THE FUSE

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.