Donut Country is out now on iOS and a bunch of other platforms. It’s a cute looking little game where you move a hole around the screen swallowing up objects, the more you swallow, the bigger the hole gets, so you can swallow bigger objects, etc. Sort of a weird spin on a Katamari Damacy game, except the levels are much smaller affairs and there’s no time limit or anything you can do wrong as far as I can tell.
It’s published by Annapurna Interactive, so it’s got a little bit of indie cachet coming out of the gate, and I really liked Gorogoa, the last game I played from them.
But I’m going to say Donut Country is just okay. It looks nice, it’s pleasantly funny, but there’s really not much to this. I’m not done with it, but unless there are some big surprises, it doesn’t look like there’s much left ahead of me in the game. I don’t regret checking it out, but I’m not here to recommend it either.
It is a little interesting in light of the “controversy” earlier this year, when Hole.io topped iTunes Charts (not to be further confused with holedown, the similarly named but very different game we discussed in this thread recently). It’s also a game about swallowing increasingly large objects with a hole in the ground, and it seems a little premature to call that a genre, so there was some hand-wringing about App Store look-a-likes and clones and rip-offs and whatnot.
On Monday, [Donut Country developer Ben] Esposito tweeted about a clone of the game released by a publisher known as Voodoo.io. The iOS and Android app is called Hole. io, and unlike Donut County, there’s no storyline or characters, but the gameplay mechanism of being a hole and eating things to get bigger is the same.
“There are differences,” says Esposito. “Donut County is a story-based puzzle game, and Hole. io combines the premise of Donut County […] with the ‘.io’ king of the hill formula.”
So if you were eagerly awaiting the conclusion of that saga, here you go, check it out. But it’s probably not essential.
Unrelated: does anyone know how to force common markdown to not create a URL? The website for hole.io is not http://hole.io, it’s hole-io.com, but short of these ugly inline code-blocks (or inserting a space as I did in the Polygon quote) I couldn’t find a way to stop Discourse from treating the game of the game as a (wrong) link. @Clay, you’re a smart guy, any idea?