Weird title huh?
I saw this comment on Twitter with the image next to it, and I couldn’t help but get curious. Was someone having an awful day? Was this a new movement we all had to get behind? Clearly the black background was very ominous. Yet the rose had to mean something too?
A little search provided me with the answer. This line was taken from a game: Donut County 🍩 ! And pretty soon after that I saw a women I’m following on her blog mention this game too. I just had to check it out!
Your goal? Swallowing it all up
Sometimes a game can start out simple, and still capture your attention. This was the case with Donut County: I was immediately thrown into a landscape with a hole, with no real clue about what to do. Moving the hole around made that clear pretty quick though: it swallowed everything in its path, providing it was small enough to fit. The hole grew the more I swallowed (Hey! Sounds familiar with my growing waistline!)
Strange how satisfying this was: even when a little happy dog fell in the hole I wasn’t sorry about what I had caused. Even though I had no idea about what waited for it in the world beneath! I guess that is key to Donut County: you are the bad guy! In this case, the Raccoon called BK. Funny, by the way, that Tom Nook who is well known in Animal Crossing as being a greedy businessman, is a Tanuki. And the Japanese term Tanuki translates to a Raccoon dog in western language. Why do these creatures get such a bad rep?
What happens Nine Hundred Ninety Nine Feet Below?
Anyway, as you go along in the game, more and more of the story behind the holes becomes clear. There is a connection between the local donut shop where BK and his friend Mira work. Customers call to have donuts delivered, but instead of those colourful pastries, they get a hole.
After you have swallowed up everything in your path in the first level, you go and look what happens to the unfortunates that have followed Alice to Wonderland.
Slowly but surely the story unfolds, and with each chapter you clear, you understand why this came about. Every character you meet is quirky and funny, how did they think up these character?
The puzzler doesn’t stick with just Holes though. There’s a little bit of strategy involved as well, a level where my hole filled up with water constantly comes to mind. And eventually BK orders a catapult to launch things back from the hole up, which makes for another kind of puzzle.
Weird and wacky fun
Donut County is weird, wacky and funny. Not just in the game mechanics, but the texts are funny too. You can check after a chapter what things got sucked into the hole for instance. And the description is often hilarious.
Donut County is available on PS4 and on mobile, so I decided to buy the game in iOS. It seems to be very well fitted for my iPads touch controls and at a price of €5,49 I felt it was worth a shot!
Ben Esposito, the developer, made a laid back game with funny tests and an interesting story that we might actually learn something from! And pretty soon, on December 18, the game will come to the Switch as well!