Disc Room's surprises keep it from being a series of mechanical time trials. And so is that timeless room, and the other mysteries aboard the horrible disc ship. It's the way to the trance zone (briefly, because you never last long in Disc Room), whereas the sniper-discs that zoom at me set a more aggressive mood. The homing blades and ghost blades and other special blades make the game harder, but predicting plain old bounce patterns has a purity that I like. The best fun I have in Disc Room comes from dodging your basic, DVD logo screensaver-style bouncing saw blades. The controls are remappable, and it works fine with WASD, but it's a controller game for me-analog stick recommended. The graphics options are: full screen, yes or no, and then settings for things like camera shake and blood color. There's not much to report on the technical side. The music sets a nice and spooky space mood, too. And I love the thick-lined art, which gives the impression of a hand-stapled indie comic made in an out-of-date version of Photoshop-something I'd be prone to buying if I saw it at a comic shop, even though I know I don't need to collect more things. Or if you want to make things harder for yourself, when you start a new run challenge conditions are tracked, such as 'only unlock one ability' and 'never die in under 10 seconds.' A convenient scoreboard tells me how much better or worse I've done than my friends. Some cool stuff: There are granular difficulty settings, so if you get frustrated and just want to get on with it you can slow the game down, or just the discs, or keep everything the same but make the objectives easier. Messing with my movement is an intrusive way to add difficulty. Also, the slow fields that occasionally come into play suck. I also still haven't figured out how to deal with that timeless room, and I know someone's going to figure it out instantly and then tell me it was obvious. It gets me killed and doesn't feel like my fault. Some frustrations: I don't see why touching the edge of a map should slow me down. It's exhausting, but exhilarating to spend time on the edge of my capacity to think ahead. If I forget where the next strand goes, just for a millisecond, the rope instantly frays and I'm dead. It's like I'm braiding these three strands of attention into rope, and I have to braid faster and faster as the level progresses. And when I also have to collect dots or step on all the floor tiles (another complication in certain rooms), there's a third thing holding my attention. Add an ability, and then I'm also focused on deciding when and how to use it, so I'm likely to get gutted by one disc while thinking about dodging over another. In the early levels, my focus is entirely on where the discs are and whether they're going to hit me. These abilities make it possible to survive for at least 20 seconds in some of the cruelest rooms, including a few where the lights strobe on and off, and one that is pitch black (unless you figure out the trick). The abilities you'll use most are Dash, which lets you briefly run through discs without dying, Slow, which slows down time, and Mirror, which teleports you to your mirror location on the map (tricky, because it's mirrored horizontally and vertically, and you might teleport into a disc if you're not careful). A few are mostly useless except to solve certain puzzle rooms you'll run into as you explore the modest map (there are 52 rooms, and then a reverse hard run after you beat it). Special abilities help with the increasingly difficult rooms.
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