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Save Room - Organization Puzzle: A collection of good things on sale, stranger.
🕑 Added 2025-01-15 21:53:11 +0000 UTCI like Resident Evil. Whether it’s the horror aspects of the first few games, or even the goofy action-driven pivot the series took after Resident Evil 5, it’s one of those franchises I have a soft spot for. Except for Resident Evil 6, that game is… not good.
One of the core mechanics Resident Evil relies heavily on is the inventory system. Your character can only hold a fixed amount of items, thus there’s a bit of strategy beyond exploring a place and killing all the zombies. Knowing what items and weapons to bring, making sure you’re equipped for whatever the game throws your way, whether or not it’s worth getting the big ticket item now or coming back later once your inventory’s empty. While it can be frustrating that you can’t just hold everything, it’s a deliberate design choice that I can appreciate.
(courtesy of r/oddlysatisfying on Reddit, likely taken from elsewhere.)
By the time we get to Resident Evil 4 it starts being more complex, where they use a grid system, with each item taking a specific number of slots in the game’s inventory system, now depicted as a large briefcase. It feels a bit more realistic, but also a game within a game, as one has to occasionally do a bit of adjusting to fit the new weapon or the dozens of fish they caught. It’s that one thing people always mention when they talk about RE4 that isn’t complaining about Ashley Graham being annoying. In 2022, 17 years after the original game’s release, a bunch of Brazilians were inspired by this interesting inventory system and liked the concept so much that they made a game out of it.
(I assure you, in spite of the simple title screen, this is not an asset flip.)
Save Room: Organization Puzzle is a game made by Fractal Projects, an indie studio based out of Brazil. Unfortunately I couldn’t find much information on the studio itself, but it’s made a few indie games like Npc Problems: Vertex Coloring and How to Bathe Your Cat, which are mostly pixel-driven indie games that are likely enjoyable games for the sub-$5 price all of their games go for. They don’t really have a website or a broad social media presence, so I can’t really pinpoint if these folks have prior game experience outside of their own work. Funny enough, while there aren't clear credits for who made this, they do credit the assets they used in from the Unity store, so they're at least considerate even if they're semi anonymous.
(If you want to progress stranger, solve my puzzle!)
There isn’t much of a story. A Merchant – likely a reference to the merchant from RE4 – asks you to solve his puzzles, which involve having a bunch of items and fitting them within a specific grid of tiles. You click and drag them into specific spaces, right click rotates the item 90 degrees, and clicking on an item without moving it gives an option to inspect, combine or use, like in Resident Evil 4. Once you’ve filled all the slots, you can move on to the next puzzle.
Eventually you’re thrown a few curveballs to finish the puzzles. Some require you to heal up – either with herbs or first aid sprays – or load your weapons with any ammo you have. Others require combining items together to make a new item, which is a nice little twist, as it necessitates having to figure out not just how to put things together, but to make sure there’s no excess items left that can’t fit in the grid. In some of the later puzzles, this really requires a lot of trial and error, as I had to restart some puzzles just to figure out that yes, I need to use the food and healing items in a specific order so I can successfully complete the puzzle.
There really isn’t a whole lot else. New levels add new weapons and items, and the grids can get real complex, but there isn’t much else there. Save Room has 40 puzzles to complete overall, and once I finished them I had little to no incentive to replay them. There isn’t a big story, there’s no overarching plot, it’s a puzzle game in the simplest sense. Which is fine, as this reminds me of those puzzle games you’d find in the bargain bins at office supply shops everywhere. Stuff like Slingo Mystery: Who’s Gold.
(Killer6 sounds like a low-budget knockoff to Killer7. Surprised nobody's done that.)
While I do appreciate the winks and nods to Resident Evil 4, it doesn’t do much to make itself stand out. The logo, design and everything allude to RE4 heavily. While there’s nothing wrong with being inspired by something, it ends up feeling cheap, pandering to the crowd of RE4 fans who remember that inventory bit. You can make a game inspired by another game’s mechanic and make it stand out on its own: Peglin is very much inspired by Peggle and RPGs, but it has its own style, thus it feels like its own game even though it’s taking inspiration from other games. The characters aren’t legally distinct versions of Peggle characters, they do their own thing. Save Room feels too shackled to the game its inspired by, which hampers the game.
There is a sequel, Save Room: The Merchant, which seems to lean even more to the Resident Evil 4 references and adds an additional step where you gotta buy stuff alongside the existing puzzle mechanics. I bet it’s at least worth a play, but if they do a third Save Room game, they gotta get a bit more weird with it. Maybe reference other games in the genre, or something.
(Nicely packed. I know there's some that might take issue with how it's arranged, but it fits enough to finish the level, dammit!)
Despite my gripes, I did enjoy playing Save Room: Organization Puzzle. While I never really got deep into the complexities of Resident Evil 4’s inventory system like others did, I can understand why it resonated so much with folks. You usually don’t see something like that in a survival horror action game like that, and making it into its own game seems like a no-brainer thing that I’m surprised it took that long for someone to consider making.
Imagine that you’re a designer at Capcom, working on Resident Evil 4. The game’s been in development hell and after a few project restarts, you’ll try anything to make it stand out from previous installments. You expand upon the inventory system of previous games by making it a complex grid that the player can adjust to their own will, almost like a game within the survival horror game. Once the game’s shipped, you don’t think much of it. The project’s done and released, you move on to other games. That little mechanic takes on a life of its own, so much so that a bunch of fans of RE4 made a puzzle game strictly based on that mechanic you made. That’s gotta be pretty wild to think about.
Save Room: Organization Puzzle is on Steam and other current platforms. It’s super cheap – $3! – and for the hour or so of time I had with it, it’s definitely worth it at that price. A nice little time waster in-between bigger games, which is something we all need every now and then.
Now I’m trying to think of other games that had interesting mechanics that folks made into their own games. Surely there has to be several of them that I missed out on, right?
