I picked up three months of Game Pass about two and a half months ago, and I’ve utterly wasted it. The entire point of purchasing it was to spend my downtime working through games that I’ve seen other games compared to since comparisons are rarely used just once, but then I went and got sidetracked. Luckily, I managed to find enough time to blow through Donut County after seeing multiple Steam reviewers compare Rain on Your Parade to it. Untitled Goose Game, Donut County, and Rain on Your Parade serve as a kind of cutesy meme-game trinity, though there’s a clear hierarchy. Donut County falls between the okayish but massively overhyped goose game and the more varied and creative Rain on Your Parade.

Basically, Donut County is a game about growing a hole by moving it around so that objects fall into it. As the hole becomes bigger, you can fit larger objects into it, and clearing areas of objects either unlocks a new area to destroy or ends the level, pushing the story forward. It’s cute. It’s enjoyable. It’s short and somehow slightly repetitive. Overall, I like it despite the fact that it’s not the strongest part of the aforementioned meme-game trinity.

Buy Donut County on Switch, Xbox, or Playstation. Or don’t. But ideally, do, because those are affiliate links and I’d like to buy a house someday.

I like Donut County‘s weird humor more than I like its text-speak acronyms and such

Donut County is a game about a human named Mira and her raccoon friend and employer, BK, who runs a Donut store. Every time somebody orders a donut, BK instead creates a hole and moves it around to swallow them and everything around them, to the point where much of the story occurs underground. Most of the levels are flashbacks as each of the world’s characters explain what happened to them while trying to make the point that what BK did was wrong. The whole thing is cute and lighthearted, with Donut County‘s cast of quirky, dopey victims being gradually introduced.

And that’s really all there is to the story. BK has some character development, and some of the inhabitants come up with a plan for escaping the hole, but not a lot else happens in Donut County.

That makes sense, to a certain degree. This is a short game that you can and likely will finish in one or two sittings. There’s not a lot of time for things to develop. Still, much of that time is spent in pointless text message-adjacent conversations filled with colloquialisms that I can only describe as “peak avocado-toast millennial goofiness.”

Donut County‘s writing sometimes reads like it was composed entirely in Tweet form, warts and all. That’s unique but probably not a good thing unless you live and breathe Twitter. I don’t and found it grating.

Destroying things with holes is entertaining, but the attempts to keep it fresh aren’t great

Each level consists of Katamari Damacy-like escalation; most objects are simply too big to fall into the hole at first, so you have to find smaller objects to grow it. As the hole grows, it becomes possible to swallow up increasingly bigger objects, which in turn grows the hole even more until you’re capable of swallowing parts of the scenery that you wouldn’t normally expect to be able to interact with. It’s weirdly satisfying.

Along the way, there are scenery changes that occur when you swallow up everything in an area, though that’s not always the case. In one especially bizarre example of the logic breaking down, the only way to move on to the next scene is to create a soup by mixing ingredients together in your hole (while avoiding the roaches who spawn and ruin the whole thing if they touch it), then feed it to a chef bird.

Not all of these “wait, what?” moments are as aimlessly bad as that—swallowing up bunnies so that they mate and shoot out a large stream of baby bunnies that destroy a nearby building is juvenile but amusing.

These types of moments highlight the way that the gameplay lacks straightforward rules in its attempt to be cute and random about everything, though. In one level, moving the hole over water fills it up and requires moving to a nearby bird so that it can drink the liquid and restore your hole’s ability to swallow objects. In later levels, water is swallowed like anything else. It doesn’t create a huge amount of confusion since levels are small enough to simplify experimentation, but when Donut County ended with a boss fight against a flying opponent who shoots cement, I found myself wondering which hole rules it was operating under.

Like everything else, Donut County‘s music and art are cute and lacking in impact

Visually, Donut County goes the low-poly, cel-shaded route that so many indie games have walked down over the past 5 or so years. Much like how the meme-game trinity varies in quality, so too does the quality of this art style; sometimes you get a mediocre Infected Shelter or Kentucky Route Zero that’s a muddled mess of confused colors, while other times you get an Iris and the Giant that wields its art style and color contrasts like a weapon. I wouldn’t say that Donut County reaches quite the same heights of distinctness as Iris and the Giant‘s visuals do, but it does use color to help its many characters and areas stand out, and this lends an undeniably pretty, screenshot-bait quality to many of the levels and scenes.

Donut County‘s glitchy, often minimalist acoustic music, meanwhile, is well-produced and bouncy enough to reflect the zany chaos of the story and premise. It doesn’t connect to anything in any meaningful way, however, and given Donut County‘s short length and the strong similarities between many levels’ background music, I couldn’t remember any of the tracks even hours after finishing the game. The music serves as a fun complement to the gameplay when you’re playing, though, and it’s produced well enough that I was genuinely surprised by how little of it I remembered afterward.

Story: 2/3 Gameplay: 2/3 Visuals: 1.5/2 Music: 1.5/2 ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ – 7/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

A super late Donut County review first appeared on Killa Penguin