It's surprising that it's taken five years--and six movies--for the Saw franchise to be adapted into a video game. The series lends itself well to games, with its focus on puzzles, moral choices, and the potential for multiple endings. Zombie Studios and Konami have finally made this adaptation happen in the aptly named Saw:  The Video Game, but are the results closer in quality to the first movie, or the fifth?  (SPOILER ALERT:  It's closer to the fifth.)

In Saw, you play as Detective David Tapp (Danny Glover's character from the first movie), whose obsession with catching The Jigsaw Killer has marked him for "testing." You wake up in an abandoned asylum filled with deadly traps and a bunch of NPCs who either need rescuing or want to kill you, and you make your way through the crumbling building finding clues from Jigsaw and solving puzzles.

The game succeeds on a lot of counts, not the least of which is the tension you feel when you struggle against a time limit to solve a trap before somebody gets killed in a spectacular and gory fashion. For example, one of the first major "set piece" puzzles has you fitting gears into a series of boxes before a pendulum can slice someone in half. The relentless clanking and swooping of the pendulum, the screaming of the victim, and the obligatory fevered industrial music all work together to replicate the intensity of the movies, and this is really where the game is at its best.

The main problem, however, is all the time between these sections. The environment's appeal wears off pretty quickly, and most of the gameplay consists of a few basic elements repeated over and over again. The first time you have to reach into a toilet filled with used syringes to retrieve a key is interesting and creepy, but the fifteenth time you do it is a bit of a chore.

It turns out Jigsaw made, like, a hundred of these.

The reason for the repetition, apparently, is to make the game longer. You can't run through most areas because of the tripwire-activated shotguns all over the place, and every sixth door or so is rigged with another shotgun trap, which requires a button press to avoid (anyone else wonder where Jigsaw gets all these shotguns?). These traps are not at all difficult; they just slow you down and make the game feel considerably longer than it actually is.

Similarly, by the end every puzzle involves completing circuits or rotating pipes to re-route steam, except for a short break when Jigsaw makes you play Concentration. This, combined with the increased reliance on the broken combat system, makes playing the final third of the game feel like a lot more trouble than it's worth.

There's actually some fun to be had in Saw, and some really easy Achievements, if you don't mind suffering for them. It's kind of like a Jigsaw trap in itself.