Chainsaw
Your team keeps breaking character because the story hasn't explained who they are yet.
Chainsaw is a real-time turn-based RPG where enemies continue attacking during your turn, forcing you to react quickly while managing a four-character team. Set in a city transformed by a mysterious chainsaw, the game combines strategic pre-battle preparation with frantic in-combat decision-making. Released in chapters, it features a grotesque, surreal tone reminiscent of indie psychological horror-adjacent RPGs.
Chainsaw's real-time turn-based combat system and uneasy narrative tone deliver exactly what the developer promised—a game where enemies don't wait for your turn—but players fixate on the story's fragmented pacing and unexplained lore, suggesting the game's atmospheric strength outpaces its narrative scaffolding.
The art direction and character personalities are the game's primary draw—players fall in love with the visuals and design despite narrative gaps, suggesting strong aesthetic authorship compensates for missing story scaffolding.
The real-time turn-based combat system divides players: those experiencing it for the first time often praise the forced decision-making, while those seeking traditional turn-based depth complain about UI clarity and whether the system adds meaningful choice or just chaos.
Players across languages acknowledge the game is short, janky, and incomplete, yet describe it as worth the $3.99 price and worth waiting for chapter 2—indicating that atmospheric experience and character design override technical roughness at this price point.
The story moves in fragments: character motivations emerge slowly or not at all, fourth-wall breaks occur without warning, and payoffs appear without setup. Multiple reviewers note that exposition is sparse and players must infer the narrative from subtext. The UI for combat—specifically applying effects to allies and managing methods—requires numerous clicks and feels unintuitive. For a two-hour chapter, this creates pacing friction that some players experience as intentional atmosphere and others as incomplete design.
See the game in motion.
Chainsaw is a real-time turn-based RPG where your apostles fight alongside you while enemies attack continuously, forcing you to think fast and react during combat. The game is released in chapters, with future episodes included free as updates. Build your team, explore a dangerous world, and manage both your strategy before battle and your reflexes during it.
Players frame Chainsaw as a weird, visually striking indie RPG with an unusual tone—something between psychological horror and surrealism—where the combat forces real-time decision-making and the story refuses to explain itself fully. Brazilian and international reviewers emphasize that the character designs are compelling despite minimal backstory, and that the first chapter is short but dense with atmosphere. English reviews invoke comparisons to OFF, Oneshot, and LISA, positioning it as a spiritual successor to cult indie RPGs rather than a polished mainstream experience.
“Story told schizophrenically, with payoffs without any setup (the 4th wall immediately breaking being one of them, the MC judging choices you didn't make being another one, but the most egregious one is everything revolving around the Tsubaki scene.”
“Fun, I like the illustrations and particularly the combat system, this is personally my second ever real time turn based RPG and I honestly just love the gameplay during combat,”
“Also, the enemies don't drop nearly enough money to warrant fighting them most of the time so combat kinda just feels optional??”
“I found this game at the start of the month, falling in love with the creator's art and the story's potential.”
Short verbatim excerpts selected from the analyzed public Steam review sample for their relevance to the analysis above.
30 public Steam reviews analyzed across 3 languages.
Synthesized from public Steam reviews. Not affiliated with Valve Corporation.
Player-language signals, not generic review scores.
Best for
- —Players who loved OFF, Oneshot, or LISA and want that weird indie-horror aesthetic applied to turn-based combat.
- —Anyone curious about real-time turn-based RPG mechanics and willing to forgive UI jank for the sake of trying something genuinely strange.
- —Fans of games that trust atmosphere and character design over narrative exposition and clarity.
English reviewers invoke specific game comparisons (OFF, Oneshot, LISA, CoryxKenshin-era indie games) and analyze how the real-time combat system either succeeds or frustrates them. They frame jank as a spectrum from charming to problematic depending on player tolerance. English-language reviews are more likely to articulate both what works and what doesn't in the same sentence.
Brazilian reviewers express enthusiasm more directly and emphasize national pride (one reviewer celebrates Chainsaw as a Brazilian game deserving recognition). They focus more on character personality and story potential than on combat mechanics. The tone is notably warmer and more forgiving of length and incompleteness, framing the game as promising rather than rough.
More games with overlapping community patterns.
Deep editorial analysis
Chainsaw's real tension emerges between aesthetic coherence and narrative fragmentation. The art direction, character designs, and unsettling tone communicate a deliberately authored world—one with internal logic and atmospheric intent. Yet the story itself moves through fourth-wall breaks, withheld exposition, and payoffs unmoored from setup, forcing players to reconstruct narrative from subtext rather than exposition. Players across the analyzed sample report tolerating this gap not out of forgiveness for incompleteness, but because the visual and tonal language proves distinctive enough to sustain trust. The combat system amplifies this divide: real-time decision-making appeals to players encountering the hybrid turn-based format for the first time, while those seeking traditional depth find the UI laborious and feedback unclear. At $3.99 for a two-hour chapter, however, the price point reframes both friction and reward. The game delivers a coherent sensory and emotional experience within its scope, even if narrative scaffolding remains deliberately sparse. Chapter 2's direction will determine whether this fragmentation represents intentional style or incomplete design—a distinction the current sample cannot yet resolve.
Signal data
% positive reviews
Under-the-radar potential
Store framing vs player language
Voice and personality in reviews
Would a stranger click buy?
34 reviews currently indexed
30 analyzed · english, brazilian, japanese
Last synthesized: Aug 17, 2026 · 30 reviews in that synthesis
Revlize indexed this signal before it reached scale.
8/17/2026 · 26 reviews
34 reviews
+31% · +8
Why it entered the radar: tension loop.
This timeline records correlation only. Revlize does not claim to have caused later growth.
Review sampling, evidence boundaries and public-signal methodology.
Frequently asked
Chainsaw releases in chapters. You receive all future chapters as free updates after purchase. The current version contains episode 1, approximately 2 hours of gameplay, with chapter 2 in development.
Players report that the UI is janky and unintuitive in some areas, particularly when applying effects to allies or managing combat methods. This doesn't prevent the game from being fun but requires more clicks than expected for certain actions.