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Make me feel like dancin' around

Singin' you a song that makes you feel

Like you're the only bird on this tree

#Donut county #Dan koestner #Ben esposito

Mini-Game: Donut County

Donut County isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions. What does someone mean when they want a donut delivered? Why is there so much trash everywhere in the city? What, exactly, is a donut? This is a game that’s not afraid to ask the hard questions, and make sure people get the donuts they want too.

Well, sort of.

The game is not about delivering donuts, not really. It’s about controlling a tiny little hole in order to collect objects, grow larger, and collect even more objects. It’s part itch.io, part Katamari Damacy and part millennial comfort food, featuring quirky anthropomorphic animals that talk like they text and text like they talk. The dialogue is snappy and light-hearted, even in heated moments, filled with puns and LOLs and intentional typos and an almost stubborn refusal to acknowledge the more serious problems that arise in the story. The world, the characters, the speech and delivery all feel like they came from a group of characters who grew up with the internet. It feels like a game made about my generation by my generation.

The mechanics of the game are limited to using the left stick to move the hole and your eyeballs to see what can fit into the hole. Each object expands the hole a little bit with a satisfying bouncy animation. Crumpled paper laying around and bits of grass give way to chairs and tables, household appliances, people and then eventually entire rocks and whole houses. The objects shimmy and bounce around the hole as you try to stubbornly jimmy them in despite knowing that grabbing a few more stepping stones would make your job easier, but finally getting them in the damn hole is a satisfying feeling. Even though the game doesn’t ask much of the player, despite layering on a few fun tricks in the late-game, scooting around the hole and eating things up is almost therapeutic.

So almost therapeutic, in fact, that you don’t stop to question what you’re doing until the game calls you out on it fairly early on. The driver of the hole is BK, a raccoon who’s using the hole app to get enough points for a quadcopter that he can pilot around, like a typical millennial. His best friend Mira who, along with the residents of the town, put him to task for hole-ing up their property in the form of flashbacks. Each vignette from the inhabitants of the town takes you on a little visual ride, which alone are worth the price of admission. You get to explore a slice of someone’s life as you slowly engulf and disrupt their goings-on, which can range from exploring the campground of a lonely vegetable salesman in the desert or prodding at the questionably-legal fireworks shop that’s opened up near the beach. The hole can explore a restaurant whose reputation has somehow escaped causing it to close, or even visit a raccoon theme park. Most levels have you manipulate the environment in order to remove obstacles or get faraway objects closer to the ground so you can, y’know, do the hole thing to them. The art style, which is full of pastel and contrast, give a personality to the game which makes just looking at it soothing, even as you’re really inconveniencing these poor townspeople.

The game isn’t very long, which is both a compliment and a complaint. The levels move at a fairly quick clip, never overstaying their welcome or presenting any sort of roadblock to progression. Being able to see such a wide variety of situations and art is a treat, plus the game is extremely low-commitment is you just want to jump in and play a level and get a bit of a chuckle. With that being said, the short levels make it hard for any additional tools the game gives you to feel very meaningful, and it loses the ability to teach the player meaningfully new ways to solve puzzles, which tend to be contained to single levels. Most levels can be done in a handful of minutes, with the longest one running me about ten.

In the end, though, it’s difficult not to recommend Donut County just because of how damn charming and warm it is. BK and Mira bickering in person and via text, the plethora of rambling goofs, the low-poly and wonderfully-realized world that you drive the hole to eat up, and the eventual ridiculous places that the story goes are something special. Listening to the contenting and carefree soundtrack while scooping up someone’s motorhome in order to buy a quadcopter hasn’t ever been this relaxing before. It’s never been this anything before, and Donut County has rectified that mistake. It’s light, and soft, and funny and heartfelt, which is sometimes exactly what a game needs to be.

#donut county #ben esposito #dan koestner #steam #ios