There could have been plenty of others - at least visually, if not via gameplay - but Donut County never goes for it. The comedic high point of play was when a ferris wheel went rocketing off of its axis and crashed into a castle after my hole blasted it with water, but that was just one chuckle.
It’s a shame since such a bizarre premise seems ripe with opportunities for wacky situations that never materialized. With that said, it was disappointing to see it all played so straightforward here - the level of humor is subdued and limited to hit-or-miss dialogue in the cutscenes, and it was mostly miss. It’s bizarrely entertaining, and it kept me hooked - I finished the entire thing in one sitting. However, the real meat of Donut County is the primal satisfaction of making things disappear. Eventually even huge things like cars and houses will fall prey to its insatiable hunger.Īs the campaign progresses, there are a few slight twists to the formula - a catapult appears inside the hole and can eject certain objects to trigger events (swallow a frog and launch it upwards to snag flies high above, etc.) and in certain places the hole can fill with water to meet specific goals. It gains diameter with each thing it consumes, and soon it can move on to lawn chairs, boxes, and larger structures. After the first three levels I ended up skipping through the cutscenes to get back to stuffing more adorable things into the hole, and that was fine.Īt the beginning of every level, the hole is small and can only devour things like pebbles or tufts of grass. There’s a narrative thread about raccoons and texting, but it’s not nearly as funny or as clever as it thinks it is. The whole thing reminds me a bit of a Playmobil playset, in a way. The bright colors and low-poly shapes are appealing, and there’s an appreciable minimalism in the visuals. It doesn’t sound like a lot to base an entire game on - and frankly, it’s not - but being cute and likable goes a long way here.įor me, it’s mostly the art style.
This breezy indie is built around a single idea - the player controls a hole in the ground that can move around and suck things into it. While I wouldn’t say it’s everything and I wouldn’t recommend that developers focus on it at the expense of other design aspects, there are times when a good dollop of charm can get a project to a good place. Take Donut County, for example. WTF The obsession with quadcopter drones.
LOW Neither the story nor gameplay is as funny as it could be. HIGH Making things disappear into the earth is immensely satisfying.
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