Donut County is a physics based light puzzle game. It is designed to be a relaxing experience and there’s no challenge at all. The main gameplay is moving a hole around to swallow objects. With each object swallowed, it gets bigger, so then you get to swallow bigger objects. It’s strangely satisfying to eventually swallow up everything, in a way that’s similar to the Katamari games.
There is a light puzzle element. there’s the obvious part where you need to find smaller objects to swallow first so that you can enlarge the hole before moving onto the bigger objects. However, there are other smaller puzzles where you need to do something specific first. This could be swallowing a fire and then coals to stoke it so that you can light other things on fire to make them explode into smaller pieces. Or you need to attempt to swallow a carrot in order to lure a rabbit out of its pen to then break the carrot into smaller pieces. Usually, when you get to a point where you cannot swallow anything more, or you end up doing things on a loop, that’s when you know you need to do something different.
The game has a simple cartoony aesthetic that looks and suits the simple and silly tone. There is a story to help explain what is happening. It takes place in Donut County and Mira is chatting with her racoon friend BK. She knows BK is using an app and is about to hit rank ten. BK explains that he’s scheduling the delivery of donuts. The game shows us what eventually happens, being that Donut County is swallowed up to the underground, before each citizen then recounts what happened to them, jumping back to the events that took place to get up to this point.
Each level is short, taking a few minutes each and the difficulty is low. You’ll rarely get stuck and the game overall is short. it takes around two hours to complete, which helps to not allow it to become boring and stale, given that each level is basically the same until the final few levels. Those final levels were more interesting given it had slightly different structures, with connected areas, marginally more elaborate puzzles, and even boss battles.
After you complete the game, there isn’t really anything else that you can do. You fly around in the credits, there’s a sort of collectible aspect where it tracks everything that you have swallowed. If you happen to miss one, you can select the level to obtain it. The story was fine, and throughout the game, you aren’t sure what direction it will take. So the ultimate direction it did take was interesting and silly enough to be enjoyable.
Overall, Donut County is a short and relaxing game that doesn’t take itself seriously at all. The chill gameplay works well with its simpler aesthetic and the story carries enough charm to help push it along. The short length works for and against it, although the overly simplistic gameplay in the game does ultimately mean that this is a fairly average game.
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