To navigate your way around the insane asylum you will be clambering up and down ladders, shimmying through pipes that periodically blast flesh-melting bursts of steam, balancing your way across a gap, or otherwise avoiding environmental hazards such as electrified puddles of water or walking across broken glass on your bare feet. Controlling your character around and through these hazards however feels unnecessarily sloppy thanks to a combination of imprecise controls and jerky animations. There will be times where you will want to run from an enemy and close and bolt a door between you, only to have the every step of the process feel much less intuitive and much more cumbersome than you would expect.

An interesting aspect of such wanderings however is found when you need to illuminate your way through dark or pitch black sections of the facility. You start with a standard lighter which casts a soft amber glow in a pathetically small radius, but you can swap out the lighter for a different source of light such as a flashlight or a camera. Each one has their pros and cons, with the camera illuminating entire rooms for only the short instant before the flash must recharge, or with the flashlight lighting up a long distance in a narrow cone. None of the three have a limit on their use, but with the camera having such a large recharge time it really boils down to either the lighter or the flashlight, and even then it isn’t much of a choice.

The puzzles are easily the game’s most enjoyable aspect, as the combat is underwhelming with few exceptions and exploring the linear facility isn’t tense or frightful. The game does a good job of trying to spice things up with a variety of traps and situations in which you must fight enemies, but it is the foundation of the gameplay itself that is fundamentally flawed. The game is good for a brief whirl if only to experience the set-piece puzzles that Jigsaw has set up, but it just doesn’t have the tense moments or gripping gameplay that defines any strong survival horror game.