Like the game "Downwell," which takes you down a well, the title of "Disc Room" speaks for itself. Discs bounce around in a square 2D room, and you must control a small man to avoid hitting the discs. You cannot fight the disc. Eventually you will be turned into goo, and the score is based on how long you can stay alive in each room. It's easy, at least until you get to the room where time doesn't exist.

At first glance, I thought Disc Room was an attempt to find the purest form of the video game sawtooth hazard, so to speak. Starting with a single disc and escalating in a regulated and straightforward manner, I imagined that I could test my disc dodging skills in a dojo-like environment. At one point, however, I filled the room with clones of myself and had to feed them to the discs trying to hide from me. The disc room is strange and esoteric. You might be able to figure it all out in six hours, but I have yet to figure it out, even though I have defeated the last boss. What am I supposed to do with that timeless room? I still don't know.

There are many other simple rooms where you run from an increasing number of spinning disks while a timer keeps score. If you survive long enough (say 20 seconds), the door to another room unlocks. While it's fun to play this simple, focused game, you can see that Disc Room will soon be elaborating on the idea with special abilities, boss battles, and riddles to solve. The idea of surviving the 0.3 seconds of disc hell is not very appealing once you play it properly. In some rooms, new types of discs appear if you stay alive long enough, but none of them are interesting enough to be the only motivation.

So the situation gets stranger as you progress. Not every room is unlocked by a good score in the next room. Some rooms require you to accomplish larger objectives, such as being killed by a certain number of unique disc types (an annoying collecting task) or solving a more bizarre mystery objective. The timers in the rooms also vary from area to area. In some rooms, the only way to get more seconds is to collect little Pac-Mans. In another room, you must stand in the center circle or the clock will stop.

At the boss level, you can also damage the boss in a way by collecting Pac-Man dots. The first few "guardians" are not too difficult to defeat, but then there is one that I can assure you is almost always designed to kill you just before you collect the last of the many dots required. The boss itself is a giant spiky disk that wanders around the room, joined by a dozen saw blades and a gang of sandworms that pop up from the ground. It's tricky, and you'll probably die more than once. But that's okay: starting the level again is like eating another pretzel; you probably should have stopped five minutes ago, but it only takes a moment, so you do it before your inner monologue tells you to stop.

Special abilities come in handy in the more difficult rooms. Some are of little use except to solve certain puzzle rooms encountered when exploring the humble map (52 rooms, with a reverse hard run after you beat them). The abilities that you will use the most are "Dash," which allows you to run through the disc for a short time without dying, "Slow," which slows down time, and "Mirror," which teleports you to the location of a mirror on the map (there are horizontal and vertical mirrors, so if you are not careful, you might teleport into the disc, which is (tricky).

These abilities allow me to survive for at least 20 seconds in brutal rooms where the lights come on and off like a strobe, or in pitch black rooms (unless you know the trick). They also confuse me a lot. In the early levels, I concentrate on where the disc is and if it will hit me. With the addition of abilities, you are going to have to concentrate on how and when to use them, and you are going to have to think about dodging with another disc, and then gutting it with another disc. Furthermore, if you have to collect dots or step on all the floor tiles (which is also complicated in certain rooms), you will need a third caution. It is like weaving these three cautions into a rope, which must be woven faster and faster as the level progresses. If I forget, even for a moment, where the next thread is going, the rope snaps in an instant and I am dead. It is exhausting, but exhilarating to spend time at the very edge of my ability to think ahead.

A few gripes: I don't know why touching the edge of the map slows me down. It kills me and I don't think it's my fault. Also, I still don't know how to deal with that timeless room. Someone will figure it out instantly and then tell me it was obvious. Screw that guy. Also, the occasional slow field sucks. It's an obtrusive way to increase the difficulty of my moves.

Some cool stuff: there are fine difficulty settings, so if you get frustrated and want to get on with it, you can slow the game down, make it disc only, or make it all the same and make the goal easier. Also, if you want to make it harder on yourself, challenge conditions such as "only unlock one ability" or "never die within 10 seconds" are recorded when you start a new run. A handy scoreboard tells you how much better or worse you did than your friends. I also love the thick-lined art, which gives the impression of a hand-stitched indie comic made with outdated Photoshop. The music is eerie and in a good mood too.

There is not much to report on the technical side. Graphics options are full screen, yes, no, and settings for things like shake and blood color. The controls are remappable and work fine in WASD, but for me it is a controller game.

The most fun in the disc room is dodging the basic, DVD logo screensaver-style bouncing saw blades. Specialized blades like homing blades and ghost blades make the game harder, but I genuinely like predicting the old-fashioned bouncing patterns. (Because they don't last long in the disc room.) They are a path to the trance zone, whereas the zooming sniper disc puts you in a more aggressive mood. At least this contrast is interesting. And so is that timeless room, as well as the other mysteries inside the terrifying disk ship. Thanks to the surprises in the disc room, it's not a series of mechanical time trials. It's a charming and puzzling little comic book that will be loved by both the casual adventurer and the speedrunner who wants to master its quirks.