Disc Room

Another game from Devolver Digital, who's known for publishing at least okay quality indie games. The review scores for this are pretty good, but it's not a well-known game. It's Disc Room.

Disc Room is an interesting take on the bullet hell genre. Instead of enemies that fire bullets who you have to kill, the enemies essentially are the bullets, and you can't kill them, but have to survive for as long as possible. Most rooms have a goal of surviving for some 10 or 20 seconds, but they may also have a variation on that, such as the timer only going up while in a zone. There are also other goals, like dying to different discs, which there are almost as many of as there are different rooms. Completing goals unlocks new rooms, progressing the game. You will also unlock new skills (invulnerability frames, bullet time, etc.) as the game progresses, only one of which can be used at a time.
The rooms are quite short, depending of course on how well you can play, but the overall game time should be around 3-4 hours. After that, you can go for completing all goals, dying to all discs, or just going for a high score in each room. The difficulty also ramps up quite fast, so maybe you'll complete the first half of the rooms in an hour, and then spend three in the other half.

I like this bullet hell variation, and I think Disc Room was well executed in terms of the vision it had. I didn't notice any instances of the game being broken, or missing the mark on some of its mechanics or anything. However, I do think the vision wasn't quite as good as it could have been. While reasonably difficult, simply running around and dodging isn't the most fun gameplay. It's kind of repetitive, despite the large number of different discs, but at the end of the day it just boils down to not overlapping your player box with the enemy boxes. It's also kind of short, even if you did want to enjoy it for more than a couple of hours. And finally, many rooms have a greater or lesser degree of randomness in them, which can get really annoying in an otherwise heavily skill-based game.

So, overall, good execution, subpar idea, and too short. I wouldn't recommend it to most people, but if you're big on bullet hell games and/or chasing high scores in short bursts of gameplay, then maybe you'll find it fun while it lasts. Although to my knowledge, the randomness in this game may very heavily clash with the usual strategy of learning attack patterns in bullet hell games, so consider that.

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