In one level, you’re helping a chef concoct a soup and in another you’re accidentally breeding sheep to bring a house down. The allure of the next weirdness also contributes towards Donut County’s gimmick never growing stale. There are also small variations to the puzzles, such as the hole catching fire or snagging a snake to use as a prodding stick of sorts, but these are never taxing and just tittersome ways of keeping the experience fresh instead. The hole expands the more it consumes, meaning that you should start with the small stuff to eventually work your way up to the bigger things in levels, such as a house or a skyscraper. It helps that the puzzles it presents are almost immediately obvious in their solutions, and this is coming from someone who gets a migraine from crosswords. Donut County is ultimately a distraction, and there’s nothing wrong with that - video games are all about escapism, after all. For that reason, I found it to be the perfect palate cleanser in between heavy bouts of “serious” games like Green Hell and Fear The Wolves. On PS4, you only need to use the left stick to move the hole and X to proceed through dialogue and use the catapult a short while in to its (at a push) two-hour runtime. The gameplay consists of very little in the way of player input, which makes for an oddly cathartic time as you ransack a peaceful place. Donut County is off-the-wall from the get-go and never takes itself seriously for more than a minute. While his job title may say he delivers donuts, his real focus is on swallowing up people and all the trash he can find - anyone who orders a donut becomes a new citizen of the hole. The game opens with the people of the town dwelling deeper underground after falling victim to BK, the arrogant and often dense raccoon you play as, and his “hole driving”. No, the main allure of Donut County is seeing what you can put in your hole. The patter between the two main characters is charming and the game is full of moments of heart like these, but that’s not the real attraction. If that sounds weird, that’s because it absolutely is.ĭonut County is the dictionary definition of irreverent, which is evidenced in the first few minutes when you’re in a text conversation and can just repeatedly spam the duck emote. Donut County is one such game, a unique puzzler where your only job is to, well, be a bit of a dickhead raccoon behind the wheel of a hole. I have all the time in the world for games that know exactly what they are, those that don’t need to shoot for the moon and deliver everything and the kitchen sink. No other game this year will make you an accomplice in a dastardly raccoon plot to take over a town.Developer: Ben Esposito Publisher: Annapurna Interactive Platform(s): PC, PS4, iOS Novel and likable, Donut County is worth the few hours it asks of your time – especially on the iPhone, where the touch-screen enhances its tactile feel. It is memorable for its odd cast, funny, internet-speak-derived writing style and strange situations, but it is unexpectedly shallow, and fun ideas flit away before they develop into anything complex. A lot of work has gone into making the physics behave so naturally.ĭonut Country can feel rather passive now and then you must swallow up a lit firework and catapult it up elsewhere, or hunt around a while for something else to pull into the pit, but otherwise the game unfurls with minimal input. Debris from destroyed buildings pings wildly around the screen once you’ve set off a chain of destruction. Stacked pots smash on the ground and tumble satisfyingly into the void when you catch the leg of a table. Donut County feels meditative and pleasantly weird. There is never much head-scratching over what to do next, and no scoring to reward quick thinking or speedy play. Over the course of two hours, playful ideas appear and disappear in an instant, the entire town sinks into an underground void, and a mad little story about raccoons, trash and the gig economy unfurls. In another scene, swallowing a couple of rabbits results in a preposterous fountain of newborn bunnies erupting from the pit. A mad little story about raccoons, trash and the gig economy unfurls.
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