Disc Room Review
need to know
What is it? A 2D game about dodging deadly spinning discs.
expect to pay $15/£12
developer Kitty Calis, Jan Willem Nijman, Terri Vellmann and Doseone
Publisher Devolver numbers
audit date Windows 10, Intel Core i5-9600K, 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 2070 Super
multiplayer game? No, but there are leaderboards
go out: October 22
Association: Official website
Just as Downwell is a game that sends you down a well, Disc Room’s title says what it is: a game about a room full of discs. The discs bounce around in the square 2D room and you have to maneuver a little guy to keep him from getting hit by them, as one hit will turn him into a damn slime. No fighting with discs. They end up leaving you in a daze, and your score depends on how long you survive in each room. It’s simple, at least until you get to the room where time doesn’t exist.
At first glance, I thought Disc Room was an attempt to find the purest form of video game saw blade harm, so to speak. I imagine it will start with a disc and level up in a canonical, straightforward way so I can test my disc dodging skills in a dojo-like environment. But at one point I had to fill a room with clones of myself and feed them onto a disc that was trying to hide from me, so obviously something was wrong with my predictions. The disc room is weird and mysterious. You might figure it out in six hours, but I didn’t, even though I did beat the final boss. What should I do with that eternal room? I still don’t know.
(Image credit: Devolver Digital)
There are many other simple rooms where you can escape more and more spinning discs while the timer keeps track of your score. Survive long enough – say 20 seconds – and you’ll open the door to another room. It’s fun to play with this simple focus game, although I can see why Disc Room is quick to articulate the idea with special abilities, boss fights, and mysteries. Once you’ve got a decent run, the thought of running another 0.3 seconds of disk hell isn’t very tempting. If you survive long enough, some rooms will introduce new disc types, but no disc is interesting enough to make it the only motivator.
So things get weirder as you go along. Not all rooms can be unlocked by scoring in adjacent rooms. Some require you to complete a larger objective, like being killed by a certain number of unique disc types (an annoying collection quest), or by solving mysterious objectives of strangers. Room timers also vary between zones. In some rooms, the only way to increase the clock seconds is to collect Snack Pac-Man food. In other cases, you must stand in the center circle or the clock will stop.
In boss levels, collecting those Pac-Man points also does damage to the boss in a sense.The first few “Guardians” aren’t hard to beat, but I swear it’s designed so you’re almost always dead only Before collecting the last of the many points you need. The boss itself is a huge spiked disc that roams the room, surrounded by more than a dozen saw blades, and sandworms emerging from the ground. It’s tricky and you’ll die a lot. But that’s okay: restarting the level is like eating another pretzel. You probably should have stopped five minutes ago, but it only takes a fraction of a second, so you stop before your inner monologue tells you not to.
Spending time on the fringes of my ability to think ahead was exhausting, but exhilarating.
Special abilities help solve increasingly difficult rooms. Aside from solving some of the puzzle rooms you’ll encounter when exploring the normal map (there are 52 rooms, then a reverse hard run after you beat it), some of them are of little use. Your most frequently used skills are Dash, which briefly lets you traverse the disc without dying, Slow, which slows down time, and Mirror, which teleports you to a mirrored location on the map (tricky because It’s mirrored horizontally and vertically, and if you’re not careful, you might transfer to a disc).
These abilities make it possible to survive at least 20 seconds in some of the most brutal rooms, including some with flickering lights, and a dark room (unless you get the hang of it). They also screwed me up a lot. In the early levels, my focus was entirely on where the discs were and if they would hit me. Add an ability, and then I’m also focused on deciding when and how to use it, so I might get destroyed by one disc while thinking about dodging another disc. There was a third thing that caught my eye when I also had to collect points or step on all the floor tiles (another complication in some rooms). Like I weave the three strands of attention into a rope, I have to weave faster and faster as the level progresses. If I forget where the next rope goes, in just a millisecond, the rope wears instantly and I die. Spending time on the fringes of my ability to think ahead was exhausting, but exhilarating.
(Image credit: Devolver Digital)
Some frustration: I don’t understand why touching the edge of the map is slowing me down. It got me killed and it felt like it wasn’t my fault. I haven’t figured out what to do with that eternal room, I know someone will figure it out right away and tell me it’s obvious. Screw that person. Also, the occasional slow field that comes into play sucks. Messing up my movements is an intrusive way of adding to the difficulty.
Some cool stuff: There are granular difficulty settings, so if you get frustrated and just want to continue with it, you can slow down the game, or just disc, or keep everything the same but make the goal easier. Or, if you want to make things harder for yourself, when you start a new running challenge, challenge conditions such as “Unlock only one ability” and “Never die in 10 seconds” are tracked. A handy scoreboard tells me I’m doing better or worse than my friends. And I love the thick line art that gives the impression of a hand-bound stand-alone comic made with an outdated version of Photoshop – if I saw it in a comic store I would buy it easily, even though I know I don’t need to collect more stuff. The music also creates a wonderful and eerie atmosphere in the space.
(Image credit: Devolver Digital)
There isn’t much to report on the technical side. The graphics options are: full screen, yes or no, and then settings like camera shake and blood. The controls are remappable and it plays nice with WASD, but it’s a controller game for me – an analog stick is recommended.
The most fun I had in the Disc Room came from escaping the basic DVD logo screensaver-style bouncing saw. Homing Blades and Ghost Blades and other special blades make the game more difficult, but predicting plain old bouncing mode has a purity that I like. It’s the way to the trance zone (in short, because you never last long in the Disc Room), and the sniper disc zooming in on me creates a more aggressive mood. At least, the contrast is interesting. So are the other mysteries on that Eternal Room and the terrifying disc ship. The surprise of the Disc Room makes it less of a series of mechanical time trials. This is a charming and mysterious little comic book that will be loved by both casual adventurers and speed runners looking to master its quirks.
Today’s Deals
Check more articles in our categories Gaming & News et encore Anime.
Thanks for visiting we hope our article Disc Room Review
, we invite you to share the article on Facebook, twitter and e-mail with the hashtags ☑️ #Disc #Room #Review ☑️!
