Saw

Torture porn.

Those two words together manage to elicit any number of reactions from people: disgust, intrigue, even excitement. If nothing else, though, you’ve at least got to be curious. Zombie Studios is banking on that curiosity with their upcoming videogame adaptation of Saw, the breakout horror film of 2004 that has since turned into an annual Halloween moviegoing tradition.

So how do you make a game around the elaborate tests and traps built by clown-loving psychopath Jigsaw? You start by setting the player inside an abandoned insane asylum as a prisoner of the demented killer. In our handson demo, we had a skull-encasing contraption locked onto our head as the scene began. If we didn’t twirl the left stick around and time our B button-presses correctly to disarm and remove it quickly, it would snap like a mousetrap, crushing our jaw.

Next, we had to escape the bathroom we were locked in. Faced with a combination-padlocked door, we didn’t have a clue how to open it. A quick look around the bathroom revealed seemingly random, unintelligible scrawls on the walls. As we peered further, we realized that more marks on the mirror matched up with the other writing to reveal the solution.

In our short playtime, we also had to (A) reach into a toilet bowl full of syringes, (B) quickly press Y after opening a door to avoid triggering a trap, (C) rewire a fuse box à la BioShock’s hacking minigame, and (D) keep our balance as we crossed a narrow beam over a hole in the floor.

Part adventure game, part survival horror, Saw’s success in polygonal form will likely hinge on how interesting and varied its torture scenarios are. If it avoids being a minigame-fest, then we’re in it for the long haul, Jigsaw.