Save Room — Familiar Peace
I remember convincing (or tricking) my Dad to vouch for me at our local Target long ago, for the express purpose of buying Resident Evil 4, in the era of its Gamecube exclusivity. I’d never played any of the Resident Evil games before that, but it always seemed to come up in conversation. It was the hot thing. And it proved to be the hot thing: enemies en masse, precision aiming, thrilling item management, giant foes, overdramatic characters, thrilling item management, a riveting and self-contained story, and THRILLING ITEM MANAGEMENT.
Resident Evil 4 introduced me to inventories proper: having to rearrange and reallocate my belongings, maximizing the intentionally limited space to go the furthest in my upcoming fights. I’d spend minutes on end flipping and rotating things around, trying to hold onto as many weapons, herbs, and ammo boxes as possible. The management of items was as much a game as the core loop of infected villager skirmishes, providing a calmer, fear-devoid moment between combat encounters. While games, both in the Resident Evil series and beyond, have built up on that core loop, very little has ever come close to the beauty that the inventory system was. Until now (or very recently, at least).
Save Room — Organization Puzzle by Fractal Projects taps into that familiar sense of peace, but cuts out all the pesky combat and precision in favor of effective item management. The entire setup feels lifted right out of a (copyright-avoiding) Resident Evil 4 inventory screen; the items, familiar to RE players; the control scheme, damn near identical; the achievements and limited text, the item information, the vibes, it’s all in service to where it came from. Save Room is a love letter to Resident Evil 4, sending its adoration through the all-important, but just as easily overlooked, inventory screen.
Players control some faceless, voiceless protagonist, flipping and organizing their items after they’ve seemingly stumbled into a (musically and tonally-appropriate) Safe Room to catch their breath amidst whatever horrors are outside. The objective is simple: for every stage, ensure all of the items fit in your (varying designs of) inventory, ensure your protagonist is at full health, and that all weapons are locked and loaded with some ammo. Can’t expect faceless protagonists to win without bullets.
Players start off easy, simply organizing loaded weapons into pretty cut-and-dry inventories. Before long, ammo boxes start appearing, requiring smart stacking and reloading. Then, health items, calling for forethought and planning before just snarfing half-a-dozen raw eggs. Before long, gunpowder makes an appearance, demanding careful combination to create the necessary ammo for what weapons you have. Save Room excels at puzzle-based design: introducing its new elements, challenging the player with various iterations, and then moving into new elements on top of the mastered elements. All the while, it’s switching up the inventory space you have to work with: simple rectangles, crosses, inverted pyramids, and all manner of shapes that would make no sense as a functional inventory. By the time players reach the endgame, they’re flipping items around, combining without thinking about it, and stacking like elements together in every effort to make just one more free square of space…to say nothing of five squares by willingly eating a rotted fish.
In full disclosure, the experience only clocks at a few hours, depending on the player’s familiarity with the systems from Resident Evil and the inventory system from 4. I managed to barrel through the 40 puzzles in less than two hours, but would still wholeheartedly recommend it. It’s short, but well-designed, both in aesthetic and gameplay. It brings the less-sung, but just as revolutionary inventory system back into the spotlight where it belongs, creating an unexpected, braintickling experience for both nostalgic village-dwellers and puzzle lovers looking for a unique take on the genre. Perhaps there’s more on the horizon for this take, but for now, what’re ya sortin’?
All images captured in-game.
