There aren’t many film series in the horror genre that are as meticulous with their worldbuilding as Saw. The gory death-game franchise has had its ups and downs, but the path between peaks and valleys has been methodically planned out and connected between all ten of its movies, with the serial killer John “Jigsaw” Kramer’s twisted philosophy of rehabilitation at its center. Saw: Genesis, one of the more surprising announcements at this year’s Summer Game Fest, is an asymmetrical horror game that uses a fair bit of the franchise’s iconography, but it’s playing a bit fast and loose with a timeline that has been, for decades now, pretty ironclad. I’m interested in it as a video game, but as a new piece of Saw literature, I’m skeptical.
At Summer Game Fest’s Play Days event last weekend, publisher Bloober Team and co-developers Broken Mirror Games and Anshar Studios offered an extended look at the game following its announcement at Friday night’s showcase. Kotaku attended alongside other members of the press and saw most of a full Genesis match from the perspectives of both sides of this grisly game.
Stripped of all the lore, Genesis is a pretty compelling Saw-like spin on the asymmetrical multiplayer trends we’re seeing in games like Dead by Daylight. One player acts as the Judge, a brutal game master manipulating a trap-laden maze as three Accused desperately claw their way to an exit on the other side of death machines and other dangers. Each game’s maps are procedurally generated, and even the Judge isn’t able to completely manipulate the match without constraints, but they’re still given access to places other players can’t reach, and thus are given a birdseye view of their twisted game as the three Accused wander blindly through the dark corridors of the Judge’s lair.
This is Saw, after all, so there’s always supposed to be a way out. The Accused navigate this procedurally generated death trap in search of key items that can help them escape, but if they’re caught, they will be forced into a Jigsaw-style contraption that will require them to exact a pound of flesh in order to escape. They can give into the Judge’s sick demands and hack off a limb or dig their own eye out of their skull, or they can hope that their teammates can find them and save them in time; the game’s first-person perspective makes that decision even harder because if you do pay the price, you’ll be treated to a gnarly, up-close image of the carnage.
All of this can be avoided if the Accused players find and defeat the Judge, who is just as vulnerable as any other player, unlike the Killers in Dead by Daylight. The idea is that there are multiple ways for either side to win a game, and the randomized maps make it so that every match can play out differently. It’s a compelling structure for an asymmetrical game, and is a decidedly Saw way to extrapolate the series’ death-game concept into something that is replayable and challenging for folks on both sides of the death and dismemberment.
All that said, it’s the Genesis part of the title and concept that gives me pause. Saw: Genesis is set nearly 100 years before the events of the films and shortly after World War I, with the Judge being positioned as a kind of precursor to the Jigsaw Killer we meet in Saw. Though the team said the two are not meant to be “mirrors” of one another when I asked about the connections between Genesis and the actual Saw legacy, the implication of the game’s announcement trailer is that the Judge is an inspiration to John Kramer, with Kramer going so far as to call him a “prophet,” setting the stage for his own games a century later. There are even throughlines between the two’s work, with the Judge’s “accomplice,” who can be directed to manipulate the game, wearing a makeshift pig mask similar to the one characters wear in the films.
The thing is, these pieces of iconography were not merely aesthetic choices in the Saw films; they were rooted in Kramer’s story and philosophy. Genesis isn’t merely a fan project riffing on Saw’s violent imagery, it’s a Lionsgate-sanctioned collaboration that is meant to be additive to the series’ elaborate but airtight mythology. But it’s set so far away from the events of the films that it doesn’t really touch them, beyond recontextualizing Kramer’s sadistic ideology as not just a byproduct of his own delusions of grandeur and his choice to reckon with his own imminent death by instilling that same fear of mortality in others, but as something influenced by someone else entirely.
The trouble with successful franchises expanding into multimedia properties is that, eventually, the plot will get lost somewhere. The video game history of the Saw series is already a bit muddy, as Konami’s ill-fated PS360-era horror games already put their fingers a bit too deep into the bloody pie, retconning deaths and character arcs for no real benefit. Now, Genesis is trying to change the recipe entirely. Rather than reflecting the series’ meticulous approach to narrative, Genesis feels like it’s just bolting itself onto the side of the Saw franchise in order to slap a recognizable logo on its cover. I’m curious to see how Genesis fits into this puzzle when it eventually launches, and I hope my fears are drowned out in the terrified screams of the Accused as they try to navigate my twisted games.