As far as horror franchises go, Saw seems tailor-made for a video game. Make a bunch of escape rooms, sprinkle some adventure and choice-making gameplay in, and throw in a lot of gory traps. Zombie Studios' Saw....kinda sorta does that. Except instead of escape rooms, it's mostly the same 3 minigames over and over under a time limit. And you don't really make any choices, and the choices (choice?) you make don't matter. And it steals the gory traps from the movies and uses them over and over again to the point where you wonder what happened to Jigsaw's creativity. Saw is...not very good.
We have a hard time thinking of this game as horror. It's certainly meant to be scary, as you walk around the dark, abandoned asylum where various human rights violations were carried out (the files go so over the top with this detail that it wraps around into hilarious). Sometimes someone with a pig head will jump out at you. But the gameplay is more like a very simple beat-em-up, until it starts giving you a gun and then you're stronger than everybody which doesn't make you feel scared. And even then, there's so few enemies in the game that we have a hard time thinking of it as a beat-em-up either. Most of your time in the game is spent wandering around in the dark, finding items (or, frequently, nothing) that you already have plenty of, and watching out for insta-kill tripwires, which killed us so many times. They're so hard to see, because it's dark and also part of the AAA era where every game was muddy brown.
Oh, and there's the minigames, of course. Not only do you quickly see every minigame the game has to offer, you also quickly see every variation of the minigames by the time you've completed the second level. There's a couple unique puzzles, but they're still quite easy, like "swap the tiles around to make the picture"--not even a slider puzzle, just swap em around. Ever since we heard Ian Brutalmoose call this kind of minigame "grandma games", that's all we can call them. They're the kinds of minigames you expect to see in a hidden object game--fun to break up the monotony of looking for objects, but also easy and simple enough that anyone can get past them. Combined with the equally simple main gameplay, it feels like they were trying to attract Saw fans who'd never played a video game before.
Is there anything here for Saw fans? Eh kinda. Presumably Danny Glover didn't want anything more to do with the franchise after the first movie, so it's fun to get to play as Detective Tapp. The stuff with his partner's wife is probably the most interesting lorewise, showing the ramifications that Sing's death had on his family. It's fun to see some moments from the movies, even though "stick your hand into a toilet full of needles" starts to get old the 6th time around. But the story ultimately feels superficial. You're supposed to be choosing whether the people you meet along the way live or die, but it seemed like you just had to free them by playing the Boss Puzzle of each level. They then will walk 5 feet into the level before finding some reason to leave, the funniest one being the guy who immediately hits a tripwire. Ultimately, the ending choice is whether you choose a door that says FREEDOM or TRUTH. We chose FREEDOM and found the ending extremely disappointing.
If you really like Saw, playing the first level is a little fun. You will also have seen all that the game really has to offer in terms of gameplay. The game apparently did well enough for Zombie to make a sequel, which we will regrettably be checking out in the future.