I do enjoy a good survival horror game, though. You may find that contrast ironic, but games are still technically limited and mechanically contrived enough that it's easier to take them less seriously than films. That detachment might allow me to have fun with the Saw video game that Konami and Zombie Studios are cooking up, sinister though it is.
Zombie wants to imbue the Saw game experience with the same sort of intense panic the films' poor protagonists experience while trapped in the deadly contraptions created by the series' villain, the Jigsaw Killer. In the demo I got to try, that meant rotating analog sticks and hitting buttons to free my character from the "reverse bear trap," a locking, bladed mask that threatened to slice my head in half after a short timer expired.
You're directly presented with some of the control information--an onscreen prompt showed me when to rotate the stick, for instance. But the somewhat clever idea behind these Quick Time Event-style minigames is that you need to pay close attention to what's happening to figure out everything you need to do. In this case, a small red light blinked on the side of the mask after the joystick input, and that light was meant to correspond to the red B button on the Xbox 360 controller. So only by finding those subtle clues in time can you escape death in these situations. (There, I just gave you that one for free.)
Aside from those minigames, Saw looks like it will feature standard survival horror-style third-person exploration of the old run-down asylum Jigsaw has made his lair. Other characters will be trapped in the asylum; some will want your head, while others will be wrestling with their own sinister entrapment and may help you out for mutual benefit. It looks like unsettling minigames may be on order here; another one I played involved fishing my hand around in a toilet full of syringes to grab a key. Just another day in the loving embrace of a madman!
Saw, the game, seems a little more palatable for those with weak constitutions than Saw, the movie series. The real question is whether or not the gameplay here can carve out a unique identity from other survival horror games.
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