Disc Room is an indie arcade-y action puzzle game. It’s about getting murdered by circular saws. There are 64 unique “enemies” in the game, and they are all varieties of circular saws. There are similarly 64-ish rooms, grouped into four or five biomes depending on how you count them.

Rooms have different goals to open different doors between rooms, which range from “survive 5/10/20s” to “collect 10/20 orbs”. Most rooms have gimmicks, like “you can only see in the spotlight” or “time only progresses when you stand in the circle” or “time progresses when you run over a floor tile”. But most of the time the real issue is to just survive.

You aren’t given much in the way of kit. You can run around at a fixed speed, and have one of 6 abilities on a pretty reasonable cooldown. None of these are overpowered, some of them are arguably more hassle than they’re worth. Like “blast” can charge a circular blast radius around you to bounce saws away, but they bounce everything even saws that just circle around the edge of the room. There’s also “absorb”, which lets you “store” a saw, but if you had one stored previously – even from a different room – that one pops out of your pocket slot. So now you have to deal with the last thing you tried to get rid of in a room that wasn’t designed for it. Often times abilities are used for specific room puzzles, and really you should just use dash for the iframes . . but even the dash has a downside: it’s a little short, and you can’t pick up orbs while you’re dashing.

Unlike most stuff on this list, I’m not sure if I’m going to beat this. I’ve hit a wall at the end of normal mode. I’ve gotten to the point where there are only like 3 or 4 rooms locked, but one of them requires me to have been murdered by every saw in the game, and I’m down to ones that are goddamn obtuse. Most are obvious, it’s a new type of saw, it flys around in a certain way, fine. But some you have to try to get killed by. Like bosses have a “defeated” mode if you go back to their room and re-beat them, so you have to beat them again and THEN get killed by the corpse mode, not one of the 40 other saws that may be on the screen at that point. Others are just unfair, like in a room with a ludicrous number of tiny tiny tiny saws that move really fast, after surviving for 15 seconds one gold saw will spawn. Ok now continue dodging all the normal saws and try to get killed just by that one saw that barely looks different.

The game is also apparently not popular enough to have comprehensive guides. When it comes to my particular problem of figuring out all the discs, the most complete guide literally says “I’m not gonna tell you where all 64 different discs are in the game as that would be waaaaay to much for this one guide.” and then “I believe in you.” Thanks dude but no I really don’t want to spend hours in the entirely red zone trying to find a saw that has a slightly different tint to it.

Was it good? Idk, it wasn’t bad. It’s probably worth the $15 retail, and as usual, it’s definitely worth it in Game Pass, where I played the game. But there is absolutely some unfairly difficult crap in there.