Donut County doesn’t ask you to get anywhere near the edge of your seat, but this is a relaxing experience just as engaging as the most demanding twitch platformer. Figuring out how to submerge everything in a level was a really laid-back, yet tactile experience. The gameplay is incredibly simple in this regard, but fiddling with physics to systematically consume a crocodile’s house and home is equal parts absurd and engaging. However, as you suck in objects, the hole will grow in circumference, to the point where you’ll be taking entire apartment buildings down into the depths below.

To do this, you’ll control his sinkhole, which starts out each scenario donut-sized. Each town resident has a zany story of what they were up to when BK enveloped their property and sent them underground, and you’ll get to work backwards in time, helping BK accomplish his goal of, let’s say, relocating the citizens of Donut County. The game takes place nine-hundred and ninety feet below ground, with the residents of Donut County gathered around a campfire, chewing out BK for sinking the town into destitution to earn an RC drone.

Perhaps I’ll say this Donut County takes its wild premise and executes on it with such precision and charm that this is easily one of the best games of 2018. If playing as a self-centered raccoon named BK opening up sinkholes to accrue enough points to buy your own quadcopter isn’t the most unique conceit for a game that you’ve heard of in a long time, I’m not sure what to say.

There is nothing I value more in a game than creativity and originality and few games better exemplify these qualities than Donut County, the recently released sinkhole simulator from Ben Esposito and Annapurna Interactive.

Donut county game amazo