Donut County
It's fun, it's silly, you play as a hole and your enemy is a racoon.
Donut County is an extremely silly, deeply irreverent game. Donut County is plagued by errant holes that keep gobbling up plants and buildings and people. You play as the holes.
I hope that brief introduction set the scene for you. Donut Country landed on a fun idea and ran with it. In a Katamari-esque loop, you start by slurping down small items – bits of wood, small potted plants, maybe a squirrel or two. This serves to expand your gaping maw, enabling higher-stakes consumption: a motorbike, a caravan, a whole house. Your neighbours – they didn’t like it very much. There are occasionally nifty little single-level gimmicks; you might have to ingest a fire in order to use hot air to open a trap door in order to consume what’s within. My personal favourite is the level where you guzzle up a pair of rabbits, and the rabbits do what the rabbits do. Your hole becomes a cannon of baby rabbits that you can direct as needed. Superbly silly.
Gameplay this silly calls for a plot of equal silliness magnitudes, and Donut County delivers. Your best friend, the racoon BK, is operating a donut delivery service with nefarious ulterior motives, causing holes to slurp up the residents of the town. He’s desperate to impress the Trash King, truly stopping at nothing to make a name for himself. It would be nice if I could say that BK learned his lesson and your friendship came out the other side of this trouble stronger and better than ever, but it’s pretty open to interpretation whether he learns anything at all.
The game has an absolute bucketload of charm, too. The characters are all a variety of animals with distinct personalities and stories of how they came to be living at the bottom of BK’s hole, and the writing is good enough that you get a sense of distinct personalities, which is highly enjoyable. The writing also shines in the “Trashopedia”, an in-game encyclopaedia of all the things you hoover up throughout the game. ‘Megaphone – if you swear into this, everyone will know.’ It’s witty, sarcastic, and droll, and I get the sense the writers had a great time putting it together, which shines through. The music and sound effects are great, and the art style is really effective too. Nothing feels out of place in Donut County – except for all the residents, who are at the bottom of a hole.
The developers didn’t ever let anything get in the way of their extremely silly story, and the story always serves to facilitate the gameplay. And I think that is glorious. One of the best things to come out of starting this blog is that I feel freer to play games that are purely for fun. Yeah, games are art. Games can tell beautiful, haunting, sad, uplifting stories. But they can also exist just as a means for you to enjoy yourself. It’s like any form of media – some films are serious, effective, and touching, and some are the Fast and Furious series. I truly suffer from the millennial plague of hustle culture and find it hard to do things that are “just” fun, carrying a lot of unnecessary guilt with me. It’s a habit I need to break out of, and Donut County helped by being extremely enjoyable. I played it first a few years ago but replayed it to write this and was reminded of a lesson that is easy to forget. Adults are notoriously bad at play, so here’s my message to you, dear reader – allow yourself the time to goof off and do something just because it’s fun.
Before I go, I want to say a few things in defence of the word ‘silly’. It can be used as quite the put down – I’m sure your ex is just a silly person (lacks common sense, childish, unserious). However, when I say silly, I think of the times my partner makes a face and we both laugh – yes, it’s unserious, but it’s also joyful and unpretentious and fun. So it’s with that definition in mind that I want you to consider that Donut County is an unapologetically silly game, well worth the two to three hours of your time it will take to play it. Give yourself that much.
Game: Donut County
Developer: Ben Esposito
Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
Platforms: PC, Switch, Mobile, PlayStation, Xbox
I think I saw someone play this a few years ago! It looks superbly silly.
And I, too, would gladly swap bodies with a cactus.
Might have to check this out with the kids!
This would make for a great party game (if that option doesn't already exist)!