Arcade-style release Disc Room is ready to challenge your skills on Nintendo Switch. Learn more about it in our Disc Room review!
Disc Room from Devolver Digital and indies Kitty Calis, Jan Willem Nijman, Terri Vellmann, and Doseone is an arcade-style game with a simple goal: stay alive. On top of this, you’ll have to complete other extra objectives – more on these in a bit. As for the game’s setup, it’s the year 2089, and a giant disc has been discovered in the orbit of Jupiter. A crew of international scientists is sent to investigate, but no one could have predicted what was about to happen…
Controls are simple to pick up since you’ll be moving your character – dressed up in a very hard to miss yellow suit – with the left analog stick – or the right one or both, depending on how you configure things. That’s it. Sure, you can press the L or R buttons to speed things up, but that will only mean you’re going to die faster. You can use this to speed up the gameplay once you know what you’re going up against.
As for the objectives you’ll have to complete, these will change as you progress through each room – and completing them is actually required if you want to progress to the next room. At first, I had two objectives: survive for 5 seconds, and die from four different blade types. Since I first glanced to the left side of the screen to read these objectives, my first run ended two seconds in. After this, I did manage to survive for 5 seconds, which then opened the door to the next room.
It was then I realized that each room I entered had a new set of objectives to complete, which would then grant me access to the other rooms on the map. Press the + button, and you’ll get to see the map, which will show you what rooms you’ve already visited, which ones have recently opened, what objectives have been completed, and which ones remain pending. Press the R button, and you can also check the growing list of discs you’ve found during your journey.
There are the regular Discs, which will pop into the room one after the other as they try to slice you up. There are Wall Discs which only spin around by moving along the walls of a room. There’s a Huge Disc that will take up a lot of space in a room, making it harder to avoid. But then I ran into a peculiar disc: the Dasher. This disc killed me good, but it also somehow altered my character’s physique, granting it the ability to be able to dash through discs by pressing the A button!
After taking on and eventually defeating an Armored Gatekeeper disc that shot smaller – and much faster – projectile discs, I was able to open up the door to a new area, where I ran into a Slower disc. When the Slower disc killed me good, it gave me the chance to swap my dash ability for one that would make it possible to slow down time around me, which would prove to be a very useful ability that would extend my time in a room by allowing me to avoid death more than once. Don’t worry about losing the dash ability since, between deaths, you can press the B button to swap to another unlocked ability.
During this particular experience, you’ll get to discover 64 different discs, spread through the 57 rooms you can explore, which means this is not a game you’re going to be done within a few minutes… although you can! After your first full run, and thanks to a ton of trial and error, you’ll learn what each disc type does and what the best abilities are so that you can take a crack at doing a speedrun of the game to try and beat it in less than 15 minutes. This is one of the bonus challenges you can aim at completing, which also include beating the game with less than 30 deaths, completing it with speed cranked up to 200%, or never dying in a room before 10 seconds have passed, to name some examples.
Disc Room is a highly addictive arcade-style game that caught me by surprise on Nintendo Switch. When I started to play the game for this Disc Room review, I couldn’t put it down after playing into the wee hours, as I tried to just complete one more objective before stopping. I had to stop once my Nintendo Switch ran out of battery when playing in Portable Mode, which just goes to show fun this one is. The challenge and overall gameplay loop are not going to be for everyone, but hopefully, you give this $14.99 game a chance.
Disclaimer
This Disc Room review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Devolver Digital.
