Disc Room

Developed by Jan Willem Nijman, Kitty Calis and Terri Vellmann, with a soundtrack by Doseone; Disc Room is an insanely fast-paced game set in the year 2089, where a giant disc has appeared in Jupiter’s Orbit. You play as a scientist who must investigate, and explore the many disc-filled rooms (and try not to die). The game opens with a cute comic style intro, which blends perfectly into the first room.

There are a tonne of accessibility options right off the bat, which is fantastic to see. Difficulty can be adjusted in a variety of ways, from the game speed to disc speed, as well as unlocking everything from the start so that you don’t have to worry about certain rooms being locked off to you. This opens the game up to being playable by everyone, something that would likely have been fairly difficult had these options not been available - as the standard settings are preeeetty damn hard. I have some proper sweaty-palm-syndrome when it comes to playing games like this, and this is only amplified by the sheer panic that flows through me as I desperately try to dodge, but even with this - I just cannot stop playing.

Due to the fast-pacing - whether that be due to you quickly dodging every disc that comes your way, or if it’s due to you being obliterated the second you start a room - Disc Room has an unbelievably addictive nature. This, combined with the portability of the Nintendo Switch, makes for a fantastic game for playing both out and about, or at home. Although containing your expletives in public might prove a tad difficult! It’s a lot of fun, and the challenges available in each room encourage you to come back for additional runs.

Different abilities can be unlocked as you progress and work through certain rooms. Only one ability can be in effect at a time, which means you’ll have to work out which abilities work best in which situations. In a Twitter thread by one of the devs, Jan pointed out that the Dev Team times on screen come from whoever got the best score in the team for each individual room during development, and that they intentionally kept the info about which ability was equipped to get that score so that players can’t use that to their advantage. So you’ll just need to figure that out for yourselves.

We ran into a couple of bugs/glitches whilst playing, such as when using the Slow Time ability, you would stick in the wall if you went too close, which was frustrating but not game-breaking. During one of the boss fights (Phantom Gatekeeper), Allan came up against an error which caused the software to close - which he was devastated about as he’d actually been doing surprisingly well. Even upon restarting the game and trying the room again it would instantly crash and close the game again. This error definitely appeared to be a gamebreaker, but thankfully a slight workaround has been discovered that allows you to bypass this by turning the goal difficulty to 10% temporarily. Hopefully a patch will be available in the near future.

Overall, we had a great time with Disc Room and can easily see this being a family favourite to come back to time and time again. Going up against the Dev Team times is a fantastic incentive for us, and also pushes everyone at home to compete against each other to have all our names on the leaderboard, fighting for the glory of the top spot.

In the end, we decided to give Disc Room the Collecting Asylum rating of 8.5/10.

Have you played Disc Room yet? What did you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!

- V x

Thank you to Devolver Digital for the Disc Room Nintendo Switch review code!