Saw: The Video Game

I think the Saw movies are entertaining but somewhat idiotic, melodramatic buckets of 2000s-era guts and stuff. I also have a functioning fight-or-flight response, and would be upset if a little puppet guy on a tricycle told me he wanted to play a game. I don’t want to play a game with the little puppet guy, and I don’t want to play Saw: The Video Game, a survival horror exercise from 2009.

Most of the game’s “scary” moments—digging through toilet bowls full of used needles, avoiding bone-crushing shackles and a room-sized furnace—are punctuated by sudden camera sweeps and zoom-ins. Though intended to build drama and heighten the puppet guy’s spiel about teaching you the true value of life, the game’s ungainly, wide-eyed intensity is mostly funny.

What critics said: “The Saw films are renowned for their ability to induce gut-wrenching reactions with vivid torture scenes and nail-biting suspense,” Tim Turi wrote in a 2009 Game Informer review. “Imagine my dismay when I popped in the game and instead felt boredom tempered with frustration.”