Donut County is one of those cutesy indie game with a very limited scope. You control a hole, and you move the hole around to make objects fall into it. As objects fall into it, the hole gets bigger, allowing you to grab up even larger objects. For most of the game, the gameplay loop is nearly identical – you start out as a small hole in someone’s yard, go around hoovering up increasingly large objects, and then eventually suck down their house. Rinse repeat for 10+ levels.
You wouldn’t think that a two hour long game would have issues with repetition, but somehow, Donut County does.
And this is the main flaw of this game. I don’t have anything against very short games – The Stanley Parable is one of my favorite games, and it is very brief.
The issue here is that the game doesn’t really have much substance to it.
Almost all of the game consists of doing the exact same thing, over and over again. There’s a couple of mechanics which sort of vaguely mix things up a little:
• You get a catapult that lets you shoot stuff back up out of the hole, which makes it a bit smaller but lets you knock stuff down or otherwise interact with the environment. This sounds neat, but only appears in a few levels, and is mostly used for the same purpose repeatedly, so doesn’t manage to mix up gameplay all that much until the very end.
• You bring down a snake, whose tail can be used to whack stuff in the environment as it sticks out of the hole.
• You suck down a fire, which can set stuff on fire in the environment to make them easier to suck down or launch off fireworks that you have sucked in.
• You grab a carrot, that you use to attract other stuff with.
This all sounds neat and all, but this is literally all of the gameplay variety there is, and there isn’t really a whole lot done with most of these mechanics. Two of them appear only once or twice, and none of them are ever used all that creatively.
The game only really involves any degree of puzzle solving at the very end of the game, as the last few areas demand that the player solve some fairly simple tasks to progress. And then at the very end of the game, there’s an actual boss fight, using the mechanics you’ve got to do something fairly clever.
And then the game ends.
This is the real issue with the game – it doesn’t really aspire to be very much. Most of it is the same thing over and over again, and the few moments of cleverness make up less than 15% of the game’s length.
I would have really liked to see this game actually try to do more than it did with the mechanic – a two hour long game is totally fine, but the point of making a super short game is to completely avoid repetition. This game somehow is short *and* repetitive.
Outside of the core gameplay, there’s a rather silly story going on – a certain raccoon has sucked up everyone in Donut County, and most of the story is a frame story, where you have a discussion in a cave deep underground where everyone ended up, and the characters recount how they got sucked into a hole between the levels while complaining at each other.
The game is chock full of internet speech – the two main characters literally say lol and JK, and some of the game is also told via text message conversations on smart phones. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it lends the whole thing an extremely informal air, and while that works for the game, it still ends up feeling a bit weird.
That said, the trashpedia – an in-game encyclopedia which fills up with details on the items you collected in each level, from the point of view of the raccoon – is quite funny, with the various descriptions being pretty humorous and showing the limitations of the raccoon, as well as his mentality about the world.
But this wasn’t enough to carry the game for me. Yes, the game has some funny bits to it, but the actual core gameplay is pretty mediocre and surprisingly uncreative given how interesting it sounds like it would be at first.
2.0