Disc Room

Exciting and stressful in the way all good twitch-action games are, Disc Room makes you cherish every second you manage to survive in its sawblade-filled stages.

A fast-paced arcade game with the soul of a puzzler.

Disc Room provides hours of high-stress fun for daring adventurers, and a few mysteries to solve.

The game is also, yes, small in stature, it is one-note, it can be enjoyed in one sitting until you reach the crest of conditioning and competence, if not completion. It is single-minded to the point of being playable with precisely one digit. You might play it for a single day, as I did, have a wonderful time covering yourself with blood, and be satisfied to never touch it again. But if these are flaws they are also proof of focus and refinement. Disc Room might be readily slept on, but if you are the kind of tough game obsessive, a connoisseur of arcade death, or a bullet hellion who cannot resist the call to mastery, these rooms should be approached wakeful and willing and ready to die.

Like a lot of other releases in the Devolver line up, Disc Room is a wonderfully unique release that stands out well on the eShop. That premise of "a shoot 'em up without the shooting" seems silly at first, but very quickly shows itself to be an interesting idea that's taken in plenty of fun directions. Disc Room is tough as nails in all the right ways, and this combined with plenty of secrets, solid accessibility options, and an intriguing premise makes for an experience we can easily recommend. Don't pass this one up, it's definitely worth your time.

Disc Room wants to cut you in so many ways. It wants to chew you up, dismantle you, and make you say a swear or 50 creatively woven into the same sentence. It’s bullet hell without the regular therapy of being able to return fire. But for all of those aspects, it's also horribly addicting. The ease of picking up where you left off and trying your darndest to survive just a little bit longer to unlock a room left me putting down my controller, rubbing my head, and then often picking it up to say, “this will be the time I get it. This time.” It’s not a ridiculously long or complex romp. But it also doesn’t really need to be. It knows what it wants to be. It wants to be your murderer. And the only way you’re going to thwart it is by surviving just long enough to open its next doors and beat its myriad of challenges.

Disc Room is an outrageous experience built around one single philosophy: getting cut in half by spinning discs. However, the challenges for surviving as long as possible and grazing past enemy attacks satisfies a craving that only the most polished of Japanese shmups could satisfy.

Disc Room expertly blends together the simple yet unique mechanics of Minit and the lightning-quick carnage and quick challenges of High Hell, so yes, the end result is akin to peanut butter and chocolate.

Disc Room is not a game that should be overlooked, especially if you have an Xbox Game Pass subscription, then you have no excuse to not give it a go. No matter how many attempts I had at several of the rooms and how much it was making me frustrated, it spurred me on to keep playing over and over again. The gameplay is consistently moreish and before you know it, minutes have turned into hours.

To put it bluntly: Disc Room is addicting and full of polish where it matters. Everything else is just serviceable and something you probably won't notice. I mean after all it is Pacifist Smash TV and who would turn that down?