If the last half-decade has demonstrated anything, it is that the terminally online rhetoric of post-ironic who-gives-a-shit is metastasising. Vine was a benign growth, TikTok a malignant tumour. The netizen-hive-mind-collective that 'solved' the Boston Bombing is directly responsible for the fashwave that is/has/does/will erode democracy. Your grandpa has FOMO and bought $GME to 💎🙌 to the moon and we're all gonna make it, gm, gn, and you're buying into my shitcoin so I can rugpull you because Blizzard nerfed Siphon Life during Obamna's first term. Video games and anime used to be so much better before this forced diversity bullshit ᴡʜᴀᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ꜰᴜᴄᴋ ᴀʀᴇ yᴏᴜ ꜱᴀyɪɴɢ ᴅᴏ yᴏᴜ ʜᴇᴀʀ ᴛʜᴇ ꜱʜɪᴛ ᴅʀɪʙʙʟɪɴɢ ᴏᴜᴛ ᴏꜰ yᴏᴜʀ ᴍᴏᴜᴛʜ yᴏᴜ ᴄʀᴇᴛɪɴ took away the possibility of me getting a tradwife with Abigail Shapiro's body and Marin Kitagawa's face while I [REDACTED] to Angela White after a month of semen retention and get those GAIN$$$$ because there's always a bigger fool and it sure as fuck isn't me and you just don't get this new meme and I'm being gangstalked and I haven't [As the owner of a LandNFT, you own your individual Metalverse patch and secure a permanently assigned place on the Met---

The Milennials are the new Boomers [GEN-X ERASURE] and even the Zoomers are coming of age and they've been inundated with information and bullshit bullshit bullshit so they're casting a mirror back at this fucked up world we've made for them in their own art but some people are trying to be cute and coy with it and you get a YIIK or a Neon White but at least one of those was a good game even if it was still corpo-white-washed faux-sthetics. And your cute and coy attempts and being quirky fail to represent how angry you should be that you were born into this mess of a world because don't you know anger results in nothing? Why yes my favourite podcasts are My Brother, My Brother & Me, and The Adventure Zone, I love to choke down the fetid slurry that is the McElroys' toxic positivity of no bummers and horses and you're being force fed advertisements for fast food and you can't even open your eyes to realise it.

So when a game has the moxie to be viscerally angry, I have to take notice because that feels so genuine in the hyperrealistic world we inhabit. And Splatter is mad that the Internet has made us manipulative, lonely, nostalgic, deluded, greedy, and ultimately willing to harm others (or ourselves) for some gain, be it financial or spiritual or egotistical or chemical. This works where other games borne of the online mindset falter because this runs deep. Rat King Collective didn't disconnect to craft up some malformed half-simulacra that is outdated before it comes out. They never stopped being online, they didn't go for the here and now, they struck at the core of fourteen-year-old-me's identity. This isn't the cream of the crap, this is the dregs of a multitude of online cultures that you, yes, had to be there for. Or maybe you didn't. Does it matter? This goes deep enough that a missed referential quip refuses a reading of "oh this is one of those internet things I don't get," it simply recedes into the background, a cacophony of noise.

It isn't as if the gameplay is some marvel though. It's a spongy xoomer-shooter affair with hand guns and a Dark Souls Borne Ring dodge and commitment to the bit. A leaping enemy is gonna leap! Your dodge isn't going to give you i-frames but it'll get you out of the way and into a new harm's way. I'm not here for the gameplay anyways, it's a means to an end.

This is the video game equivalent of B.R. Yeager's Amygdalatropolis and I ravenously ate it up. Get mad. Wreck shit. Tear it all down. WORLD IS A FUCK

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.

a game i was not expecting to enjoy as much as i did

is it simple? most definitely, however, its that simplicity that it savors and makes the most of that is why i appreciate it so much.

on the whole, it could seem like no more than a simple flash game turned to a full release, and i would have a hard time disagreeing with that, but the amount of potential it realizes with its simple premise of "avoid circles" is honestly kind of surprising with the sheer number of circles you must avoid and the ways you can avoid them, all set to what can only be described as a "bumpin" soundtrack with a very charming art style and you got yourself a classic, babe

i do realize its problems, though, its a very short game with not much in the way of a story to latch on to (as strange as it actually is, it doesnt really go deep enough into the existential horror like the marketing and existing cutscenes lead you to believe it will) and less replay value, there are certain amounts of randomness in disc trajectory that can be frustrating, and it doesnt have enough of a unique personality or style to join the ranks of Hotline Miami in the indie hall of fame, but overall it just cant distract from how immediately fun the game is.

