Have A Garbage Day! note
So, it all starts as a normal day in Donut County. The sun's shining, the neighbor's honking their head off as usual, and Mira's texting her best raccoon buddy/co-worker, BK, all about it. BK, wishing she'd come into work at the Donut County donut shop located in Donut County sooner, decides to deliver the neighbor a donut.
Cut to six weeks later and the whole County's stuck in a cavern nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine feet underground. Turns out BK's been sucking everyone and everything down remote-controlled sink-holes using a tablet app under the guise of the donut shop's delivery app. Apparently, the raccoons have been staging a covert invasion to acquire non-raccoon-kinds vast quantities of "trash" (read: everything man-made that isn't nailed down... and everything that is!). Admittedly, BK didn't really know what he was doing, he just wanted a shiny new quadcopter. So now it's up to Mira, BK, and the rest of Donut County's colorful denizens to find a way out of the holes, turn the tables on the Raccoons, and get their town back. And maybe get BK to admit that, yes, this is totally his fault.
Donut County is an indie puzzle game developed by Ben Esposito and published by Annapurna Interactive, that kind of plays like a reversed Katamari Damacy. You start by deploying the hole and moving it around to collect small objects (rocks, cell phones, bugs, etc.) with each object increasing the circumference of the hole until you're horking down whole high-rises. The premise starts simply until you need to manipulate specific types of objects (water, fire, fireworks, etc.) to break things down into manageable pieces.
The game was released on August 28, 2018, for Steam, GOG, PlayStation 4 and iOS. Ports to the Xbox One and Nintendo Switch followed on December 18, 2018.
Tropes Include:
- Achievement Mockery: The "Game Over" achievement is earned by losing the boss battle. Despite what your health bar shows, you have to get hit about five or six times before you actually lose.
- Actually Pretty Funny: Even Mira goes "LOL" when BK, prompted to "say something" to Coyote after having wrecked his vegetable business, simply says "Vegetables stink".
- All the Worlds Are a Stage: During the finale, the player visits the Trash King's Biology and Anthropology Labs, which each contain a bunch of different gameplay mechanics previously contained in different levels - the Biology Lab focuses on living creatures, like the large snake, frog, and rabbits, while the Anthropology Lab focuses on human creations, like the fireworks, water pumps, and fire.
- Ambiguously Brown: Mira has dark skin and no other real distinguishing racial characteristics, or even other humans to be compared to.
- Blackout Basement: The inside of the abandoned house is pitch black, but there are light sources to be found.
- Chekhov's Gun: The balloon Pup flew away in during the second level. It's used in the finale.
- Clutching Hand Trap: The Trash King's hand is trapped in a pickle jar because of this. Naturally, he denies that it's even stuck.
- Creative Closing Credits: The game ends with a sequence from the perspective of BK's quadcopter, which the player can fly around Donut County to see how the cast is rebuilding after the incident. The game's credits are hidden around the area for the player to search for as long as they want — afterwards, choosing to "power down" the quadcopter will take the player to the traditional credits.
- Easter Egg: The Trashopedia descriptions hide two hints for special interactions. One gives you a soup recipe that's good enough (or bad enough, given Chef's track record) to make the bird cry, and another gives you a code for the grabber machine in the Raccoon HQ lab that unlocks a treasure vault.
- Eccentric Townsfolk: Donut County, inhabited by a combination of anthropomorphic animals, regular-styled intelligent animals, perfectly normal animals, sentient salt-and-pepper shakers, and humans. All of them quirky as all get out.
- Explosive Breeder: Get a male and female adult bunny to both fall into a hole, and the game will waste no time in letting you know just what they end up doing down there, eventually resulting in a literal eruption of baby bunnies.
- I Knew It!: In-Universe Example. Possum is both a hollow-earther and a flat-earther, somehow. He feels very validated when he ends up down the hole, confirming the 'hollow' part, at least.Possum: HOLLOW EARTH!!! OCCAM'S RAZOR!!!
- In Medias Res: The majority of the game's levels are the stories of most of the townspeople trapped underground recounting their misfortunes after ordering a donut from BK.
- Insistent Terminology: 'Delivering Donuts,' as BK calls creating holes around Donut County.
- It's All About Me: BK is selfish and reluctant to admit to his faults in almost every situation. At the beginning of the game, he's more concerned about his quadcopter being destroyed by Mira rather than him destroying his friends' homes and trapping everyone in a large hole.
