Donut County
A portal into a tale of raccoon wrongdoing.
DonutCounty is delicious. A story-based physics puzzler where you play BK; a raccoon who ostensibly works as a donut store delivery dispatcher. But instead of dispatching donuts he is dispatching holes in order to suck up objects, people and creatures because a) raccoons LOVE to collect trash and b) BK really wants to level up his game and earn a sweet quadcopter.
The puzzling is light but enjoyably so. You move the hole with your cursor and if something on the ground above it is small enough it’ll fall in. The more trash you collect, the bigger the hole will get.
The game-within-a-game idea works well, and it allows relatively slight gameplay to feel in keeping with the idea of a daft but compulsive and damaging app. Levels are short and sweet, the cast is entertaining, and the story moves at a fair clip so, even though you can get through it in about an hour, it’s a jam-packed hour.
And that’s to say nothing of the Trashopedia entries, which describe objects from a raccoon point of view, or the flourishes which infuse the animals with personality. My favourite was cutting to BK in the donut shop while he’s texting with Mira. He’s on his back, feet waggling, and tapping a screen. It’s so “teen-lounging-on-a-bedwith-their-legs-up-the-wall”.
There was one dodgy moment in terms of puzzling, where I couldn’t get the solution to a lategame scenario to register — a rare moment of fussiness where I repeated the only possible action over and over until one time it worked. But it was a lone irritant in a lovely experience.
In terms of reference points, there’s something of
LostConstellation in here – it’s less about solving puzzles and more about interacting with a vivid world in an easy manner.
Donut County is an entertaining diversion; it’s simple to play, and doesn’t out-stay its welcome. Small gems like this are a valuable and finite source of relief.
Philippa Warr