Donut County review (Ben Esposito, 2018, PC, Consoles, Switch, Mobile, Apple TV)
Donut County is a casual, cosy, narrative puzzle game set in an ultra-capitalist, even fascist, raccoon hellscape. You control an ever-expanding hole in the ground, swallowing objects in deeply earthy, American scenes in-between cutscenes set underground with a squabbling cast of critters, and just the one human.
The writing is fun, ironic, and maybe even post-ironic; I wouldn’t be able to read you the dictionary definition, but I know it when I see it - character dialogue being written (there’s no voice acting, just Animal Crossing-tier chirps) with ‘LOL’ in it, for example, and even more nebulous traces of this idea in the voice of BK, who is possibly now and forever the greatest Raccoon dickhead in a video game. There’s a thesis to be written about why and how it is that raccoons in video games tend to be cast as horrible creatures through an anti-capitalist lens; that’s not what this is, but do write in if you have any thoughts you would like to file in, essentially, the bin.
Donut County is about trash, oddly enough; and waste, and minimalism. I enjoy these themes, and the conflict between the Raccoon set arguing that they need trash to live, so why not suck up an entire county, and its residents being very mad about their existences and livelihoods being taken from them. These people haven’t opted into a life of trash; they’ve had it thrust upon them.
This is a cute game, and the hole in the ground mechanic is surreal, but the world it takes place in is steeped in realism, and the unsettling reality that end-stage capitalism has no easy antidote. At the end of the game, when events come to a close, the human character, Mira, comments that ‘things won’t seem normal for a while’, and that’s… a lot! A ragtag group has [redacted], and yet there’s still an uneasiness about what they’re even going back to. You get a little cutesy credit vignette of the world they’re [redacting], but that’s really it.
Beneath the name ‘Donut County’, the art-style, the anthropomorphic animals, the physics… whatever; this is a game that goes hard. I think that your tired, disillusioned and traumatised will recognise a lot in this and feel a lot of things about that, with the surface-level cute tone being the guiderope to get them to the end.
I quite like, in retrospect, that Donut County still manages, in its short duration, to raise these issues in a satisfying way; it’s laugh out loud funny, to the point where I’m not going to play Donut County again for a fair while because I want all of the lines to land in the same way. It’s not designed for repeated play, other than achievements; which is fine! It gets in and out having accomplished what it set out to do, and I respect that. More games should be like Donut County.
The game is very simple; the left stick and the A button will get you through the bulk of it. It’s not especially difficult; I found a couple of the puzzle solutions a little bit esoteric and I wasn’t exactly sure how I triggered them, but it’s linear enough, apart from one more ambitious section near the end, that you could probably train a computer to beat it, like they do for chess. Gently press your head against the wall enough and you will beat Donut County. That’s not a criticism, but an accessibility note! I had a great time, beating the whole thing in a single three hour sitting, though spending chunks putting the controller down to gush about it.
For a short, down to Earth (har har) narrative controlled from an unusual perspective, that benefits from the player having empathy, compassion and some form of depression, I can’t fault Donut County. It’s a short, eerily cosy story game with a fun central mechanic, and that’s all it needs to be.
