Over a year later, a second Save Room game was made and if the subtitle of “The Merchant” isn’t already an indication, it doubles down on the Resident Evil 4 inspirations both in its presentation and mechanics. For a start, there’s a story now, where you play as a secret agent who goes through many deadly offscreen adventures in order to save the president’s dog from an unsavory cult. This is conveyed through brief tongue-in-cheek scenes every few stages where your character is contacted by your support team and the game’s many villains, reminiscent of the radio chats Leon has with Hunnigan in Resi 4.
They’re cute little interludes that also help to contextualize the major gameplay addition, the merchant. You start a level by doing the same process of placing all the items into the attache case, but doing so doesn’t complete the level. Instead, it unlocks the ability to sell items to a merchant – one who is dressed like and speaks with the same kind of catchphrases that the infamous merchant from Resi 4 growled at you – and use the cash earned from those sales to buy new items. You’re given a list on the side of the screen of what items you have to buy, and all items must be placed into the case for the stage to be completed.
As a result, the amount of time spent in each puzzle is doubled, since you effectively have to solve it twice with a different group of items. You also need to consider things such as how much money you earn, what you can afford to sell off, and the fact that only items in the case can be sold off. As well as this, there’s a limited amount of ammo and health restoratives you can buy, so you’ll have to carefully plan how to heal yourself while having enough items to put into the case.
The complexity is further ramped up by the introduction of treasures and jewels ramps up this complexity, since adding jewels to specific treasures can ramp up their selling prices. You’ll regularly be in a situation where you need to buy treasures for your unsold jewels or jewels for incomplete treasures. Later on, you’ll need to contend with returning complications from the original game such as gunpowder crafting and new additions like upgrading your weapons and cleaning up dirty jewels to raise their prices.
With so much to keep in mind, The Merchant is often a much trickier game than its predecessor. The lack of an undo button means that screwing up, for example by using the wrong health item or selling incomplete treasures, will force you to restart the stage which can be quite a tedious retread. However, concessions are made to make things less imposing: you’ll earn plenty of money from sold off treasures that you can afford to make a few mistaken purchases, you can right click to sell or buy multiple items at once, and new mechanics are very gradually introduced as the game goes on.
It’s a more difficult game, but primarily in the sense of it being longer and requiring good forward thinking instead of just filling out a grid. In one sense, this does lose the quick simplicity of the original that made it so charming. But at the same time, it can be very satisfying to make a plan of what items to sell and how, and to see that plan come to fruition as you slowly put together your new selection of items. This isn’t more of the same, but a new take on the Save Room gameplay, and it’ll be up to you as to whether that’s a good thing or not.
The Steam page for Save Room – The Merchant: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2326020/Save_Room__The_Merchant/
