i only started playing Disc Room a few nights ago on Halloween, and by the 1 hour mark i already knew i had to write about it on this site. it's a game that's been on my radar for about two years now, ever since it was mentioned at the end of the Action Button review of Pac-Man. listen, if anyone can sell me on a game, it's Tim Rogers. he got me to maybe potentially consider playing Final Fantasy VII, and i don't do that for just anyone! Disc Room definitely caught my attention a lot more than FFVII, though. i've always had a passing interest in the bullet hell subgenre of games, i've played your Touhous and your Ikarugas and your Mushihimesamas, but i've never been all that great at em. i'd usually play a few stages in, get walled hard by one obstacle and just give up. i dunno, i can handle dodging bullets, i can handle pumping damage into enemies and bosses, but when you force me to focus on both at once is when i start to lose my cool. not to mention, the arcade setup most of them have of "there goes all your lives, guess you gotta start all over!" made it really hard to learn more about those bottleneck points and prepare accordingly. that's where Disc Room stands out to me, and is probably why i got more into it than other bullet hells. but i think i'm getting ahead of myself, let's start small first.

you might have seen that developer list in the info section and gotten a little overwhelmed. four different specific devs listed seems a bit excessive, what's up with them? well, this ain't this group's first rodeo in gamedev. Terri and Dose are probably most well known for being the creators of shitty-city simulator Sludge Life, as well as the classic Nerf Gun dungeon crawler Heavy Bullets. on the other hand, Kitty and JW are the creators of the 60-seconds at a time action-adventure game Minit, another pretty well known indie darling. these four put their heads together to create Disc Room, and their experience really shows.

Disc Room takes place on a disc located near Jupiter. you, a member of an exploration team sent to learn more about the anomalous disc, find yourself face to face with dozens and dozens of sharp razor blades ready to chop you to pieces the moment you come into contact with them. you must explore the area, avoid discs (for the most part, we'll get to that) and find out just what this base is for. the game is split up into rooms (as you can imagine) each with its own disc patterns, set of goals for you to complete, which unlock new rooms upon completion, and occasionally even secrets. one thing i really love about Disc Room is that it doesn't fall into the trap a lot of games this nature tend to do. take Super Hexagon for example, the classic Terry Cavanaugh special. that game is unrelenting, arcade action, all about endurance and high scores, which is fun in its own right. but at a certain point, i start to feel bottlenecked, just like with the arcade shooters i was talking about earlier. i know there's tons of people who live for games like that, but it doesn't tickle my personal fancy. Disc Room, on the other hand, has more traditional progression, while also having that high score system for people who want that. each room has a timer and a high score leaderboard keeping track of your longest runs. it's the best of both worlds, and i actually had a ton of fun both when focusing on the main game and beating my friends' best times. but with all that said, all it takes to end that long lasting run is a single touch of a disc. that sounds punishing, and it definitely is in some parts, but i was able to get through the base game (nearly) 100% in only a little under 5 hours, and only had a ton of trouble on one boss and the final sector. Disc Room isn't gonna hold your hand, but it won't spit in it either.

let's talk abilities. your primary verb in Disc Room is "move," but you do get 6 extra abilities over the course of the game, and you can only use one at a time. the most universally useful one is the Dash, a single tap of the X key lets you dash forwards, making you invincible for that small moment. it's not very fast, so you won't be outrunning any discs by using it. instead, this is moreso for passing through oncoming discs, and it's extremely helpful in that regard. the next one is Slow, which slows down everything (including yourself) for a moment. it's pretty typical of bullet hells to have a "focus" ability like this, but i didn't find this one all that useful, at least not for its intended purpose. instead, i ended up using Slow for its secondary ability: lighting up dark rooms! there's a sector to the east on the map that focuses entirely on dark rooms and removing your ability to see, but the circle that forms around you with the slow ability cuts right through that, and it's super helpful. then there's the most unique ability of the 6 in my opinion, Clone. as you can imagine, this one lets you duplicate yourself, at the cost of some of your time. yeah, each ability actually has a downside, Dash and Slow stop the timer for as long as they're active, but Clone straight up subtracts some time from your total. this can be pretty rough when going for those endurance goals, since it's setting you back instead of just holding you in place. even still, i think some of the ways they use Clone for puzzles is awesome. yeah, Disc Room isn't entirely execution, there's actually a lot of puzzles to solve here. i won't spoil any of them, since they are pretty fun to figure out naturally, but i think a lot of the puzzles are super cool and make you think your head. our fourth ability is probably the most situational of the bunch, and that's Absorb. this lets you take one disc from the playfield and hold onto it, allowing you to redeploy it again at any time. this isn't super useful in general gameplay, but does have a lot of super unique puzzle uses. again, no spoilers, but some of the stuff they do with Absorb is really sick. and even in gameplay, i think there's a couple rooms where it actually outshines a lot of the other abilities. take Jupiter Ascending for example, a lategame room that's only got a few discs total, but they're all extremely speedy and hard to avoid. being able to remove one of the two discs here from the equation is actually pretty handy, and it's how i ended up completing it. next up is Blast, an ability that lets you charge up a shockwave, then release it, pushing away any discs around you. i thought this would be my go to ability when i first unlocked it, but i actually used it a lot less than i thought i would. even so, it does have some pretty cool gameplay uses, like a level where you can't move, and you have to blast away any discs that come near you. and finally, our last ability is Mirror, allowing you to teleport to the exact opposite side of the map from where you are at any time. i'll admit, i think this might be the most underwhelming one. whenever i'd try to use this one, i'd just end up reverse-telefragging myself. as always, however, this one has some unique puzzle applications that i like. overall, i'd say you'll be using Dash the most, followed up by Blast and Slow. the balancing is a little offset, but i think each ability is still pretty damn cool.

