$12.99Is Donut County worth it?
Donut County is worth it if…
- you want a low-pressure puzzle game for a relaxed evening
- you like games with a silly premise played completely straight
- you have two or three hours and want a story with an ending
- you enjoy witty dialogue and absurd humor more than a challenge
Screenshots
A hole that eats everything
Each level gives you a small hole under a small corner of the county, and one job: move it under things until they fall in. Every swallowed object makes the hole wider, so a fence becomes a car becomes a shed becomes the whole house. The puzzles come from what you swallow and in what order. Water fills the hole and blocks anything else from dropping in until it drains. A spicy pepper turns into a burst of flame. Combine a carrot with another carrot and you get bunnies. Fireworks go off. When the hole is full, you can catapult things back out, to solve a puzzle or just to make a mess.
A raccoon owes everyone an apology
BK drives the hole for the raccoon crew, trading his friends' belongings for prizes from an app, and things get out of hand: he falls into his own hole and ends up 999 feet underground with Mira, his best friend, and every neighbor he flattened. The story unfolds as conversations between levels, told in quick, modern, very funny dialogue, and it carries you from start to finish. Between chapters you can browse the Trashopedia, where the entries on each stolen item are a highlight. It is a story about greed, donuts and accountability, told by cute animals, and it lands better than that sentence suggests.
How long does it take to finish?
Is it difficult?
Not really. The hole grows as long as you keep feeding it, and the puzzles ask for light thinking rather than skill: figuring out that a pool of water blocks the hole, or that something swallowed can be catapulted back out at just the right spot. It is a game to unwind with, played at your own pace, not a test.
Is it good for kids?
It is family friendly, cute and easy to control, so younger players can enjoy steering the hole and swallowing houses. The humor is written with a wink at adults too, so it works as something to play together rather than a game aimed only at children.
Can you play it more than once?
There is little reason to replay it once the story is done, since each level has one way through. What holds up is everything around that: the dialogue, the music, the Trashopedia entries and the pleasure of dropping a whole gas station into the ground. Treat it as a great one-evening story rather than a game you return to weekly.
