There are certain games that just feel like they belong to a particular time of year.
Now, we enter Spooky Season, and it’s time to turn to the horror genre and enjoy some incredible games like Dead Space, Alan Wake and Silent Hill, to name a few. We will get to those top titles, but we will start with some of the more forgettable titles associated with this time of year.
That is where Saw: The Video Game and Saw II: Flesh & Blood come in.
Neither are particularly good. In fact, calling either of them a good game would require a level of generosity that even Jigsaw himself probably wouldn’t possess.
Both games are incredibly flawed, one more so than the other, and they both have their own relationships with the movies they stem from.
Saw: The Video Game- As Faithful as It Gets
The first Saw game, released in 2009, had the easier job.
The original film is essentially one giant puzzle: Two people trapped in a disgusting room with clues scattered around the place and survival depending on figuring out what Jigsaw wants from them.
That sounds like the perfect foundation for a video game. And to its credit, Saw understands this.
The game brings back Detective David Tapp from the original film into his own nightmare and is set between the first and second films. You explore an abandoned asylum, solve traps, search for clues, and occasionally come face-to-face with some other unfortunate souls trapped in the building with you.
The best part is undoubtedly the atmosphere.
The grimy corridors, flickering lights, rusty machinery, and the constant sense that something horrible is waiting around the next corner genuinely feels like the films. The game does feature the voice of Tobin Bell as Jigsaw, and hearing that familiar voice through the speaker system or TVs does an enormous amount of the heavy lifting.
They couldn’t recruit Danny Glover for Tapp, but they did manage to get the voice actor for Louis from Left 4 Dead to do the voice of Tapp and somehow got Jen Taylor, most famously known for her role as Cortana in the Halo series, to voice Amanda Young.
Unfortunately, rather decent voice acting and atmosphere can only carry a game so far.
The combat is absolutely dreadful. There is something particularly comical about playing a game based around one of cinema’s most creative torture villains and discovering your greatest weapon is just punching.
Weapons can be picked up, but the act of using them is just slow, sluggish, and imprecise. Enemies aren’t particularly intelligent, and encounters quickly become more irritating than scary.
Then, there are the puzzles.
This where the game gets so much wrong and a fair number of things right.
Some of the larger traps are quite clever and capture the feeling of the films. You get the satisfying moment of looking around a room, spotting clues, and figuring out what you have to do to survive and rescue the unfortunate souls trapped with you.
The smaller puzzles, though, do get repetitive fast, just by how many times you have to do them. You rewire things, pick locks, and search for objects in toilet bowls or barrels of acid.
There is still something undeniably “Saw” about it. And that’s important. The game doesn’t simply slap the franchise’s name onto a generic video game adaptation. It actually tries to make the mechanics fit the movies.
It’s just a shame that those mechanics don’t always work out.
Saw II: Flesh & Blood- Somehow Worse
There, there is Saw II: Flesh & Blood.
Released a year later, Saw II: Flesh & Blood follows Michael Tapp, the son of David, as he gets dragged into another one of Jigsaw’s games. On paper, a sequel should have been the perfect opportunity to take everything that didn’t work in the first game and fix it.
Instead, it feels like the developers looked at Saw, identified all of its weakest elements, and decided they simply weren’t bad enough yet.
The combat is still terrible. Well, it isn’t really combat at all. The developers obviously didn’t fancy improving it, so they just binned it off for QTEs instead.
The QTEs are also terrible in and of themselves. They rely on you forgetting where any button is on your controller in order to even have a small chance of messing them up, and even then, you have enough opportunities to put it right.
Saw II seems to believe that repeatedly pressing buttons when they appear on-screen is the pinnacle of a horror game. Every time something remotely interesting happens, there is a good chance you’ll be staring at a button prompt instead of actually playing the game. Whether it’s opening a door to reveal a shotgun rigged above it or the floor giving way, they all rely on QTEs.
The traps are supposed to be the highlight, and some of them are suitably gruesome, but even they can’t save this game.
The Saw films work because you are watching someone desperately trying to figure out how to escape an elaborate death trap. In Flesh & Blood, the process can feel more like completing a particularly unpleasant set of chores.
Find the thing.
Walk over there.
Press the button.
Complete the mini-game.
Watch something horrible happen.
Repeat.
The whole experience becomes incredibly repetitive. And then, you have the presentation. This is a game that has aged about as gracefully as a corpse left in one of Jigsaw’s traps.
The environments are ugly, the character models are rough, and the animations regularly descend into comedy. There are moments when characters move around with such awkwardness that the game becomes unintentionally funny.
Which is probably not what you want from a horror game.
The worst part is that the first Saw game at least had some novelty going for it. It was the first time we got to properly explore a Saw-style environment and interact with Jigsaw’s traps ourselves.
Flesh & Blood doesn’t have that excuse. It’s the sequel. It should have been better.
Instead, it feels like a cheaper, rougher, and more irritating version of something that was already pretty rough and irritating.
Even the story struggles to justify its existence. Yes, it expands the Saw universe and introduces another member of the Tapp family, but eventually, you stop caring about the convoluted plot because you’re too busy wondering why you’re still playing.
There is one thing that irked me in both games and made me think that maybe Jigsaw is rather kinky. In both games, you have no shoes and have to walk around barefoot. In the game, this is meant to add a level of thinking as you have to avoid the broken glass on the floor to avoid cutting yourself, but even if you do, you can remedy any lost health with a syringe.
Also, syringes are why a lot of people end up in Jigsaw traps, maybe bandages would have at least made better sense in the context of the game. Furthermore, if you’re removing the character’s shoes, why stop there? It seems to be winter time in the first game, so why not remove all clothes, barring the underwear, and have the character freeze or look for heat sources to stay alive? You know…survival instincts!
Anyway, this was a rough start to Spooky Season, it can only go up from here.
