Donut County review: A charming and bizarre physics puzzler about a mysterious hole
Ben Esposito is an indie games developer whose previous works include mysterious-house-in-the-woods simulator What Remains of Edith Finch.
A rising star in the industry, he seems drawn towards the abstract. In 2012 he worked on The Unfinished Swan, a PlayStation exclusive in which you exist in a blank white world that only reveals itself as you chuck paint around.
After that, on a commission from digital artist collective Arcane Kids, he created a dreamlike satire of social media addiction called CRAP! No One Loves Me. “Meet fellow teens at the Vape Shop,” writes Esposito in the short game’s description. “Pick a sick custom coffin. Boost into purgatory. Will the Baroness take pity on your lonely no-followers having soul, or will she grind your bones into dust? Is there a difference? Is there such a thing as relief?”
Though still a very weird game, Donut County is one of Esposito’s more conventional projects. The original idea came from a Twitter parody account satirising the ideas of Peter Molyneux, a British developer known for his high-concept and often impractical game designs. The tweet imagined a game in which you play a hole in the ground. Esposito ran with it.
So, in Donut County you are a hole, controlled remotely by a mischievous raccoon. You can move around on the ground, positioning yourself beneath objects so that they fall into you. As more and more things fall into the hole, the hole becomes larger, allowing it to consume bigger and bigger things, like cars and people.
Katamari is a clear inspiration, a game in which you roll up objects of increasing size, starting from paperclips and ending with entire buildings. Donut County’s scale is less dramatic, instead focusing on a series of short levels based around the homes and workplaces of the county’s animal inhabitants. You hoover up snakes in the desert, and eggs at the local farm. There are a few light physics-puzzle elements along the way, but nothing stops you in your tracks.
Gobbling up all of this random detritus is gently satisfying. It’s a form of therapy, destroying everything with your gaping, hungry hole. And the writing throughout is light-hearted and low-key funny. Every object you swallow can be examined later on, and each has its own description written in the style of weird Twitter.
If Donut County is about anything, it’s social decay in urban spaces as viewed through the nihilism of a trash obsessed raccoon. If not, then it’s probably just a nice game about being a hole.