Before anything else, allow me to fully disclose that I am NOT a big fan of the Saw films past Saw II. I have seen them all, but a single franchise can only hold my attention for so long before it all boils down into little more than writers in a room saying to themselves “Hey, you know what would be a cool way to die…”.

In Saw: The Video Game, you play the role of Danny Glover. After a freak encounter with The Color Purple on the Night Train, Glover’s Beloved partner Manderlay is found dead after having Gone Fishin’ the week prior. Taking the Flight of the Intruder to the Grand Canyon to search for the Shooter, Glover confronts The Rainmaker and uses a Lethal Weapon to bring him down. The killer’s son bears Witness to this and calls on Boesman and Lena and Predator 2 take Glover to The Cookout in the sky. By Pure Luck Glover has gone Missing in America, and the final scene is Glover walking slowly down a dark New York alleyway on his way To Sleep with Anger.

…if you aren’t a fan of the Saw films, odds are you probably had more fun reading that paragraph than you would playing the game. That’s not to say that Saw: The Video Game is necessarilly bad, but it certainly is a fan service to followers of the films.

You actually do play as Danny Glover’s character from the original Saw, David Tapp. Awakening in a soiled, rundown asylum bathroom you quickly discover that you are part of Jigsaw’s game. Almost immediately you’re given the task of getting out of the iconic reverse beartrap. The initial trap boils down to moving the analog stick back and forth while playing a very intense quick-time event. After freeing yourself from the trap, you learn that Jigsaw has removed the bullet from Tapp’s body (from when Zep shot him), replacing it with a key that everyone else in the asylum needs to escape.

The biggest thing going for Saw: The Video Game is, without a doubt, the superbly crafted story. Fitting between Saw and Saw II, the game follows up on the stories of several characters from the first movie, as well as shining a little more light on Jigsaw’s backstory. A well-written script is met with equally impressive voice acting. While Danny Glover himself is nowhere to be seen (literally — Tapp doesn’t even look remotely like him) and Shawnee Smith is also not in the game, Tobin Bell does reprise his role as John Kramer and the actors who take on Glover’s and Smith’s roles (Earl Alexander and Jen Taylor, respectively) do excellent jobs.

I shall not spoil the endings for you, but depending on choices you make in the game you get one of two endings — one of which is canon. So, in case you were wondering why Detective Tapp was dead by Saw V…

To compliment the presentation is the design of the puzzles in and of themselves. Requiring you to think outside the box and actually use your braing for once (as opposed to most games, which qualify “match the red button with the red light”). I especially applaud the effort that has gone into some of the original traps in the game, as well as the subtle references to older tests (as well as hints to puzzles that, according to the storyline, hadn’t been seen yet).

While the puzzles themselves can be quite fun and definitely feel rewarding when you pass one of Jigsaw’s tests, the penalties for dying are far more than simply getting a “Game Over” screen. There is absolutely ZERO ROOM FOR ERROR with Jigsaw’s puzzles, which is not a bad thing. However, when you die and are forced to reload you aren’t taken to the beginning of the puzzle. Instead, you sit through a loading screen before finding yourself a few rooms back. Having to retrace your steps through those rooms is very trying on the patience. This is especially true if you are forced to get into a fight with another of Jigsaw’s victims.

The fighting mechanics in Saw: The Video Game are as close to “broken” as you can get without the actual control being busted. Using the left analog stick to ready yourself, you use the A or X buttons (on 360) to swing whatever weapon you happen to have. While it sounds well enough in theory, in practice Tapp takes entirely too long to go through his attack animation. The problem here is that the enemies attack faster than Tapp does, and Tapp’s attack animation resets every time he’s hit. I sat in my chair more than a few times, frantically tapping the A button and not even getting any kind of response from the game.

Thankfully the combat is infrequent at best and can be avoided almost entirely if you take the right path. You are far more likely to utilize a few of the game’s many traps to take enemies down. Throughout the game you find components that can be used to build explosive traps and there are more than a few opportunities to rig the tripwire shotgun traps first seen in the original Saw. These traps become essential not due to the difficulty of the enemies, but the lack of responsiveness in the controls.

More than anything else, Saw: The Video Game’s main downfall is that it just drags on too long. The first several hours are amazing and keep you drawn in, but as time progresses the environments become stale to the point where they all sort of bleed together, the puzzles begin to become repetitious and before too long you just want it to end. Thankfully, as I mentioned above, the two endings are well-written and worth the extra three-to-four hours that the game drags out.

At the end of the day, Saw: The Video Game is far from perfect. However, bad combat issues aside it works as a unique and very tense puzzle game that stays true to what the Saw franchise is all about — keeping you fucking TENSE. If you’re a longtime fan of the Saw franchise or you just came back from catching the late showing of Saw VI, do yourself a favor and check this one out.

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