The Eurogamer Expo 2009 certainly feels like a big deal from the outside; queuing amongst largely paying customers, I was safe in the smugness of my press pass. I won’t even pretend to be outraged about not being fasttracked to the front, although it appears that only school groups are being allowed to jump the line on this mild half-term Friday, which is a bit of a slap in the face. After finally getting my much-coveted white wristband – the only wristband that gets you access to a small ‘press office’ with a fridgefull of drinks to blag – I head inside and feel terribly underwhelmed. Not because I’m disappointed by the setup of the show, just that it’s exactly what I was expecting; multicoloured spotlights illuminating banks of painfully huge flatscreens, an awkward feeling in the air, and a lot of people queuing for a long time to play videogames. All this I could gladly accept, but it would have been nice to have more people involved with the making of each game alongside the demos; rather than largely clueless PR practitioners, Nintendo’s especially are full of information; we’re told New Super Mario Bros. Wii is “out, er, next month, I think.”

Having wandered the exhibition floor in a state of bemusement I decide it’s time to actually play something. I stumble across a free Xbox 360 running a demo of Bayonetta, essentially an even flashier Devil May Cry, and if the demo is anything to go by you spend much of the game going in about twelve directions at once. As an athletic hack-and-slasher it certainly doesn’t feel over simplistic, with a myriad of combos, double jumping, and running up things that are fun to pull off in the practise mode. When it comes to the demo level, my coherence is as scant as Bayonetta’s protagonist’s clothing. I’m plummeting off a cliff, standing on a chunk of a clock tower with its own gravitational field, fighting off large groups of demons. Exhilaration quickly turns to cynicism when my character becomes impossible to make out behind the enemy hordes and colourful runes that fill up the screen, not to mention the horrifically disorientating effect the rotating, falling, clock faces have. When I die, I walk away.

Downstairs in the basement, the organisers seem to have gone for some sort of subterranean nightclub aesthetic; it’s dark and cramped. Saw offers an equally horrifying experience to the movies that spawned it. And if you feel like that films have been getting somewhat repetitive and formulaic, then I suppose you can apply that to the game as well. It’s a mix of gruesome puzzle-solving, quick time events, and presumably a few fist sandwich encounters to liven things up along the way. I don’t have much luck with demo, simply working out that you can hold a lighter and punch at the same time. Others get stuck into a lot of stick swivelling and button mashing to onscreen cues while a pre-animated character attempts to get a timed bear-trap off his face. It’s immediately apparent that the Jigsaw killer is getting a bit short of ideas, because even I know that it’s been lifted straight from one of the films.

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