Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Sleek, sharp, metalic, shiny, and soon to be bloody. Disc Room is what a bullet hell game would be if you replaced the bullets with buzzsaw blades and had them bouncing around a room. It's a lot of bloody fun, with sharp gameplay and a difficulty that really cuts deep.
Puns aside, Disc Room is about a giant disc that has appeared near Jupiter, and you as a scientist have decided to discover the secrets waiting within. Hint, the secrets are sharp. And very pointy, and want you dead. Disc Room is very basic at its core: don't die. In Disc Room there are a bunch of interconnected rooms you must make it through, each having different requirements to unlock the adjacent rooms. For example, one could be "survive for 15 seconds" or another could be "die with four discs in the room at once". As you progress through rooms, the challenges get harder, the discs get more aggressive and weirder, and you can also pick up helpful abilities.
Each room is a square where you have to dodge discs in, with some differences depending on the "zone" the room is in. For instance, the second zone you need to stand on a central platform for it to count toward your time. As you progress through zones, you will pick up abilities, such as dash or absorb, or slow time. Pro tip about absorb: it let's you absorb a disc, which you will then pop out when you go to use the ability again, regardless of which room you are in. This actually crashed one of the boss fights for me, but a recent patch and I no longer have any issue, so props to the devs for that rapid response time.
Hitboxes are best described as "existing", as sometimes you can get away with a lot more than you'd expect, but other times you'll be thinking "no way did that hit me". The game is built around multiple deaths though, so dying a lot is to be expected. And you will die a lot. There are a few puzzle based rooms, but more often than not you will follow the five Ds: Dodge, Dip, Duck, Dive, and Dodge. As a game where death is cheap and bodies start stacking up, I must say that I almost always only got frustrated with myself rather than the game, which is definitely a good thing, at least from a developer perspective, if not my mental health.
Disc Room does something really simple, but it does it really well. While most people have probably played some sort of survival type game in the vein of "don't get killed", how much you take away from it is directly related to the amount of effort that is put into the game, and Disc Room feels full of it. Very few rooms are similar in set-up, and even those that are generally have extras features added in to differentiate themselves. The game doesn't overuse or underuse aspects, and the different regions are just big enough that when you start to feel you've had enough, you get to move onto the next region. The puzzles are challenging but reasonable, and apart from the hard mode rooms, I didn't feel like any room in normal mode was egregiously difficult.
Summary
In summary, Disc Room is a great title that really brings the "timed survival" reminiscent of some more classic games back to life. With colorful environments, interesting region design, many different types of discs to avoid, and some neat abilities to change up your play style, Disc Room certainly provides a solid experience. With added gameplay value in the form of extra challenge rooms and hard mode, there is a great deal in terms of content for what you pay for. As a switch title, I definitely appreciated how you can pick up a room or two at a time for only a few minutes between doing chores, or waiting for the laundry, or while on public transit. It's fun and simple, and that's exactly what it needs to be.
Score: 8.5 / 10
