Roller Drama is secretly a brilliant houseshare simulator
Hello! I’ve been playing Roller Drama over the last week or so. It’s not a long game, I gather, but I’m taking it slow, because it feels, in its own way, like it’s a whole world I am being dunked in, and I want to make the most of it, and to live it as fully as I can.
Roller Drama
- Publisher: Open Lab
- Developer: Open Lab
- Platform: Played on Switch
- Availability: Out now on Switch, PS4 and PS5, Xbox and PC
It’s a wonderfully strange thing. In Roller Drama you play as a coach to a roller derby team. You play the matches – which are brilliant and tactical and exhausting, and I have yet to finish one without someone on the team dropping on the track out of sheer knackerdness – and in between you knock around the house you all live in together, solving surreal little puzzles and talking to a ghost who looks a bit like Shakespeare. There’s a cat involved too, who, physics fans will be glad to hear, may or may not be dead. It’s hard to tell.
It’s rare for a game with this many pieces to fully click, I think. But Roller Drama is clicking for me. And that’s because I like the hectic, thoughtful spin on a sport I can barely comprehend, and also because this game, I think, is secretly something very coherent and very welcome. It’s secretly an absolutely stellar houseshare simulation.
Testify. It’s not just that you and your team live in this house together. It’s that the game is alive to the awkwardness and endless nuance of living in a house with a lot of other people. I am the middle of five children myself, and I’ve also houseshared a lot over the years, and I love and recognise loads of the little things about this game.
I love the hesitancy I feel when initiating a conversation – the way I try to get as many clues as I can to the state of mind of the person I might be about to talk to. I love sneaking around the hallways trying not to encounter anyone else on my way to a shared room. I love the strange moments of opportunity where the world seems to open up as you meet someone you weren’t expecting to outside or in the kitchen and you have a moment. It’s magic.
