What I'm Playing - No. 152
Welcome back to another weekly wrap-up of the games I’ve been playing over the past week!
This post is spoiler-free.
Click a title to skip to that section. Games contained within this post:
Donut County (PC)
Sometimes, you just want a short game with a simple, fun premise and good music. Donut County is exactly that, with a lot of charm and humor sprinkled on top for good measure.
The concept is simple: you control a hole. By moving the hole around on the ground, you can position it under things and cause them to fall down into the dark abyss. When something falls into the hole, it gets bigger, allowing you to absorb bigger and bigger objects, until you’ve eventually consumed everything in the level. Then you move onto to the next level, and repeat the cycle. It’s a delightful gameplay loop that’s fun from the start, introduces a few extra interesting concepts throughout, and ends before any of it gets stale.
Donut County is sort of like a simple puzzle game at times, but usually it feels more like a relaxing/zen game due to the simplicity. It does that job really well though! The music reinforces that relaxed feeling with a very chill soundtrack, and there’s a sense of joy in the gameplay that never goes away. There’s just something satisfying about moving the hole under an object, and watching as its center of gravity causes it to slowly topple and slide into the hole, especially when it’s something as big as a boulder or even a house.
The quality of the story Donut County manages to tell in its roughly 2 hour runtime is also very impressive. The story is told primarily through short cutscenes between levels. It’s set in Donut County, a place where talking anthropomorphic animals and humans live together in harmony. Well, I say “humans,” but the only human you see is Mira, one of the main characters. Her raccoon friend, BK, has an app on his smartphone that lets him summon up holes, and he gains reward points on his account for all the things he drops into them. It’s a pretty bizarre plot, but it’s a lot of fun, and has a lot of funny moments too. It definitely doesn’t take itself too seriously, which feels right at home with the rest of the game, and I didn’t even expect this game to have a story, so I was pleasantly surprised.
Like I mentioned earlier, you can play through all of Donut County in a little over 2 hours, and if you have the opportunity, there’s really no reason not to play it. If you’re looking for a short, genuinely fun game, consider giving Donut County a try.
