Donut County is one of those titles that just screams out how adorable it is. Having played it I can confirm this is true.

With a sale on, and one of the last chances I have before I have to tighten the budget for life reasons, I grabbed it at a slight discount and completed it in a few short, but wonderful, hours.

You play as BK, a raccoon, and his friend. And you and all the town are trapped down a hole, and believe BK to be the responsible individual. When people called up the donut shop he ran, a hole would appear in the ground and swallow them up.

The story of the game is how each individual fell down the hole, how they get out, and solving the problem of the hole itself. All down through little (unskippable) cut scenes where people chat over a social media phone app that has a 'quack' duck button. And the events down at the bottom of the hole prior to your escape.

The other characters are a mix of intelligent animals, weird pologony alien thingos and outright anthros. This is never brought up or questioned. Chickens appear to be just for food.

And gosh darn it, the level of internet shitposting in the conversations really made me smile and chuckle.

I've never played 'Katamari Damacy', but I have played the excellent 'Wonderful End of the World'. It's a close genre match. Though rather than trying to roll everything up you are trying to grow a larger hole by eating more and more items. Eventually swallowing caravans, buildings, and mountains.

The hole is reset to a small size on every zone, there's no making the planet into a hole or anything really crazy. It is not too big a concern. There's in game reasons why and it allows each stage to work individually rather than as the sum of you know what.

Overall puzzles are fairly simple. Just move to the next largest item on the screen, allow it to fall in, and repeat.

Later levels involve a catapult, where you can throw out the last item collected high in the sky. Either to hit a leaver/button or to cause it to smash itself on the ground to cause a certain effect.

This is honestly the game's weakest portion. There's very little in the way of puzzles for this one. While it does make it all-ages friendly, it severely limits replayability.

The game is wrapped up in 2 to 4 hours, depending on how much you quack around and attempt some of the achievements. Only one has any real difficulty and will be spoiled as soon as you go looking for it.

Would I of liked more levels? Post Game Content? Hell yeah. The game is frickin adorable and many of the item descriptions made me laugh. I don't need anything super challenging. And if fan-level support was ever made through Steam Workshop I'd have to take a look, even though I purchased it on GOG.

The low poly flat lighting appearance this game uses has been showing up a lot lately as a stylistic choice. It works quite well here. Always clear on what an item is, and contrasted against the floor/sky/rooms you are in.

There's a good choice of animation and lack of animation of the cutscenes too. Simpler models only animating when needed to, rather than trying to do too much.

While the music is not overly memorable, I did not find myself humming along post play. It is a lovely minimal sound that syncs in with the animation. Characters are unvoiced and strong emotions have good sound and visual effects.

Basically, it made all the right choices.

After having a rough year, I'm glad I ended it on this game. Sadly very short, but highly entertaining and totally adorable.

If you like falling down holes, or just want some fun for a few hours, I do say you should go take a look.

Game Acquisition: GOG (End Of Year Sale 2018)
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 15 December 2018
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Windows 7 (64bit only)
Processor: Intel Core2 Duo E8400
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: Radeon HD 3870
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Storage: 500 MB available space