You are missing ammunition. Wounded. Desperate. But you got through the level and now you can take a deep sigh of relief and prepare for the next one. Time to heal, recharge your weapons and organize your backpack so you can fit all your gear neatly in it.
The latter is what you do in Save space – Organizational puzzle. That’s actually all you do. This inventory management puzzle removes shooting and monsters and dangers and literally anything but the very act of healing, reloading weapons, and getting all your weapons, grenades, and equipment to fit neatly into your grid-based backpack.
And that’s … pretty good?
Probably the best known ‘Inventory Tetris’ game is Resident Evil 4, but lots of other games have grid-style inventions, from Deus Ex to DayZ. I think at some point we have all been sitting there carefully trying to optimize the placement of gear in a backpack or briefcase so we would not have to leave a single item. Save Room starts with a few simple puzzles to make it easier for you – put a shotgun, a pistol and a few boxes of ammunition into a grid – but the puzzles become more complex and the grid changes shape as you evolve.
It’s such a familiar feeling. Who has not wanted to avoid discarding a weapon just because there is not enough space in our furniture? We can definitely find room for it all: the long rifle, the long shotgun, the two pistols, and the damn awkwardly shaped uzi that is annoyingly square instead of rectangular. Jam in some grenades and ammunition boxes and a food item that luckily only fills a small square and it feels like you are a master of efficiency. Like Tetris, you can rotate each item in the Save Room, but unlike Tetris, you can combine some of them for maximum optimization.
For example, when you have multiple boxes of ammunition, you can sometimes combine them to fit all of your bullets in one box instead of two. And do not forget to load as much ammunition as possible into the guns themselves. (Weapons, if you think about it, are really just small backpacks for bullets.)
The above gif is accelerated so you do not cut teeth out of frustration when you see me trying to fit four weapons in one bag.
And keep an eye on your character’s health – you never see what’s going on before entering the savings room, but sometimes your HP has been reduced, giving you a chance to use a healing item. Yes, it restores your health, but more importantly, using a health kit means that there is one less thing you need to fit in your package.
Save Room adds puzzles to its puzzles, like when you start making: Use different vials of gunpowder to create specific types of ammo, and combine herbs to make healing items. Sometimes you will need to use consumables in the right order to effectively remove them from your stock of equipment. Did I poison myself by eating a rotten fish just so I could use a health vial? You can believe it. Is that a ridiculous thing to do? It is. But there are two items less that I now have to find room for. A little salmonella is worth it.
The game also made me laugh a little. A puzzle has multiple cannons plus an RPG without rockets, and if I had a nickel for every time I dragged a powerful weapon, I could not spend hours through a game, just if I had a chance, I would finally find some ammunition for that, I would have enough to fill another backpack. Can not stop. Games with inventory grids have turned us into packrats, and as my dad advised me on my wedding day: “If you find a weapon that can take a helicopter down, never let it lie.”
The Save Room contains 40 puzzles and it will probably only take a few hours to get through them all. But it’s a lot of fun, the background music is excellent, and it costs less than two dollars on Steam.