SAW II: Flesh & Blood

If you played and enjoyed the first SAW game and just can’t stand life without experiencing more of it, then I would recommend you bound down to your local games retailer right now and purchase a shiny new copy of SAW II: Flesh & Blood for your respective console. If, however, you have never played the franchise’s games before and are considering changing this fact, allow me to cut your eyelids off and force you to stare screaming at the light of first-hand knowledge that shows that you may wish to re-consider.

To show that I am taking all sides into account, I would like to begin by saying that SAW II: Flesh & Blood is at least competent as a game. It loads up, all the buttons appear to work when pressed, and there is definitely a moving picture on the screen. Everything after this, though, is rather regrettable. You start off playing as a middle-aged white man – who’s name we don’t know – who has to slice a key out from under his eye (cringe) to escape the neck brace trap he awoke in. After re-tasting yesterday’s lunch during this, it’s time to escape Jigsaw’s dungeon through an elaborate mix of puzzles and Quick Time Events. You link the correct colours of the wires in fuse boxes, turning all the lights off on a game board, walk along balance beams, figure out combinations of padlocks, and pick door locks with nails. So far so standard, but the set-up had promise and the eye gouging had made me cringe to the edge of my seat, so we were all set for the rest of the game.

Then a very strange thing happened. You see, every time you get a narrative-required puzzle wrong you died in an overly exotic fashion, and were then forced to restart from the previous checkpoint (which at this point were all reasonably placed). One time though, I screwed up crossing a QTE powered balance beam and fell to my death. I waited patiently for my previous checkpoint to load when suddenly I’m in a flashback sequence, in a first person perspective, looking at a young black guy in a mirror named Michael who I’m apparently now controlling. Swiftly after this brief flashback encounter, I awake in Jigsaw’s dungeon as this man who has to push a cage across broken glass to escape – and the game continues. We never see the first character again! Nor is he mentioned, seen lying at the bottom of a pit, or re-controlled (at least as far as I saw). It was as if the game had two beginnings which they just couldn’t quite decide on – so they used both and just stuck with Michael from there.

The plot had already lost me because I was busy being angry and confused at whatever had just happened in my opening 30 minutes with the game. Sufficed to say that it gets no clearer from then on, and they somehow drag out “Michael is bad” for another six hours (as if it weren’t apparent enough that he wasn’t handing out lollipops and wads of cash to kids at the local orphan house before Jigsaw decided he was worth kidnapping). I therefore decided to let the plot slide, and go on the assumption that there was plenty more gory, clever and entertaining puzzles to be had throughout the journey to discover that Michael isn’t the fourth coming of Jesus. The aforementioned puzzle forms had all been reasonable up until this point and the controls were fluent throughout – it seemed like a smart horse to bet on.

With one key issue: THAT WAS IT! I say this with no hyperbole. The rest of the game (or at least the first seven hours worth before I threw my disc at the wall) consists of nothing more than walking (SLOWLY) from room to room to room. Solving almost identical fuse box, padlock, light, door lock, and balance beams. With the occasional sprinkling of identical QTE ‘combat’ moments where you press X three times and the enemy rag-dolls himself to death. Aside from some brick walls of a difficulty curve where one of these puzzles would have a ridiculous time limit imposed, that was everything I did. After three hours I was looking for other things to occupy my time while I waited for my previous checkpoint to load after another tedious and repetitive failure to turn all the lights off. I was planning the following days University notes, reading the ingredients on my 7up can and poking, prodding, and stroking my flatmate just because whatever her reaction was to these strange occurrences – IT WAS MORE ENTERTAINING THAN THE GAME.

I confess, I didn’t finish this game. I played it for seven hours and couldn’t take it any more. It was repetitive, dull, tedious, and mostly importantly – boring! This was a game based around the ‘SAW’ franchise and I didn’t even find myself getting scared by anything other than the prospect that I’d have to do yet another fuse box puzzle. The entire experience was wasted through bad writing, repetitive puzzles, awful pacing, and tedious unending repetitive repetition! I implore you, if you like the movies, go and see them in the cinema. Buy the DVD. Act them out through crudely drawn stick figures on a piece of A4 paper. Please though, for the sake of video game tie-in games, don’t spend money on this game.