Chainsaw

Chainsaw opens with a banner asking you to leave feedback about "the demo." That's not a slip — it's the most honest sentence on the store page. Two days after launch, this is a single episode of a promised multi-chapter story, running to roughly an hour, priced at under NZ$7, with the developer explicitly still gathering notes from the people who bought it. Judged as exactly that — an ambitious opening chapter, not a finished game — it's a genuinely interesting horror RPG with real presentation behind it. Judged as a full release sitting on the storefront next to games that are actually done, it's asking for a lot of trust up front.

A city called Chagas, and the chainsaw that broke it

The premise is straightforward and grim: humans and other creatures lived peacefully in the city of Chagas until a man named Isaac picked up a strange chainsaw, and violence has been the city's default state ever since. You play whoever is left to stop it, commanding four "apostles" who answer your call — an unstable but strangely kind figure, a cowardly, moralistic rabbit, a naive determined cat searching for a hospitalised friend, and an emotional elephant who seems to share memories with the others despite apparently not knowing them. It's a cast built for a horror RPG that trades in dread and ambiguity rather than jump scares, and the comparisons early reviewers reach for — OneShot's emotional beats, LISA's grotesque streak, Deltarune's fourth-wall games, OFF and Look Outside's RPG Maker horror lineage — tell you exactly what shelf this is aiming for.

Whether it earns the comparison is where opinion splits hardest. One negative review calls the story "told schizophrenically, with payoffs without any setup," singling out a late-game cutscene that appears to trigger before the first dungeon is finished, and argues the game reaches for Deltarune's tone without Toby Fox's control of when a joke lands. Positive reviews are gentler but not uncritical — "the story is kinda confusing, not much is explained really, so I have no idea what is happening, hopefully it gets better" is a fairly representative reaction. At an hour of runtime, Chainsaw hasn't yet had the space to prove either reading wrong.

Combat that doesn't wait for you

The mechanical hook is real: this is a "real-time turn-based" system where enemies don't respect your turn. You plan your team's actions, but attacks can land on your apostles while you're still choosing yours, so encounters ask you to think fast rather than queue up a perfect plan and watch it play out. Team formation changes which effects certain weapons grant, and a resource called PT is built by taking damage and spent on a small set of special moves.

Early players like the idea more than the execution. The most detailed negative review lays out the balance problems in specific terms: MP and HP allocation across the cast feels arbitrary (why does Isaac have so little MP; why do two other characters have so little HP), enemies drop too little money to make fighting them worth the risk most of the time, and status effect durations appear to vary randomly rather than following a rule the player can plan around. Multiple reviews independently flag "Methods" — one of the game's core combat actions — as feeling stiff and unintuitive to actually use. None of this reads as a broken system so much as an unbalanced one: the real-time-interrupt idea is worth building on, but Episode 1 hasn't tuned it yet.

Presentation and sound carry the chapter

This is where Chainsaw earns its praise almost without dissent. "The presentation is super cool" shows up nearly verbatim across multiple reviews, and the community's own vote-weighted tags back it up — Pixel Graphics and Isometric both sit inside the top fifteen tags by vote count, alongside Psychological Horror, Story Rich and Atmospheric. A Japanese reviewer, working from a presumably cleaner localisation pass, calls the music "quite a good point" and says the writing renders the cast's personalities naturally enough to come through even without much explicit exposition — useful context against the English-side complaints about confusing plotting, since it suggests at least some of that confusion may be translation noise rather than a structural story problem.

That same reviewer's other note is worth passing on directly: despite the Psychological Horror and Horror tags, they found nothing that plays like a jump scare in Episode 1, beyond an admittedly startling game-over screen. Worth knowing if the tags alone would put you off.

An episode, not yet a game

Steam's page states plainly that Chainsaw ships in chapters, and that buying it now entitles you to every future chapter as a free update — a fair model if the studio delivers on it, and one reason the roughly NZ$6 launch price reads as reasonable rather than thin. The problem is that "roughly NZ$6 for roughly an hour, with more promised later" is a bet on a solo-credited developer finishing a multi-chapter project, not a transaction you can fully evaluate today. One reviewer put it plainly: "it's so short I don't know if I can fully recommend it, but it seems like it'll be good... I'll be waiting with bated breath for the next episode." That's a fair summary of where the whole review corpus lands — cautious optimism, not yet a verdict on the finished thing.

Early bugs and a rough translation

Supported languages list English, Japanese, French and Portuguese (Brazil), and the English pass in particular is uneven — several reviews mention lines left completely untranslated, alongside general dialogue that reads roughly. Perspective and spatial readability in the game's first area draw a specific complaint too, with one reviewer unsure whether the disorientation is intentional horror-game design or just unfinished level layout. More seriously, one buyer reports a bug that stopped progress outright within the first days of release ("good but bugged rn, Can't progress but was having fun. Will change review when bugs are fixed") — the kind of report worth watching for before buying in, particularly this early in a chapter-based game's life. Steam's global achievement stats currently return an empty schema, meaning no achievement system has gone live yet at all, one more small marker of how early this build is.

Final verdict

Chainsaw is easy to respect and hard to fully recommend yet. The presentation and music are genuinely good, the real-time-interrupt combat idea is a real swing at doing something the turn-based RPG's classics don't, and the cast and premise sit comfortably alongside the horror-RPG lineage it's clearly chasing. But Episode 1 is about an hour long, its combat balance and translation both need real work, at least one buyer has hit a progress-blocking bug, and the developer's own store page is still framing this as a demo gathering feedback. At its current price that's a reasonable bet for genre fans curious to get in on the ground floor — just go in knowing you're buying a promising first chapter, not a finished story.