- Jump Scare: A rather tame case, but the cat in the abandoned house will occasionally jump out with a yowl and put your light out.
- Lethal Chef: The owner of Cat Soup... doesn't make great soup. The Donut County citizens admit that the restaurant is gross and some of them got food poisoning from the soup.
- Mock Hollywood Sign: A big sign in town that just reads "RACCOON".
- Never My Fault: BK. It takes him WAY too long to fess up to destroying the town, always denying the situation has anything to do with him or even trying to spin it into him saving the town from various problems. This seems to be a common trait among raccoons, as the Trash King acts the same way.
- Obliviously Evil: At first, BK doesn't understand why everybody's so upset that he got the entire town underground, as he sees no problem with that situation.
- Only Sane Man: Mira in the present underground situation. She's aware of BK's actions and is rightfully upset that he destroyed the whole town.
- Playable Epilogue: The "Aftermath" stage which shows that all the characters are back above the ground and are rebuilding the area.
- Playful Hacker: Possum. His USB hacking tool becomes a major elements of the later levels.
- Portable Hole: The "donuts" being delivered are sinkholes that can be remote controlled to slide across the floor, dropping whatever they're into the cavernous underground.
- Punch-Clock Villain: BK spends most of the game unaware he's actually doing anything wrong, and is driven by the desire to buy a quadcopter rather than any actual malice.
- it says something that his first apology is mentioning just doing his job and that it was an evil job is considered "close enough" by Mira. Obviously he should have known better, but in the end Mira knows BK enough to know he's single minded.
- Puzzle Game: With a hint of physics and comedy.
- Reality Is Unrealistic: The author had to fudge the handling of large objects
because players kept expecting them to fall faster than physics said they actually would. - Secret-Keeper: While she didn't know the true nature of the holes or where they led, Mira knew about the holes that BK was making even before the game started and felt guilty about some of BK's deliveries (particularly Coco's).
- Skewed Priorities: At the beginning of the game, BK is more upset about Mira breaking his quadcopter than the entire town being stuck underground because of him.
- Shout-Out: When Mira asks BK for his tablet's password, his first guess is "0451," which is the old Looking Glass Studios door code from System Shock, Deus Ex, and many subsequent games. The actual password is "b0nkeykong," which is the fan name for a particular competitive team format in League of Legends.
- Tactical Suicide Boss: If the King Quadcopter didn't fire the small mines, it would be impossible to defeat.
- Token Human: Mira is the only human seen on screen for the entire game.
- Trap Is the Only Option: Trash King uses a trail of donuts to lure BK's hole into a cage. The trap is pretty obvious and there's no way to avoid it as it's the only way to advance the story.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: The finale mixes things up with a proper boss battle against the Trash King in a quadcopter. Notably, it's the one point where you can actually get a game over.
- Unmoving Plaid: The artificial honeycombs in Honey Nut Forest have the honeycomb pattern fixed to the background rather than the actual honeycombs themselves, regardless of orientation.
- Unusual Euphemism: The mailman constantly honking on his scooter is "honking unbelievable", as BK puts it. Also, "delivering donuts" is used as a euphemism for "swallowing things with holes."
- Villain Protagonist: For a majority of the game, you play as BK while he makes deliveries. He initially doesn't see anything wrong with his job and doesn't admit that he destroyed Donut County with his deliveries. Not to mention that he's far more concerned with Mira destroying his quadcopter than ruining his friends' homes. This changes later when Mira finally gets through to him.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: Mira and BK, especially as the Hole situation escalates.
- We Can Rule Together: Near the end, the Trash King proposes to BK to join him by offering him all sorts of benefits, including a new quadcopter. BK seemingly takes the bait, but it turns out he's still loyal to Mira and Possum.
- What, Exactly, Is His Job?: Mira works for BK, but since the business consists entirely of him sending holes to people who order donuts, it's unclear what she does.
- Where the Hell Is Springfield?: It's implied though not outright stated that Donut County's some odd suburb of Los Angeles. Having both deserts and beaches within reasonable driving distance is one tip-off (including real-life town and national park Joshua Tree, which is about 2 hours away from the greater Los Angeles area), but the big ones include Pup's hot air balloon (and a Donut County delivery truck with a flat tire) explicitly causing bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 405 Expressway, and the main signs of the raccoons' takeover being them changing the Hollywood sign to read 'Raccoon' and converting Griffith Observatory into their trash-can-styled headquarters.
- Wreaking Havok: Objects collide with each other and you often encounter stacks of objects.
