually the victim count is kept low but you’ll be strolling through Whitehurst to find former games where dudes are ripped apart, sawed in half and such and I swear to god the count of dead bodies reaches higher than the fifties or more. How did Jigsaw kidnap this many people? How much money did he make in the movies to conceivably put all of these games into effect, all of these traps? The asylum IS FILLED WITH THEM. Did he plan this all out in advance? Is he just working with the U.S. Prison Industrial Complex to ship motherfuckers here by the truckload at this point? Jigsaw clearly almost always has a plan, so how was this game (figuratively and literally) even possible? Who knows, maybe I just need to shut the fuck up but this was a huge thought of what I was thinking while playing the game and it kinda took me out a bit.

SAW: The Video Game was an interesting ride going through my childhood once again. My fascination with the series since I was a kid still hasn’t gone away, as I’m still fascinated with the motives of the serial tester (?) as well as how the franchise went in the future. I would dip in and out of becoming obsessed and re-obsessed with the franchise but I didn’t really pick up on the series again until much more recently. Having saw Spiral: From the Book of Saw in theaters with my buddy Nick (shoutout), having watched JigSaw in a discord call with a bunch of buddies and then finally having watched SAW X in theaters as a bit of a treat to myself, it was I guess a bit of destiny that everything has kinda come together for me to start playing this game last year. I know at the moment I’m in the middle of trying to figure out my living situation, but with SAW XI apparently coming around this year with a quick turnaround (as the series is notorious for), it’s not a surprise that the next batch of games have SAW II: Flesh and Blood pushed into it as well. I enjoyed my time streaming this for my one friend, as well as it becoming my first Playstation platinum of the year so that's dope as hell!

The future after SAW: The Video Game was again a really quick turn around, with the sequel being pushed out literally less than a year later. Originally, Konami had plans to turn the SAW franchise into another horror series like Silent Hill, with recurring releases to keep the Konami cash flow going (until they went into optimized gambling, WHOOP WHOOP!). However, the critical reception went into the ground just like John Kramer would be in SAW III, except they didn’t try to resurrect his corpse for a third game. Zombie Studios would later create smaller titles that no one seemed to have cared about, such war crime Kinect simulator Blackwater and Blacklight: Retribution, an online multiplayer game that I’ve never heard about but I’m sure others have. The series of SAW in video game form however has been kind of iffy. Originally there were talks about Bloober Team creating a SAW game on a pitch for Lionsgate (which eventually turned into Blair Witch after Bloober decided they didn’t want to touch Saw with a ten foot stick) as well as discussions about new SAW games coming out for the “next generation” which let’s see how that would go, if it would even go well. Personally if I was gonna create a SAW game, I probably would make it a walking simulator of sorts, or something akin to Condemned: Criminal Origins. Konami would continue existing, something that I always have mixed feelings on due to their shitty use of their IPs. I guess here’s hoping that the new Silent Hill adaptations will work out?


Links:
https://screenrant.com/saw-game-playstation-xbox-jigsaw-ps5-xsx/

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/Saw

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1144553/

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/saw-glm

https://web.archive.org/web/20090405062724/http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scene/2009/04/silent-hill-say-hello-to-your-new-brother-jigsawkonami-has-confirmed-an-earlier-cut-scene-report-that-it-has-bought-the-pub.html

https://bloody-disgusting.com/news/14348/

https://www.dreadcentral.com/news/9147/exclusive-game-producer-david-s-cohen-talks-saw-video-game/

https://www.ign.com/articles/2008/01/30/saw-announced

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79tUra-8mwY&ab_channel=Konami

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saw_(video_game)

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/Saw

https://www.ign.com/articles/bloober-team-saw-blair-witch-licensed-games-turned-down