SAW: Genesis Is A Darker Take On The Dead By Daylight Formula

Summer Game Fest 2026 gave gamers their first look at the brand-new SAW game, SAW: Genesis.

The SAW franchise is one of the most lucrative horrors going and has seen, frankly, too many sequels and spin-offs in its time.

While the films vary in quality, video game adaptations are quite a rare breed, and our behind-closed-doors presentation at SGF has left us morbidly intrigued.

More Than Just A Dead By Daylight knock-off

Games like Dead By Daylight and The Outlast Trials popularised a unique genre of what we’d now call friendslop, where players group up as survivors to escape a gruesome fate.

Teamwork is usually the name of the game because regardless of whether the killer is controlled by another player or AI, a disjointed team will rarely see the exit alive.

The same philosophy is being applied to SAW: Genesis, but after seeing some of the gameplay, I think it’s going to push this idea further than all others in the genre.

In SAW: Genesis, one player takes on the role of Jigsaw’s inspiration. The game’s set shortly after World War I, so the technology of the time is limited, making for more barbaric traps and tribulations for the survivors.

Three players work together as survivors with the common goal of either escaping their captor or killing them. That’s right, unlike other games, the killer doesn’t get a free ride. Leave yourself out in the open, and the survivors can gang up on you for a quicker win.

Each match sees these four players in the same complex, though killers can seemingly get around quicker through the use of shortcuts, different levels, and a map of the area. Their job is to set traps on the survivor’s path, but doing so puts you on the survivor's level, so if you’re not quick about it, they could catch up and jump you.

Bloober Team

As for the survivors, their job is pretty simple. Survive. To do this, they’ll need to interact with the environment to unlock the path forward, but they’ll also be able to find weapons. Be warned that these can come at a cost.

Now it wouldn’t be SAW without some good old-fashioned deathtraps. The killer can knock out a survivor and deposit them into one of these traps, leaving an allotted amount of time to either escape it yourself or hope one of your friends will come and get you.

To escape, you may have to sacrifice part of your body, which we were told makes later parts of the level more challenging. For instance, losing your fingers might make it impossible to pull a lever later on or something like that.

So for the best chance of survival you’ll probably want to work as a team. But the developers told us that they drew a lot of inspiration from SAW 2 in particular, meaning you can screw over your fellow survivors if you think it’ll give you a better chance of success later.

While we didn’t get to go hands-on with the game, SAW: Genesis does have our attention. It feels like a solid expansion of the pre-established lore, and if you escape your trial with some missing limbs and appendages, well that’s just very SAW, isn’t it?

We’re excited to see more, and we’re told playtests will be taking place later this year so you’ll hopefully be able to try it out for yourself.

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