its goofy how good this game is but i think that might be part of why its charms work on me. good job devolver digital i love you

What kind of requirements does Devolver have to publish a game with a concept 2000? This game seems out of the newgrounds wave, only upgraded by a patronage that doesn't seem to fit the philosophy of the game itself (which probably the guys who developed this did in their jammies)
What is more interesting than the design itself or the philosophy is humility and passion for sharing and creating, launching a jam sharing resources from the game itself and creating a tutorial to encourage others to create avoid-em-Up action boxes.
(all here https://itch.io/jam/disc-room-game-jam)
I don't know more about this story, but more stories like this, please thank you bye.
Also the game is pretty neat tho.

it's a one-button rail-shooter about standing your ground in the workplace? you pretty much just press the spacebar, and that's the game.

but you don't come here for the gameplay, you come here for some really silly jokes. this game is cute, and stylish, and very funny! but its humor and the overall plot get really tiresome pretty quickly. there are only a few voice actors, as far as i can tell, and i like the way that gets used. i find them overall very charmingly amateurish, it feels like a cozy passion project game.

i agree wholeheartedly with its message, but if it's not a new message to you, it feels like it's stating the obvious. and it's delivered appealingly tongue-in-cheek, but also with a tone that's condescendingly simplistic in a way that feels unintentional.

it's hard to rate because sometimes i feel like it's a 4/5 joke game, and sometimes i feel it's a 2/5 waste of time. it's got charm, but i don't know if i'd recommend it.

Multiplayer-only review.

I always like progression systems that encourage you to use a variety of tools, and I certainly don't mind making the sweatiest knife-and-riot shield dorks on the planet use other guns so they can unlock attachments. That being said, it turns this game into a massive time-sink, and there's no way for you to be more efficient in getting these unlocks. Sorry kid, you just gotta play the game. While I enjoy this kinda thing personally, I think there's no denying that it's a slimy tactic obviously created to keep people hooked on COD for as long as possible until the next one comes out. The playstyle customization it results in is really fun, but at player level 40 (out of 55 max) I still have the tiniest fraction of options available to me and would have to play five times the amount to both unlock a good number of weapons and also upgrade those weapons.

Worth mentioning too that all the upgrade systems and camos and unlocks are explained, but those explanations are pretty front-loaded in this experience and you'll be clicking through 5 minutes of them as you try to play with friends for the first time, so if you're like me and haven't purchased a COD game in literally ten years you'll still be sitting there ten or fifteen hours in, going "ohhhhh that's how that works". It's not really helped by the menus being laid out so poorly - it's never really clear what actions are possible because you're not sure where you'd even find them, assuming they even exist. I think this is just the result of putting too much strain on the loadout customization feature - clarity would improve greatly by moving challenges of every kind to a single, separate tab in the menu. I can't speak to how confusing this is for loyal Call of Duty fans, but the onboarding experience for new players is not going to win awards.

-----

Other Notes:

- I don't think I've heard this many slurs since playing Overwatch. It was bad in 2009's MW2, but boy, the community is really bringing the spirit of the old game back.
- Seeing a lot of gameplay elements/gadgets/etc. that have been shamelessly lifted from other games. The people I play with complain a lot about drill charges (for Siege players: think "throwable Fuze charges") so perhaps I'm a fool, but these seem to be categorically good for game health/balance.
- As someone who is fascinated by guns as pieces of engineering, there's something satisfying using the gunsmith and watching a gun transform into other guns from the same family - watching a boring old 7.62 AK assault rifle transform into an RPK, a Bizon, a Vityaz, etc. It's cool! It's half the reason I keep playing this, honestly.
- Can't really see any of these maps becoming "classics", as each of them is downright miserable in at least one of the core modes. None of them are awful all the time, but playing Domination on Embassy could be used as an alternative to community service for well-behaved criminals.
- Still can't get over the awful menus. A $300 million budget with no UX designer.