The game Save Room – Organization Puzzle, from developer/publisher Fractal Projects, boldly asks the question, “What if, instead of playing an entire Resident Evil game, you instead spend a couple hours managing your inventory?” This premise plays out over a series of inventory-management puzzles where you need to cram everything into the right configuration to make it all fit.
To really drive home that Resident Evil flavor, each of the puzzle pieces is modeled after various Resident Evil inventory staples like shotguns, herb plants, and boxes of ammunition. And the puzzle area itself is a spitting image of the the classic Resident Evil grid-based inventory system that we all know and love.
In fact, Save Room is way more Resident Evil-themed than I had originally expected, down to the menacing voice that announces the title of the game when you press start. Of course, the actual items themselves are mostly just representative of the ones found in Resident Evil as opposed to exact copies, obviously for legal reasons.
Honestly, it would’ve been nice to have seen some puzzles themed after other games that adhere to this style of inventory management. I’d like to see a gold-hued series of puzzles based on the last two Deus Ex games, for example. Perhaps this will become DLC down the line. Perhaps not.
That being said, inventory management really is the name of the game in Save Room, and I kind of love it. I have been obsessed with inventory management ever since the original Resident Evil, and I suspect I have some sort of deep seeded compulsion that drives me to do it, even in games where inventory space isn’t as much of an issue. In the more recent Marauders, for example, I spend far more time separating my items into neatly arranged little collections for no real reason other than that I simply cannot not do it.
And so, with a game like Save Room, I get to muck about with inventory to my heart’s content, without having to worry about whatever full game surrounds it. And for the most part, Save Room is satisfying, mixing things up just when boredom might start to creep in. In some puzzles, you will need to make sure every weapon is reloaded; in others, you will need to heal yourself before moving on. In some cases, you will be given gunpowder so you can craft the bullets needed to reload guns, or to just combine two 2-slot items into a single 2-slot item.
Save Room even introduces poisonous items that will harm you, which lets you then use the healing items to take those pieces off the board.
At the end of the day, Save Room has no loftier or grander goals; it simply sets out to offer dozens of puzzles themed after Resident Evil items and inventory management. For only $2.99 on Steam and $4.99 on consoles, this is well worth the asking prize. These puzzles bring me joy in the crazy, mixed-up world we live in, and that’s well worth sacrificing a single cup of coffee over.
It also works great on the Steam Deck, so you can store it in your own personal inventory, like a backpack or a suitcase, giving it a real meta feel.
