Donut County Review: Special Delivery
Donut County is Katamari with a hole instead of a ball. That sounds reductive, but it's also what this game is. You steer a hole around and things fall in it, which makes your hole bigger so you can make bigger things fall in, and so on. It shakes up the Katamari formula with some simple puzzles and improves on it in that it's much easier to tell whether something will fit in a hole than the often arbitrary logic of whether something will adhere to your katamari. Levels also tend to explode.
It also has a much more involved story than any of the Katamari games, following raccoon BK and "friends" as they recount how the raccoons ruined the town and made them all trapped in a hole. It's largely entertaining, but maybe a little too long. A few of the characters and scenes don't really add anything, and it overuses some gimmicks like water that aren't particularly fun. It also commits a cardinal sin for these kinds of games, which is to not have a level where you eventually suck up the entire city or planet. The last level is cool, but you have to have that level. You just do.
And this is a little nitpicky, but I have to call out the special thanks in the credits saying it was "inspired by an idea from Peter Molyneux" because, no. No it wasn't. You made Katamari, and we can all see that. If you're going to give credit for inspiration, you owe a lot more to largely-forgotten Keita Takahashi than Molyneux. Come on. It's not a problem with the game itself, but credit being misdirected like that bothers me.
Anyway, it's good and worth playing for a few hours.
Time to beat: ~2 hours
Platform PC, also available on everything
MSRP: $13, which is somewhat unreasonable. Free on GamesPass