Sawprint

Hello! Are you ready for a dark adventure?
Sawprint is a puzzle thriller/horror story made by Wreon with RPG Maker VX Ace, and looks like it was partially inspired by the Saw series.

Kyle is our protagonist that wakes up into an abandoned hotel room together with other five persons, some he knows some he does not. They were apparently captured and to flee they have to collect ten keys to open the main door, but things are never easy aren't they?
First because there is a killer that will hunt them mercilessly, and second, to obtain the ten keys needed to escape, they have to solve some jigsaw puzzles.

An interesting thing is that you will start the game selecting the difficulty: this just indicates if the pieces will be just scattered or also turned, rotated and so on, later their number also increase. Luckily from what I have seen there is no limit of time to complete the puzzles, but not every puzzle will give you the numeric password, some will be more complex and you will need some reasoning to understand the number you have to input, anyway nothing impossible. In the beginning you also select a door, that probably decided which puzzles you will find... I think!


Clearly for a good horror/thriller you need messy deaths!

The game also incorporates some obligatory chase sections in which you have to escape from the killer or you will get a simple "Game Over" screen, luckily these are pretty much easy, since you can also sprint (you have a stamina bar that recharges when you walk), but the walking speed is actually faster than the killer's.

So far it's ok, but the game is sadly marred by some errors and inconsistencies, there are some cut sentences (like "Don't you kn her", or "jigsaw pi"), and another problem is that the sequence of rooms and events makes little sense: for example at a certain point you follow a corridor from a room to a dead end, you find a character and after a dialogue you are both surprised by the killer, so they run all the way back... to another, completely different room! HOW? Or when the protagonist runs down some stairs, outruns the killer, unlike his friend, and find himself in the sewers!
The whole hotel is a mess of casually placed rooms, ok there is no exploration or even interactions, except with the puzzles and some random rabbits (!).

There are also some parts in which a character disappears to reappear later, or we find suddenly ourselves alone and in another room, all is a series of short events that take places in different rooms that seems totally disjointed, also the story isn't that clear, not even after the ending. Finally Kyle and other characters charset and portraits (while these are cute and nice to see) are totally different. Also... why does the killer glitches and swaps between two (similar but) different charsets? It's a feature/power or an error?


It's puzzle time!!!

Final Verdict
Hey the games was not totally bad! The jigsaw puzzles were nice, and well made, I liked them. It's a pity that the setting is so random, and the story so confused. There are also seven characters but there is very little of them to learn and no reason to be sympathetic with them of find them interesting at all. Sigh. What a pity! I mean the game is good, what is bad is the story, and the frame that holds all together, the maps, the narrative, this could have been far better! Still I liked solving the puzzles. But that's all, and being the story a linear series of loosely connected cutscenes... that's a shame!