After Gamescom, following our hands-on meeting with publisher Bloober Team, we had the opportunity to dive deep into the design philosophy powering SAW: Genesis. Developed by Broken Mirror Games and Anshar Studios, this upcoming 3v1 asymmetrical multiplayer horror game moves the franchise back a century before John Kramer to the aftermath of World War I. Players step into a deadly labyrinth as either one of three “Accused” forced to make gruesome sacrifices to escape, or as “The Judge” – a vulnerable mastermind orchestrating the trials strictly from the shadows. To learn more about how the team is expanding the iconic universe and re-engineering asymmetrical multiplayer balance, we spoke with Damian Kocurek, Creative Director for SAW: Genesis at Anshar Studios.
The WWI setting introduces “the Judge” and new iconography like Bette the Puppet. How did you expand the lore while keeping it authentically “SAW” without Jigsaw?
We were making a multiplayer game rather than a story-driven one, we knew early that narrative and style would have to carry a lot of weight. So, we began by taking SAW apart – theme, tone, style elements and asking what actually makes something feel like SAW, as opposed to what simply looks like it. Then, we asked which of those things survive being moved to another time and place.
Three ideas came out of that and became the foundation of the game. The first is the philosophy: “Jigsaw” offers people a moral choice between life or death. That intent is the spine of SAW, and it’s the spine of our game. The second is that John Kramer is physically weak and wins by thinking further ahead than anyone else – planning, preparing, and engineering the situation. That philosophy went directly into crafting the role of the Judge. The third is the people. In the films, especially SAW II and SAW V, you get strangers from completely different walks of life who are desperate and forced to cooperate with someone they’d never otherwise trust. Those people became the foundation for crafting the role of the Accused.
Then, we asked the important questions. What does a trap look like when it’s built with the technology of the period, by someone who is in the early days of experimenting? What do Jigsaw’s games look like when they’re not made by someone as prepared as Jigsaw? What kind of locations can we use? How do we make sure sacrifice is a meaningful part of the game? What does our version of Billy look like? Who are the people you play as, and what were they spared from? The creative identity we’ve built, Bette included, all came from answering those questions and building something inside the world of SAW, rather than from wanting our own version of something the films already had.
Unlike typical asymmetrical killers who rely on brute force, the Judge is physically vulnerable. What design challenges arose from creating a killer who operates strictly as a mastermind from the shadows?
This is one of the most unique and challenging parts of the game. The Judge’s power comes from knowing the ins and outs of the environment, trap locations, and predicting where the Accused are headed before they get there. The Judge’s knowledge is their weapon.
That is expanded by their toolset. The Accomplice lets you act on the map without exposing yourself. The Gas Device causes hallucinations for the Accused and lets you create chaos at the most opportune moment. It created real challenges in development, and balancing was the big one. Physical strength is easy to judge, and players know that. Building a role that is dependent on strength is easy, but creating a role that requires strategy and planning is a lot harder to balance and explain to players. In this game, playing like you are invincible as the Judge will quickly lead to defeat. We’ve gone through countless iterations to find the point where game awareness is useful, but not sufficient on its own to win.
The other side of that coin was getting the players to interact. We had versions of the game where the Judge stayed in the shadows and was never seen for the entire match, which was un-fun for both sides. That’s why we put so much work into the toolkit – things like the syringe, which lets you attack unsuspecting accused, or pressure, which causes the Accused to make mistakes by sheer presence. They exist to give the Judge reasons to come close, so that the threat is something you encounter rather than just traps on the level.
What were the most surprising player behaviors or feedback points you observed during your Gamescom playtests?
Gamescom confirmed what we’d been seeing in playtests all along. In those playtests, the most surprising thing is probably how much fun people have playing against the Judge as a kind of horror game mastermind. Not just playing to win, but taunting, building tense situations, drawing out a moment to make it land. There’s no real mechanical reason to do it. They do it because the role invites it, and watching players take that invitation without being asked told us a lot about what the Judge’s role is.
The other thing we see often comes from the opposite direction. People really want to overtake the Judge. They’ll run him down, hunt him, set traps for him, sometimes well past the point where it’s good for them, while the Judge is sometimes too brazen in their attack. Both of those instincts are deeply ingrained in us as players, because that’s what these games have taught us to do over the years, but in SAW: Genesis they aren’t necessarily the best option. We’ve been working on improving onboarding so players understand early that those all-in strategies can backfire.
Since matchmade solo players often lack communication, how are you designing ping tools and in-game systems to encourage coordination without voice chat?
We know this is an important part of the experience, and we have designed around the assumption that the three Accused won’t necessarily be talking to each other. Coordination must be possible without a headset and a group of friends.
Right now, there are three sides to this. There’s a ping system that lets you mark elements in the world and show them to the rest of the team, so you can share information about the level without needing to describe it. There’s in-game proximity voice chat for the moments when players do want to talk, and a player status display. This allows players to know once a teammate has been captured in a Rehabilitation Trap (where they are forced to make a sacrifice) or are going into Catatonia state (downed and vulnerable to being picked up) without anyone having to announce it.
We’re not stopping there. A communication wheel is coming, and we’ll keep iterating, – gathering feedback and improving the existing systems to make the experience smooth so that you can have fun while learning the game. Coordination is genuinely one of those things you can’t fully solve internally, so a lot of this will keep developing with player feedback.
With mechanics like permanent limb loss shifting match dynamics, how do you prevent a snowball effect that leaves injured players feeling useless for the rest of the round?
That was one of the toughest problems we had to solve; how do players take heavy damage, lose a limb, and still be playing the game afterwards? What we ended with is the Body Damage System, and it works because of the firm limits on it. The first limit is on what can be damaged at all. You can’t lose both eyes, or both hands. There’s always a floor. Beyond that, though, we’re careful about how the damage is expressed. We don’t want you walking around with half your screen covered, or everything blurred because you lost an eye. You can technically still play like that, but it isn’t a game anymore, it’s just frustration. The cost must be real without making the next ten minutes miserable. The second part is that damage is specific rather than generic. Each Rehabilitation Trap injures you in a particular way – one might make you pull out your fingers, another might require you to take your own eye. Each type has different consequences and limits different abilities.
What has the three-way collaboration between Bloober Team, Broken Mirror Games, and Anshar Studios allowed you to achieve that a single studio couldn’t?
We’ve been working with Bloober Team throughout the years across different projects, so this isn’t a new relationship, but a continuation of one that has been working well. That matters more than people expect. A lot of co-development time gets spent learning how the other side thinks, and we were past that before we started.
Each of us brings something different. We bring our experience with first-person and multiplayer development, which is the technical backbone of a game like this. Bloober Team brings horror expertise and consultation on making the game the best it can be. Broken Mirror Games connects it all together, handling feedback and communication so the whole thing moves as one project rather than three.