Donut County review

Order a doughnut and suddenly you’ve got a giant hole in the ground eating up all your possessions. This is Donut County, a puzzle game which has you swallowing objects up using an expanding hole as you devour more objects.

The game is highly simplistic in that there’s very little opportunity to fail. The premise to Donut County is that you start off small and expand to swallow up the bigger items such as buildings and giant cliffs, as you deliver ‘donut’ orders to the locals.

The puzzle solving aspects of the game come down to elements such as the catapult function unlocked later on in the game, whereby you throw objects back out the hole to hit out of reach items. There are also plenty of secrets to discover on each level, which have requirements to unlock various achievements. Some of which are not immediately obvious and require some reading into.

The other obstacle you will face is water. Pools of water will flood your hole to the brim, so you’ll need to find a nearby bird to drink up the water from your pool. Once emptied you can rinse and repeat this method to get rid of water on levels. Clearing the area of everything is essential to progressing, so you’ll need to consume everything.

“In terms of visuals, the physics-based puzzler adopts a soothing art style whilst also keeping a close attention to detail.”

Amongst all this though there is a wacky story to be told and one that is thoroughly enjoyable to play. With the creative gameplay, the title revolves around the retelling of the donut shop owner and how his hole-creating evil ways evolved.

In terms of visuals, the physics-based puzzler adopts a soothing art style whilst also keeping a close attention to detail, with hand drawn detailing sketched onto environment objects and the cast of animal characters are brought to life in a creative way.

That also extends to the dialogue which is subtitled dialogue with no voice acting – but the title doesn’t really warrant or need any actual voices for its characters. The dialogue present tells the story in an engaging way and despite some long sections back at camp with multiple text-based dialogue screens to read through, these can be skipped through quite quickly if you don’t fancy reading for a good minute or two.

The core of the action will always come from its gameplay which offers a variety of settings from a desert snake-filled ranch to a secure secret HQ. There’s plenty of different back drops which gelp to create the engaging story offered by Donut County.

At most Donut County will offer a good 3-4 hours of solid gameplay that is light-hearted and enjoyable. The game flags as slightly too easy to breeze through, but in terms of the fun gameplay in creating havoc with holes in the ground, I would definitely recommend picking this up for a session one night.