Disc Room had me googling those funny spirograph shapes you sometimes get on bank notes. After a while, I guess, I don’t see the discs anymore. I see the trajectories. The ways that some swoop, some follow, the ways that some advance and then slow and then boost off again. I close my eyes and there are these luminous spirograph trails in the darkness. Possible gaps in between them if I thread my way though. No discs, just movement, just arcs.
This game is compact and mysterious: I properly love it. On the one hand, it does exactly what it says it will. There are rooms and the rooms are filled with discs. The discs generally move about and if you come into contact with them you are very dead. It’s a top down affair: left, right, up and down. Avoid the discs!
Disc Room reviewDeveloper:Terri, Dose, Kitty, JWPublisher:Devolver DigitalPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on Switch and PC
And then you die. And this is what Disc Room wants. You unlock new doors to new rooms by dying after having met specific criteria. Survive for five seconds, ten seconds, twenty. Succumb to every kind of disc available. Some of the criteria are really simple to understand. Sometimes it’s easy to understand but very hard to achieve. Stay alive for twenty seconds in a certain number of rooms! Unlock more doors, and the connections between rooms grow. the criteria is hard to understand! Mysteries. This game is a bit of a puzzle box.
This is my favourite aspect of it, in fact. The different kinds of discs are fun – the followers, the huge spawners that eat up space, the tiny little ones who flock and scatter, the pausers-and-boosters, and that’s all from the first few rooms alone. There is a catch-’em-all appeal to seeing every single disc the game has to offer. And the gimmicks that the different rooms offer as you move from one realm to the next – these are good too. One will only count the time you spend within a certain part of the room to your total, say. Another might intermittently turn out the lights. One might have a huge worm that lives under the ground to keep you moving