Kind of weird that, even with companies like Dodge Roll naming themselves after movement mechanics, the general dungeon-crawler inspired indie mass hasn't really congregated that much around the simple delight of planar traversal in any of its various games that take Zelda's screen by screen transition template. There was bound to be a game that understands how purely distilled a game's desirability can be, unscientifically, of course, according to this metric, by how good it feels to crank up the PC's movement speed and race across a room, especially if you get to bob and weave around enemies while maintaining your hyper-sonic momentum. Disc Room feels like if you modded Isaac to spawn only trap rooms, start the player with 2.0 speed, acquire 5 Mini Mushes, and get wrapped in a cohesive and more generally pleasing skin.

There is a lot of scholarship on how games do or do not enforce defensive types of play, but Disc Room puts forth in its environmental interaction type a soft thesis that, maybe, defensive play is born out of offensive play being a counter-balance to a defensive moveset. In each Disc (filled) Room, having no ability to counteract the danger existentially, the player never has the opportunity to rest on hope for an exsanguination of the threats present by encamping in cowed ferocity; the only progressive path is that which hurdles play towards the requirements for long term survival, which herein is that which is defined by aggressively seeking the tidiest lack of death in immediacy.

Reviewed on Oct 03, 2022


Comments