the presentation of Disc Room is top notch. props to the artists, they did a phenomenal job with the graphical style. it looks like a graphic novel i would have read in middle school or something, and i mean that in a strictly positive way. hell, the story beats are even told in the form of comics after beating each boss, it's awesome. and the whole idea of your character getting repeatedly chopped up by the discs, if done incorrectly, could have easily been stomach-churning and turned me off to the game. however, i think it was pulled off very elegantly, and makes it much easier to stomach the amount of dismemberment present here. special mention to the western sector here, they could have easily just made it a sandy desert area and called it a day, but no, each room is a living, breathing mass of viscera and life, and they totally pulled off the look without going too overboard. and oh man, the music, THE MUSIC, it's- mwah, chef's kiss. it's spot on, the pulsating, harsh, electric beats are perfect for keeping you in the zone. it's almost reminiscent of the wipE'out" games and their soundtracks, and if you know me, you know that's high praise. i also love that when you get really close to a disc, the music distorts, as if the composer is sitting on the edge of their seat, watching as you graze by near death, augh it's such a good detail. even if this game hasn't sounded all that interesting to you so far, if you like electronic, i implore you to go listen to this OST, it's killer.

one thing i really loved about Disc Room is that each world has a central mechanic they focus on. the south sector is no frills survival to start you out, but once you get past that, you get to the central sector, where to make the timer go up you need to stand in the circle in the center of the room, or the western sector where there's a worm constantly trying to grab you from beneath. you know, walk with rhythm, all that jazz. each sector has a boss, and instead of the timer incrementing normally, it instead only increments when you pick up these golden orbs around the arena. it makes you get out of your comfort zone and take risks, and i totally fuck with that. the final sector even expands on this, each room has a grid of tiles on the floor, and the only way to increment the timer is to step on a tile. the only sector i take umbridge with is the eastern sector, aka the dark rooms. here, the lights pulsate and flicker on and off, and one level even has you in total pitch-black darkness. i don't actually take issue with that part, i think it works surprisingly well and leads to a lot of unique gameplay scenarios that were really fun to overcome. plus, it gave the Slow ability some time to shine (haha) in my playthrough, due to its secondary effect i touched on earlier. no, the issue i have with the eastern sector is that... it kinda gives me a headache? i'm not photosensitive, but blinking lights specifically going straight from dark to light makes my head hurt. another example is the flickering lights in Doom, they have a very similar effect. again, i'm pretty sure im not photosensitive, i can see rapidly changing colors and be perfectly fine, it's specifically the dark to light thing that gets me. on top of that, the monochromatic red palette from the sirens is pretty rough on the eyes, and in the end i had to take breaks between levels in this sector, which made me feel like an old lady. but hey, the more puzzle focused rooms definitely made up for that. again, no spoilers here, so don't worry if you haven't played the game and want to solve em for yourself, i just wanna touch on these. there's these golden rooms you come across every so often, and each one has a puzzle in it that makes you really think about your abilities in super cool and unique ways. there's even some puzzles outside of the golden rooms, and those are cool as always. however, the eastern sector had one room in particular that had me totally stumped, and if you've played Disc Room you probably know the one i'm talking about. i dunno, i liked the idea of it and figured out the code pretty fast, it was just finding exactly what to do with the code that gave me trouble. i gave in and looked up what i was supposed to do, and i had the right idea, i just wasn't doing it the exact way the game wanted to, and it felt kind of unsatisfying to find that out. other than that one, however, i loved all the puzzles Disc Room had to offer!

alright, i think it's about time i wrap things up with this review, so let's go over some smaller stuff i couldn't fit in anywhere else. one, this game works surprisingly well on keyboard. Disc Room looks like the kind of game that would only be viable on controller, but no, the keyboard setup is extremely workable, and i love that. two, i like the collection aspect of the game, dying to each disc to catalog it in your research notes, but it sort of bugs me how you have to die to both the normal version of the guardian discs AND the broken version after you defeat them. i struggled hard on the western sector's guardian disc and only beat it on a whim, but then i forgot to die to the broken version and had to sit there and grind out another victory for like, 30 minutes. that boss in particular was kind of a difficulty spike, you have to collect 60 golden orbs instead of the normal 10 a boss requires of you, and that was super rough for me for some reason. i also think the fast discs in the northern sector were pretty brutal, and the Slow ability isn't as much of a counter to them as you'd think. three, hard mode! as of writing this, i still haven't beaten the newgame+ that Disc Room provides, but so far it's pretty fun, if basic. it seems to just be running through each of the rooms in reverse order with more discs to avoid and all the goals are some form of "survive for xx amount of seconds," and that's fine enough. you also have someone that follows you around in hard mode, and i was so scared that the challenge was gonna be that you have to keep them alive, but thankfully they did not pull that on me, they're just for decoration. and on top of hard mode, there's actually a set of 8 bonus challenges you can do on any new game you start. these can range from beating the game in 15 minutes, to beating it with less than 30 deaths, to even stuff like beating the entire game on 200% speed. these seem absolutely devilish, and i don't see myself beating any of them anytime soon, but it's awesome that they're here for those real thrillseekers.

overall, Disc Room is an excellent package with an extremely fun base game, loads of content, an excellent art style and soundtrack, and leaderboards for your competitive side to grind away at. it's addicting, intense, and will provide a challenge. i can't recommend Disc Room enough.