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The Saw games haven’t ever been much to write home about as they clumsily navigate the film canon and lean too hard on ‘been there, done that’ traps. Handing the Saw franchise over to Bloober Team feels like an inspired choice, and setting it one hundred years before the franchise’s established timeline should give a certain narrative freedom to tell an interesting origin story for the cult of Jigsaw, and I guess we should expect a handful of ye olde traps as well.
We’ve seen enough asymmetrical multiplayer games in recent years to know the rough setup. Three accused work together, navigating traps, challenges, and escape rooms, while a fourth player assumes the role of The Judge and orchestrates a plan to isolate and trap the victims of the game, leading to their incidental demise. What’s fun about playing as The Judge is gaining use to exclusive corridors and passageways, which allow him to remain elusive and slip in and out like a demon’s whisper.
Although The Judge is something of a complicated character, and I feel his involvement in his prey’s demise is more direct than his successor’s, which feels a little at odds with what’d eventually form the basis of the Jigsaw code. His role, being that he’s in charge of how the game unfolds, reminds me a little of the director role in the short-lived Darwin Project battle royale. It’s definitely a neat concept, though I’m considering the jury as still out on the game’s moment-to-moment flow, for the time being.
Matches generally last anywhere between ten and fifteen minutes, and while coordination and sticking together is the name of the game for the accused, the big hook in Saw: Genesis is that when captured, players can sacrifice body parts just like we see people do in the films. It’s like Hangman in reverse; instead of adding limbs, they can be taken away. Depending on which body part is lost, you’ll be less useful to your team—alive, though, and that’s a good trade-off. Though his control over the game tightens with every mistake the team makes, The Judge is a vulnerable character who, if cornered, can succumb to their weight of numbers rather quickly.
With perks and loadouts providing a decent variety of play styles, I do expect team composition to be paramount to success as a meta emerges, provided the game can find its footing and carve out an audience. But for now, from the demonstration I saw, considering balancing in games like this is so pivotal, I got the sense that the scales might too frequently tip in The Judge’s favour, especially with his meathead accomplice that can spawn in and abduct players.
To my surprise, the game is entirely first-person. Although Dead by Daylight is first-person in part, most others go for a third-person perspective. With the game’s maps being procedurally generated in an effort to allow for an element of surprise in every game, the map we got to see, set within the confines of an orphanage, definitely seemed modular and lacked a certain cohesion that curated, learnable maps have. I do expect that the more it’s played, the more likely patterns and recognisable layouts might emerge.
Although I can’t shake the notion that Genesis existed in one form before being adapted to a Saw game, I do think the setting is inspired. By placing itself a century before the rise of Jigsaw, it’s able to avoid the film’s canon entirely and do some interesting things within the context of a post-World War I England. With that said, aside from a few crude steampunk-adjacent traps and era-appropriate architecture, I do think the setting is something of an afterthought; perhaps I’ll be proven wrong once the game releases in full.
The one thing the game delivers on in spades is the gruesome hyper violence the franchise is known for. Pain dealt throughout general play is more of a slow burn, but there are moments where things escalate in a bloodbath worthy of Saw. Determined to get their money’s worth out of the IP, we got a look at The Judge’s version of the Reverse Beartrap. Despite being mildly anachronistic due to John Kramer being the trap’s creator in canon, seeing an accused’s mandible separated from their head, leaving nothing but tongue and gore hanging in its place, never gets old.
Seeing Saw: Genesis marked the first moment I began to wonder whether Bloober Team, with all of the irons it now has in the fire, is spreading itself too thin. I do see the potential here, and it’s an interesting enough take on the three-versus-one formula, but it’s so lacking in polish, even for an alpha build, and I can’t see a world where it releases even this year, even in early access as is the plan.
Unlike Billy, I don’t really want to play this game, but alpha playtests could tempt me. I do hope against hope that I’m wrong, and it has a bit of that secret Bloober sauce. Let the games begin?
