A Slight Chance Of Sawblades

From my upbringing with the NES, GameBoy, and SNES to the depths of my World of Warcraft and League of Legends addictions, I’ve spent a lot of time playing video games throughout my life. After realizing that playing video games and being a functioning adult were mutually exclusive activities for me, though, I backed away from gaming a few years ago, much to my benefit. These days I don’t play much beyond Mario Kart 8 on my significant other’s Switch or Shattered Pixel Dungeon on my iPad. That last part is important, as I only even play Shattered Pixel Dungeon on my iPad since it’s too tempting to fire up on my phone.

That being said, I do still find myself in situations where I just have some random time to kill while I’m out with my phone. Maybe I’m done doomscrolling Bluesky and I don’t want or don’t have time to commit to reading a news article let alone a book. What do I do? Since I have an Apple One subscription, I periodically keep an eye on new releases in the Apple Arcade to see if there’s anything worthwhile. I recently did just that and saw a new game titled A Slight Chance of Sawblades+. Coming in at a measly 63 MB download, I figured it couldn’t hurt to try it out.

The game is as simple as it is addicting. You play a character that can move side to side and double-jump. With a 60 second timer, random sawblades start coming down from the sky at various angles and cadences that ramp up the longer you go. If you jump over a sawblade and land, the sawblade disappears. This increments your score, and that’s the entire point of the game: get as high of a score as possible before you either 1.) make contact with a sawblade or 2.) time runs out. When sawblades are eliminated, they also create little shards on the ground. Picking them up will add a small amount of time back on the clock. The more blades you clear with a jump, the more shards they generate. It’s super simple.

It’s literally the perfect on the go style of game. I can pick it up and play for 30 minutes or for 2 minutes; it really makes no difference. There’s no incentive to play every day, so if I don’t touch it for a week it literally doesn’t matter. It’s all about just trying to get the highest score possible whenever that happens to be.

The touchscreen controls feel a bit wonky at first, but I managed to quickly adjust. I’ll still occasionally lose my place, resulting in moving my character the opposite direction of my intent, but those instances are relatively rare. More often than not my execution is what ends my game.

When I first started playing, I was equal parts confused and frustrated. I was dying after clearing fewer than 10 blades, making me wonder how on Earth I could ever go to the next stage. But there is no next stage. You just play the game and see how many blades you can clear for the highest score. It gives me big Super Meat Boy and Bit.Trip Runner vibes in that you’re tackling something extremely challenging for a high score with fast deaths and even faster restarts.

The game is not for people who easily get frustrated with video games. You’ll make stupid mistakes endlessly, but getting irritated does nothing to help you. Starting again and going on autopilot without thinking is really the best course of action. I firmly believe anyone who has played games like what I mentioned above, Jump King, or anything similar will immediately love A Slight Chance Of Sawblades as their favorite time-waster on their phone.

Case in point, I managed to get a high score of 68 after a total of 1244 games. I still have games that end after about 10 seconds. It’s all about finding the game where you just vibe out.

As a nice touch, the shards I mentioned previously that players can pick up to increase their time also double as “tickets”. Those tickets can be used to unlock new:

1. Characters
2. Sawblades
3. Backgrounds

While they’re all purely aesthetic, it’s fun to mix up the visuals. You can even opt to have everything random if you want so that each game gives different visuals. I personally like picking my character, sawblades, and background while having a different, random overall UI background color each game. More broadly, the game supports a lot of customization, including things like the size and positioning of the controls. I would have to imagine that it’s easier to play with a physical controller (something I haven’t tried because… I don’t have one), but the on-screen controls are quite usable. My best score above of 68 put me into the top 2% of players, and I’ve only ever just played on my phone’s touchscreen.

If you end up getting truly die-hard, there’s a second game mode called “Phantom” where your character will turn invisible a few seconds into the round. You briefly see an outline of your character when jumping (including during a double-jump) or when you land. Otherwise, you remain invisible. Suffice to say, while I’ve been able to put up a score of 20 in that mode, it’s hardly been my focus since I’m not feeling like I’ve mastered the game quite to that level just yet.

Overall, Sawblades is a really fun game. It’s a simple idea that was executed upon perfectly. When I find myself with a few minutes to kill, it’s not at all unlikely for me to fire it up to just mindlessly kill some time if I don’t feel like reading, answering emails, or anything else that would be mildly more productive. While there’s a non-Apple Arcade version available that’s probably still awesome, if you have Apple Arcade then it’s definitely worth checking out. It’ll take about a second to download, there are no ads, and there are no in app purchases. It’s just fun.