Save Room (PS5)
In Resident Evil 4, as Leon Kennedy faces off against monsters and mind-control parasites, he also has to contend with an element that could be the difference between life and death: item organization. Your attache case can only hold so many objects, but rather than portraying this as a simple menu, the objects you find all have specific shapes, meaning if you can find out how to place them all evenly in the grid, you can better carry the guns, ammunition, and healing herbs you need to survive in the survival horror adventure. The satisfaction is arranging your case just so was picked up on by many players, but developer Fractal Projects took that appreciation for organization a step further. Save Room isolates that item management and turns it into a little game on its own, but without that payoff of using those weapons in an adventure where those items manner, the question does arise how much a player might enjoy the task in complete isolation.
Save Room does have a pretty clever pun for its title, the game alluding to the safe rooms where you can save your game in Resident Evil games and where inventory management often occurs as you prepare to go back out into the danger, but this puzzle game is also all about trying to make sure there’s enough room for all the objects you’re offered. There is no story present in Save Room and its visuals do not even really try to divorce themselves from Resident Evil, right down to the herbs the game features being a fan-made asset labeled in the credits as “Resident Evil 3 – Green Herb (Potted)”. It might even be the intention that you’re supposed to imagine this is just another time Leon Kennedy is cracking his case open to move the objects around, the specific items you need to fit snugly onto a grid in Save Room mostly being weapons and healing tools. First aid sprays, eggs, rocket launchers, even the fact fish are included as one of the items makes it a set that didn’t aim to break out of the mold it borrowed at all, the game not really trying to innovate on the idea and instead focusing more of its attention on finding a way to perfectly fit all the presented items in a single flat grid.
Across the game’s 40 puzzles, the format remains pretty much the same. On the left you’ll see a grid that represents the inventory space you have available while on the right you have a space where the items you need to add to the grid are stored. Some will already be in the main area and it’s often smarter to just remove them all and work from there, although the right side can become cluttered itself in later levels when you start getting much larger items like sniper rifles. To beat a level, you must have every item placed in the main grid, the player free to rotate objects but notably it’s only in a clockwise fashion. While this sounds reasonable if you think of everything as a 2D object, the aforementioned sniper rifle has a scope that changes its shape and being able to flip an item could have allowed you to have more control over its shape. On the other hand, every puzzle in the game is made to be completed a certain way, the available space very deliberate so you have to identify where exactly certain items can go. An egg slots nicely into a single block of grid space, but then you have something like a shotgun where its long barrel fills a lot of lateral room but its stock fills a wide space, making it almost like a pot in terms of the grid spaces it fills. Identifying where the item can be placed to allow the others to be squeezed in is the challenge, so while there are a lot of little things that only take up two spaces like ammo boxes and grenades, the choice to include firearms is probably the most impactful in terms of design since their very distinct shapes are what give puzzles their difficulty.
At first, Save Room really is just about fitting everything into a limited space, rotating and rearranging all you need to concern yourself with. If this was all the game offered, it would perhaps be too sedate of a game experience, in some ways almost a glorified tangram puzzle but with more interesting thematic shapes. There’s a little bit of enjoyment in squeezing things into a tidy but packed space, but then Save Room at least gets a touch more creative albeit by copying Resident Evil even more. Those healing herbs, sprays, and food items are actually functional in Save Room, some stages starting with a life meter in the top left showing whoever is arranging these items is in need of some first aid. Choosing to use an item will make it disappear from the inventory, later puzzles requiring you to figure out which healing items to use up since not everything can fit in the case otherwise. Where it gets a touch more clever is when you sometimes need to get spoiled food in the mix, actually harming yourself a touch to then heal after as a way of removing certain items from play.
