There I was, stuck inside a Saw contraption with two options. I could wait and hope that one of my teammates would come back to save me, or I could get myself out immediately. The second option involved sacrificing part of my hand. I chose freedom, watched the machine tear several fingers off and walked away with a considerable chunk of my health missing. Problem solved. Sort of.
SAW: Genesis gave me several moments like this during my Gamescom session. It’s a 3v1 asymmetrical horror game where three players take on the role of the Accused while another becomes the Judge, and our group was on the unfortunate side of that equation. We woke up in typical Saw fashion, got a video explaining why we were there and eventually broke our way out into a series of rooms filled with puzzles that could very easily kill us. From there, the objective sounds simple enough: solve the puzzles and get out. Except somebody else is playing the Judge and doing everything possible to make sure that doesn’t happen. The Judge can’t simply run towards you and start attacking. They have access to hidden passages and shortcuts throughout the environment and can prepare traps while the Accused are trying to find their way through. They also don’t always know exactly where you are. Making too much noise or triggering something can reveal your position, and once that happens, you suddenly have another problem besides whatever horrible machine is sitting in the room with you.
There’s a fun little mind game behind that setup. Moving quickly means giving the Judge less time to prepare whatever unpleasant surprise comes next, but rushing also means making mistakes and potentially separating the team. Staying together makes the puzzles easier to solve and gives you people who can rescue you when things go wrong, but you’re also giving the Judge more time to work. We were constantly talking about where to go, who should do what and whether it was a good idea to move on yet. Usually, somebody eventually did something stupid.
Please come and get me
Getting caught doesn’t immediately mean you’re dead. The Judge can’t attack an Accused who is looking directly at them, so they need to approach without being seen and grab someone at the right moment. If they manage that, the victim can be dragged away and placed inside one of the game’s contraptions. That’s where SAW: Genesis gets properly nasty. Being trapped leaves you with another decision. Your teammates can come and rescue you, assuming they can reach you safely, or you can sacrifice something to escape on your own. My finger incident was one example. The machine did exactly what it promised and I was allowed to continue afterwards, but losing that much health came back to haunt me later in the match. Escaping immediately might save everybody some time, yet you could be creating a much bigger problem for yourself several rooms later.
And these contraptions look disgusting. SAW has spent decades coming up with increasingly horrible ways to make people choose between pain and death, and Genesis clearly wants to play with the same idea. The traps we encountered were elaborate, mechanical and unpleasant to watch, especially when you’re the person sitting inside one. They fit the films incredibly well without simply copying the most famous Jigsaw traps and putting them into a multiplayer game. The setting helps with that too. Genesis takes place in the aftermath of World War I, long before John Kramer became Jigsaw, with the Judge acting as a precursor to the games we know from the movies. That earlier period gives all the machinery a rougher appearance. There’s metal everywhere, things look painfully mechanical and nothing about these contraptions suggests you’re going to have a pleasant afternoon.
We really need to talk
The longer our match continued, the more important communication became. Some puzzles required us to properly coordinate what we were doing, and knowing where the Judge might be was just as important as finding the solution. If someone disappeared or got captured, the rest of us then had to decide whether going back was worth the risk. That created some genuinely tense moments because nobody has complete information. The Accused are trying to understand the rooms and stay alive while the Judge moves around using passages we can’t access, preparing traps and waiting for someone to make a mistake. You can try to stay together for safety, but then you’re one nicely packed group for the Judge to manipulate. Split up and you might get things done faster, but suddenly that person screaming for help is several rooms away.
My damaged hand made the final part particularly stressful. I had already paid for one mistake with a huge amount of health, so getting caught again wasn’t something I could easily shrug off. Every new room became another question of how much risk I was willing to take. We still needed to solve the puzzles and keep moving, but I was considerably less enthusiastic about volunteering myself for anything that looked remotely dangerous, which, admittedly, is quite difficult in a Saw game.
This is still very early
The version I played was clearly an alpha build, and that’s important to keep in mind. SAW: Genesis is still being tested and balanced, and an asymmetrical multiplayer game lives or dies by how well both sides work once thousands of players start figuring out every trick available to them. The developers are already running closed tests and gathering feedback before the game enters Early Access. What I can judge is the idea behind it, and my match already produced exactly the kind of situations I hoped a Saw multiplayer game would create. We argued about what to do, tried to outsmart someone who was watching us from the shadows, solved deadly puzzles and occasionally had to decide how much of our own body we were willing to sacrifice to keep going.
Most importantly, it actually felt like Saw and that’s not just because Billy appears on a cute little bike or because there’s blood everywhere, but because surviving can come with a horrible choice attached to it. Getting captured didn’t just remove me from the game, It put me inside a machine and asked how badly I wanted to get out, the ‘how much blood will you shed to stay alive’ kind of deal.
Early conclusion
SAW: Genesis is still very early, but I had a lot of fun playing as one of the Accused. Communication is incredibly important, the Judge constantly gives you something else to worry about and the traps are wonderfully disgusting. I’m especially curious to play the other side now, because after spending a match losing fingers, I’d quite like to be the person designing the problems instead.