This is Donut County:
Whoever put together the trailer for Donut County (presumably someone at Annapurna who published the game) did a brilliant job, because the quickest way I found to explain what this game was to Conklederp was to say that it was like Katamari Damacy, but with a hole that swallowed things instead of rolling them into a ball. And Donut County is kind of like that in that as the hole swallows more things, it gets wider allowing it to swallow even larger objects, but if Katamari Damacy was a Monster Energy Drink, Donut County is a nice cup of chamomile tea with a fresh donut on the side. I am bad at making analogies.
Donut County is broken up into two segments: story and gameplay. During the story sections, you are introduced to new characters beyond the two main characters, Mira and B.K. the raccoon. The dialogue between everyone helps to give context to what you are doing in the game, all of which happens in the present. Your cast of characters find themselves in the bottom of a hole, some 999ft below Donut County. As the characters talk to each other, one of their experiences comes to the forefront and then you transition to a playable level that is part Katamari-adjacent, part puzzle, and mostly just chill.
What makes Donut County so much more different than Katamari Damacy, is that there is no sense of mania in collecting objects through your ever expanding hole. There is no timer, there is no moving camera, there is no benevolent alcoholic overbearing father figure on the verge of demeaning you at the drop of a hat. For a while I was actually wondering if I was doing something wrong, if I had accidentally set the game to some type of easy difficulty, or if I was playing a demo. No, Donut County just seems like it was designed to be about enjoying an amusing experience and not trying to remember where a specific object is to roll up (or swallow in this case) otherwise your timer will run out and you will have to start over a stage that can run 15 minutes. In Donut County, you start out each stage with a hole that is small and only able to swallow up a few objects, but those objects will allow your hole to grow in size letting you swallow up even larger objects. The first handful of levels, this is what you do, essentially to get you used to the mechanics and the overall vibe of the game.
Later stages introduce objects to interact with, either as object become stuck in the hole or you gain access to new equipment like a catapult-type-launcher that lets you vomit our specific objects to effect the environment around you. There was only one stage early on that I thought I had gotten myself into a hole (badum'tiss) and restarted, although looking back I do not think that I really needed to do that. Which is something to be said for the game design, that there were no instances of the game breaking or getting stuck so that I could not proceed any further in the game.
The physics engine though can be a little wonky at times, especially with larger and oddly shaped objects that only just fit down the hole. It never got to the point where it was frustrating and if anything, it just added to the hilarity as large building bounced around the screen in a completely unrealistic manner. As if there was an attempt at realism in a game about a mobile hole that swallowed up objects and left no damage to the ground itself.
Lastly, I want to touch on the writing. The writing in this game is hilarious, well executed and often times self-aware. In the game there is an index of items you have had your hole swallow titled a Trashopedia. By the end of the game it is pretty clear what is going on with the descriptions for items here, but even knowing who the prince is (inside joke) doesn't diminish the descriptions. Even the overarching story, of which there is one although there is no real attempt at explaining how or why there are talking anthropomorphic animals that live and work in the same world as humans, is well throughout within the self-contained reality of the game. If you think too hard about a lot of aspects of the game, there will probably be plenty of plot holes or things that just do not make much sense. But you are playing a game with a mobile hole, so there is that too.
Donut County only took me a couple of hours to play and I enjoyed the entire experience, from the look of the game, to the writing, to just the overall chillness of the game itself. That it is a game meant to be fun and not a thumb-wrecking challenge was a nice change of pace (although there was one part of the game at the very end that I thought I might have to redo because I was not paying attention and was almost killed). I am very much looking forward to the next game that creator Ben Esposito comes up with next.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental
P.S.
Just another example of physics engine hilarity:
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