Item mixing and combining is another way the game tries to expand what inventory management can look like. Starting simple with loading guns up with bullets instead of carrying them separately, you eventually move into straight up crafting ammo by mixing together powders, and in much the same way as healing items, it’s crucial you identify the exact ones to use or you won’t be able to fit everything. You can only clear a stage if you have every item in the main area and you’ve properly taken care of your unseen item carrier, meaning you must heal them up and load their weapons up at least a slight bit if they’re running on empty. It is a complication that helps the game stretch its concept into 40 stages, but it’s not exactly a leap in complexity. Much of the time it means you’ll start a stage by mixing items and healing, and once you’re sure you have that tiny part of the puzzle figured out, you go back to rotating and placing objects in the hypothetical attache case. It is definitely what Save Room needed to avoid stagnation, but it’s not the game growing so much as ensuring it has the tiny bit of longevity it needs to see you to the end.
Save Room is very short, the forty puzzles not often taking too long to solve so it might place somewhere around 1 to 2 hours of play. Thankfully, despite likely playing much more naturally with a mouse for its PC release known as Save Room – Organization Puzzle, Save Room on PlayStation systems has a few button shortcuts that make it easy to pop between the two grids and your indicator for where you’re selecting moves quickly enough that play becomes natural after the early adjustment period. Besides full on emptying the play field when necessary being a bit of a slow process, it’s not like the controls are going to be an issue save for the choice to put menu options so close to the top of the grid leading to sometimes accidental round resets. Even the menu music feels like a Resident Evil homage though, the eerie yet relaxing music decent enough background noise amidst the constant clicking of item maneuvering but it is just the same track throughout so it eventually just fades from notice.
THE VERDICT: Save Room decided to make a full game out of rearranging the items in Resident Evil 4’s attache case, and if that’s what you want, that’s exactly what you get. Including healing and reloading as extra little features prevents that simple idea from being completely basic, but Save Room is banking too much on the light thrill of getting a bunch of objects to fit cleanly in a tight space rather than trying to get creative with the concept. You get exactly what you came for and nothing more, innovation or creativity not the point here. Just a selection of puzzles in a format that isn’t that difficult to manage, but while arranging your items paid off with using them in Resident Evil, hoping that doing the task with no reward besides moving onto the next level shows that some of the satisfaction in making all the items fit was because it had a practical point.
And so, I give Save Room for PlayStation 5…
An OKAY rating. Save Room feels better compared to something like a collection of word searches or crosswords rather than putting it on the same level as regular video games. This is a game format, hence my earlier comparison to tangram puzzles where you need to fit all the shapes in a flat board. It does have an edge over those since the items here are more interesting than basic shapes and the combining and healing gives them some interactivity beyond just slotting into their spots. Still, it feels very much like if you bought a jigsaw puzzle and all you found inside the box is that promised jigsaw puzzle. It’s hard to be too upset if you know what you’re getting into, and Save Room makes no illusions about what it is. You do need that context from Resident Evil 4 to appreciate many of its touches and design choices, but otherwise its just a simple puzzle type being presented for you to solve. Maybe if you start to factor in elements like its price you might be disappointed, but it does exactly what it promises and not a tiny bit more. It does show that the attache case organization works best when it has the reward of being able to use the items in a more action-oriented situation though, so perhaps a reward system of some sort might have helped Save Room provide more satisfaction than a job well done. There is a sequel that seems to start to toy with that concept though, your work leading to you buying things from a merchant as your reward, so it seems the creator of the game at least realized that the way to improve would be more context and structure beyond 40 puzzles laid out in a row.
Usually when one game is inspired by another, some effort is put into changing up its appearance or throwing in something new to set it apart. Save Room really is the Resident Evil 4 inventory system excised, but that inventory system wasn’t what made Resident Evil 4 spectacular. It was a nice little part, one that still works a bit in isolation, but even other organizational games like Unpacking realize that there should be a bit more going on than just a plain puzzle of putting everything in its place. Save Room is a quick clear that does what it says it will to the letter, but if you don’t want a small dose of this very specific style of play, you might be better saving room in your gaming library for more involved and original puzzle games.