Life is cheap in Disc Room, but every loss prompts the compelling urge to try again. Most every single-screen room in this deathtrap puzzle box of a game is designed to ruthlessly liquefy its occupant ASAP, prompting profanity and happy restarts aplenty. It's an enduring rhythm that builds throughout Disc Room onto its increasingly hectic final rooms, making for a finely tuned oddball game of sharp reflexes and resilience.
Playing as a diminutive cartoon scientist investigating an alien spacecraft orbiting Jupiter, Disc Room quickly disarms any real semblance of a power fantasy. The low-key narrative of exploring the horrific structure provides ample context, mostly expressed in text-free comic book panels. These rare but compelling segues conjure the eerie silent journeys illustrated in classic European sci-fi comics in an art style that invests in the game’s hand-animated silky-smooth feel. Controls amount to just 2D directional movement with one of several unlockable abilities at play, but that’s the full breadth of player input.
The main objective is usually survival, and the first brush with Disc Room will probably see players clearing a mere eight or ten seconds at a time before a freshly spawned blade ends their attempt in a bloody stain. The spacecraft map is divided into several different biomes of square rooms, each with their own signature discs and environmental concerns. Clearing the way to locked rooms is straightforward at the start - die to new discs, survive a certain time span over a given number of rooms, and so on - but later areas require increasingly demanding or mysterious requirements to progress. It’s an absorbing mix of out-of-the-box thinking, new strange powers to figure out, and developing skill that builds nicely over a playthrough.
There are also plenty of different discs with behaviors to learn, with the hardest rooms combining several tricky variants that synergize in brutal configurations. Some twist and swerve unpredictably, zoom head-on at timed intervals, create many miniature copies of themselves, and others are simply slow-moving and massive, corralling players into doomed corners. And yes, Disc Room features a few proper boss encounters as well, imposing creations defeated by picking up collectibles that spawn in an arena at random.
There are noticeable stumbles that slightly weaken the experience, fetching more attention only due to Disc Room’s small scope. While the controls boast that lovely just-right combination of speed and responsiveness, room edges tend to be “sticky,” so pushing the analog stick diagonally against a straight wall usually stops a player dead in their tracks, a mechanic probably designed to deter wall-hugging as a go-to strategy. There’s an entire biome focused on darkness which feels unfair when considering all the chaotic disc patterns to deal with, and contrary to the game’s mechanics in general.
Disc Room is also on the shorter side, aside from the urge to return to cleared rooms and push for high scores or unlock secrets. While the length of the main campaign may vary depending on player skill, the story can take just two or so hours to complete. Still, a compelling metagame layer includes a few puzzles to figure out, and there’s the wonderful inclusion of leaderboards in every room, including best times posted by the Disc Room developers themselves. It’s an unquestionably great feeling to beat a developer at their own game.
Indie hip hop veteran and video game soundtrack specialist Doseone (Enter the Gungeon, Heavy Bullets, Sludge Life) delivers Disc Room’s OST, perfectly aligned with its frenetic pace and creepy extraterrestrial theme. All aspects of the sound design deepen that atmosphere, adding a certain sense of character to each individual disc. While it may seem odd to describe these mechanized blades as “characters,” it’s a concept served by the game’s flavor text, found in a growing “disc bestiary” accessible from the pause menu.
Disc Room is a lively project, designed to be immediately understandable but built with space for mastery and growth. It even features additional settings which alter game speed to circumvent getting hard-stuck, making it nicely accessible to all-comers. All the same, its pared-down gameplay might orient it most towards fans of uber-hard modern platformers, leaderboard crawling, and quirky indies. For them, Disc Room presents a welcome new addiction.
Disc Room releases on PC and Nintendo Switch on October 22. A digital PC code was provided to Screen Rant for the purpose of this review.