Disc Room

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

.

Review:

Disc Room is an Arcade-style game released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game puts you in the role of an astronaut scientist investigating a mysterious disc-shaped spacecraft, only to discover it to be a series of buzzsaw-filled deathtrap rooms.

The presentation here is simple but good, featuring a hand-drawn cartoony look with 2D visuals that helps to keep the blood-soaked gory nature of the game’s deathtraps still feeling somewhat whimsical in nature. These visuals are backed by a fast-paced synthesized soundtrack that does a great job backing the intense action.

As for the gameplay itself, Disc Room starts with extremely simple gameplay, and builds on that with its clever goal structure. Players can only move their character around and make use of one ability, which they can swap out in between levels for any other they have obtained. These abilities include things like dashing through obstacles or slowing down time. Using only this, players approach each of the game’s rooms with the overall goal of trying to survive within that room for as long as possible. However, it’s pretty much inevitable that you’ll die in each room, it’s just a question of how long you’ll last.

What this game does that’s really smart is that each room can have multiple exits, but those exits require the player to meet different criteria to open them to gain access to new rooms. The criteria could be as simple as surviving in the current room for a certain amount of time, but it could also be something like getting killed by a certain number of different types of traps, or lasting a certain amount of time in 10 different rooms. As a result, you’ll be revisiting prior rooms you’ve cleared to accomplish goals in later rooms, or returning to prior rooms once later rooms have given you a new way to complete a prior room’s goals.

The result is that even though individual rooms are a simple Arcade-style experience, as a greater whole they make for a fun campaign that recontextualizes those past rooms as you come to new rooms. In addition, you’ll find that new areas are constantly introducing new types of traps and challenges, such as rooms with time-slowing enemies or lights that flicker on and off. Suffice it to say, this game does a superb job at constantly introducing new things while keeping the gameplay simple.

It’s hard to think of much to complain about in Disc Room – it does a great job balancing simplicity and depth, fast-paced short bursts of gameplay and long-term goals. But if I had to point to one area where this game could really be improved, I would say it seems ripe for a multiplayer mode. Just dropping players together in a room and seeing who survives longest seems like the most obvious way this could be done, but I’m sure there are others too, and not having anything like this seems like a massive missed opportunity.

However, even with this omission, Disc Room is a really fun game that does a lot of things right, and makes good use of its simplicity to deliver a compelling experience that feels like a great fit for Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Disc Room is an Arcade-style game that puts players in the role of an astronaut trying to survive for as long as possible in various deathtrap-filled rooms. This game features extremely simple gameplay, yet is still extremely compelling thanks to a good amount of variety and a well-crafted goal structure that gives players good reason to keep revisiting prior rooms. An excellent addition to the Nintendo Switch library.

Grade: B

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Andy Miller, Exlene, Johannes, Ilya Zverev, Connor Armstrong, Eli Goodman, K.H. Kristoffer Wulff, Stov, and Gabriel Coronado-Medina. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}