Donut County (PC)

Controlling a hole in the ground is one of those off-the-wall video game concepts that really shows the delightfully weird areas video games can explore, and it’s not too odd that this game seems a bit like a flipped version of one of gaming’s poster children for kookiness, Katamari Damacy. In Katamari Damacy you roll up objects in the world with your giant ball to make it bigger and able to pick up larger objects. Donut County captures that same satisfying feeling of clearing a messy area of objects but has you instead dropping it all down a hole that grows bigger as more stuff enters it.

The hole is the core gameplay mechanic of Donut County, and guiding it around with your mouse cursor is as straightforward as it is easy, but there is a bit of an issue Donut County has that Katamari games don’t. The ball in Katamari Damacy has to navigate around objects, can be hit by them, and can get stuck in tight spaces if you aren’t careful. A hole in the ground has pretty much all the freedom of movement it could want, the only thing blocking it really being the borders of the area you’re in. The game actually has very few ways to impede your task of collecting objects with the hole, most of your progression focused on the very easy identification of what things you can drop down the hole based on its current size and what needs to go next to help it grow. Levels don’t often have much in them to really challenge your mind on what to drop, but the game actually progresses at a pretty quick pace. Levels can be completed in a few minutes and have a few stages of hole growth to move you from one section of stuff to another. It may be simple what you’re doing with your hole most of the time, but guiding it around and collecting stuff in it is relaxing and just satisfying enough that it fills the game’s short length without having the time to get dull.

There are moments where Donut County begins to use its hole for some light puzzles, many of these cropping up once you get the catapult upgrade to the hole that can fire certain objects back out after they’ve dropped in. Most levels will still be fairly straightforward instances of collecting everything and then moving on, but certain objects like water and fire can enter your hole and must be dealt with or used to alter the environment. The catapult allows you to impact the environment more, usually just by way of firing an object up to hit a switch or lever, but there are a few moments where timing the shot is required and more interactive tasks like launching a frog so it can grow in size by eating bugs. Perhaps the most creative use of the hole in the game is one where you need to make a soup in your mobile pit, mixing ingredients in a kitchen while roaches scurry around and try to dive into it to ruin the recipe. If the game had more moments like this where avoiding certain objects or combining objects properly came up, Donut County could have kept the freedom of its hole’s movement while also giving it decent challenges along the way.

The final areas of the game do at least crank things up a bit, even showing other ideas that could have made the game more exciting in general. One aspect of the last section of the game is having the freedom to move the pit between different areas freely, meaning you have to grow the hole by finding items in different locations as well as carrying catapult-compatible objects to the required areas in other rooms. If more areas had this sort of sandbox approach to hole growth things could evolve from the decently satisfying task of emptying an area of everything and approach something with more direction and puzzle elements. The areas do at least have enough variety to the objects and interactive features that they stimulate the part of the mind that craves variety, but the game mechanic at the core of Donut County might not in fact be the main focus of the game.

Donut County’s hole is a factor in the fun of the game, but the real love seems to be put into the silly story that surrounds why this hole is moving around a city and collecting people, possessions, and even buildings once it’s big enough. The game’s main character is a raccoon named BK who speaks and acts like a modern teenager or young adult, their life revolving around the technology of tablets and the internet culture that surrounds being so plugged into online activities and mobile apps. He’s the kind of character who says LOL in real life and compares his life to a lot of the fiction he consumes through video games and memes. Seeing the way he bounces off his human friend Mira makes the frequent cutscenes and text message conversations between levels all the more enjoyable, and after completing levels, he even fills in what is called the Trashopedia, where some of the objects you dropped into the moving hole are given funny descriptions based on how a raccoon would view him. His attempts to understand human technology, odd distrust of birds, and love for garbage make the Trashopedia the highlight of the short levels more often than not, although when the Trashopedia disappears briefly its absence is certainly felt because it helped add more color and character to the stages.

The cutscenes do at least crank up in regularity to make up for Trashopedia’s disappearance, and the story framing actually has many different goofy characters to push the humor angle even further. BK actually controls the hole moving around the town, sending it out to anyone who orders from the donut shop Donut County by way of an app on his tablet. The little raccoon is greedily chasing a rewards program put in place for raccoons to get goodies for the junk they send through the hole, but early on in the story we actually see the end results of BK’s hole usage, much of the game actually told by way of flashback. The citizens of the city and all their belongings are nearly 1,000 feet underground, the player playing through the tales they tell of how BK sent a hole over to drop them down into this underground cavern. BK is definitely portrayed in a negative light to start, but thankfully the problem of being so deep underground is played off as humorous instead of something people seem legitimately broken up about, and BK does gradually come around on seeing the error of his ways and wanting to work towards a solution. The humor definitely carries the game forward, and while a more robust gameplay supplement wouldn’t have hurt it, the lighthearted and quirky story elements and bright pastel visuals help break up what otherwise could have been far too simple of a game by injecting oodles of personality.

THE VERDICT: Despite its absurd highlights both in cutscenes and in some of the areas where you collect things with your moving sinkhole, Donut County still feels like it could have gone farther with its core gameplay mechanic. Your control over the hole is often straightforward, and while some objects impact the hole in different ways and the item catapult lets you interact with the environment more, there aren’t many moments that require too much thought or proper hole navigation. There is still a simple satisfaction to dropping things into it and watching it grow though, and there are a few inspired moments like making the soup in the hole while dodging roaches, but this game mostly relies on its internet-inspired humor and kooky situations created by a raccoon using an app to drop people and objects 999 feet below the earth. The fun story and unusual situations ultimately save it from being too simple, the short game length allowing it to never dip into dullness despite its unexplored potential.

And so, I give Donut County for PC…

A GOOD rating. Were it not for the fun interaction between BK, Mira, and the people who ended up down the hole and are calling out the raccoon for his wrongdoing, Donut County might not have the meat on it to rise above an OKAY rating. Donut County occupies the same odd unnamed genre games like Katamari Damacy and The Wonderful End of the World occupy where you clear an area of objects as you grow larger and larger, but the hole faced issues in that it eliminated objects from play instead of attaching them to the main object being controlled. Donut County did find a few ways to still play with its concept like having objects interact with the hole or jeopardize it, but for the most part the game doesn’t push the player to get creative with it. Sure, a few lizards might scuttle away from it when you try to drop them in, but for the most part its just moving the mouse around to clean an area unopposed, which while it does capture that satisfaction you would feel from decluttering a real life area, it doesn’t have the gameplay hook that would make it incredibly enjoyable. That enjoyability instead comes from things like the Trashopedia, the wacky yet modern world the game takes place in, and the way the characters interact as they discuss the hole and what it’s doing to their city. The later game moments oddly enough do show that the hole could be given an interesting area to explore and tasks to complete, but Donut County’s gameplay is mostly a mildly interesting interactive portion of the silly story being told.

It’s not surprising that the game’s Steam page has “story-based” coming before any other attempt to slot it into genre terms. Donut County is about the look of the game, the writing in the cutscenes and Trashopedia, and the goofiness you would expect around a game based on controlling a moving hole in the ground. While a game about guiding a sinkhole around could be mechanically engaging, Donut County at least makes the ride enjoyable by crafting a humorous story to carry this two hour experience.