Review: Donut County

Available on: PC, Mac, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, Playstation

Cost: €11.99

Genre: Casual, Physics Puzzle

Developer: Ben Esposito

Publisher: Annapurna Interactive

Donut County is a story base physics puzzle game where you play an ever growing hole in the ground, remote controlled by a raccoon who wants to collect the trash around the town, but in doing swallows up the residents and their homes into a deep hole. Find a way to catapult them out of the hole and back to the surface.

Story

In Donut County, pesky Racoon BK has recently taken over the town’s donut shop. But items, homes, pets and people have started going missing in the town. It turns out, when you order a donut, you are inadvertently inviting a sink hole to your home, that grows larger with everything that falls into it, eventually taking in almost the entire town and plunging it thousands of miles underground. Your task is to figure out how to get the town back up on land, but that might require sucking in more unassuming characters to help from the underground up.

I really liked the main character BK, and the gentle humour is a good fun experience. New characters are quite quirky, and it is enjoyable to see your townsfolk grow underground. All dialogue is done through dialogue led cut scenes, but they are quite enjoyable, as you all work together to try and figure a way out.

Gameplay

The main aim in the game is to grow your sink hole larger and larger to pick up all the items on the plane. The hole will begin small, and will have enough room to take in a rock to trees to cars to entire buildings. To do this, you sweep across the area and pick up what you can. I found this very fun, it’s a simple physics puzzle but it’s quite pleasing to grow the hole big enough to fit bigger objects. There’s some fun things that will add an extra puzzle to the mechanic, for example if two rabbits fall in, they will duplicate, and their offspring will grow the hole, or if a frog falls in, you can project it up to use it’s tongue to stick to high objects and drag them in.

Graphics and Visuals

The design is simplistic but it’s pleasant to look at. The colours are vibrant, and the space is well filled, some levels are a bit more exciting and detailed than others. I’d have liked a little more variety in terms of biomes, some areas looked a little similar to others even though you could tell they were trying not to, but all in all I did enjoy the design. The characters you meet had some unique designs too.

Longevity

The game is only around 2 hours in length, but it is well filled. The story is fun to plod along through as you find out more about the devious Raccoon hierarchy and their plans. However, once the game is over it’s over, you can’t go back. But I’m not sure you’d need to, the aim is to clear all of the screens, so there wouldn’t be anything to go back and complete! Considering the game is only 2 hours long, I could definitely see myself going back to play it again.

Conclusion

Overall, I really enjoyed Donut County. It’s simple, clean and crisp design is very pleasing, and I enjoyed the mechanic of the every growing hole and seeing what I could get to topple into it. It’s quite a unique gameplay, I’ve not played anything like it before. It’s a simple puzzle, there isn’t much of a challenge at all, but that’s not a deal breaker for me. The real charm of the game however is BK the raccoon, I really enjoyed his character and the evolution of the story. For such a short game, the story is very strong, and I liked that I could complete everything to complete the game, I didn’t have to have that occasional dread niggle I get when my completionist brain kicks in and wants to finish everything but I don’t want to play the game anymore. It's fun, cute, doesn’t outstay it’s welcome, all in all I’d definitely recommend.