It’s very easy to control the hole simply by sliding your finger around the screen, and while I didn’t play the game for any other platform, it would be hard to imagine it feeling any more natural with a controller or mouse. Early on, your main challenge is simply to figure out which items to gobble up in what order, since it’s pretty intuitive that the bigger stuff needs to be saved for later when your hole has grown larger.

As shown off right from the title screen, the core mechanic in Donut County is your control of a hole, which always starts each level off small but gets bigger with every item you send down below. Each level revisits one of those characters and their fateful encounter with what’s in the middle of most donuts (not all, as the game reminds us that jelly-filled donuts, fritters and the like have no holes) as a hole inevitably comes for them and all of their possessions.

The link between them is that they’ve all ordered donuts thanks to a new app that allows the goodies to be delivered right to their doors, and since BK is the delivery person, it’s not a big stretch to say he’s involved somehow. Once these two friends end up 999 feet underground with pretty much everyone else from their community, the story unfolds by having a colorful cast of characters telling their own stories of woe one by one. It’s fair to say that BK is even more hesitant to do the right thing - in that respect he shares some personality traits with Rocket Raccoon of Guardians of the Galaxy fame - but as we learn later, he has his reasons. While Mira is a reluctant hero, she feels compelled to take action when people and things start going missing and suspects BK and his fellow raccoons have something to do with it. That strange-sounding pairing is actually pretty normal since the titular county is populated mostly by anthropomorphic animals, though chickens and snakes are still … well, chickens and snakes.

Donut County is primarily the story of a young woman named Mira who works at a donut store with her best friend, a raccoon named BK. Turns out it’s both exactly that and a lot more at the same time. What matters is that it made an intriguing enough showing that people were anxious for this physics-based puzzle game to come out and see exactly what you’re doing besides swallowing things up with a hole, which was the biggest thing that you took away from its E3 appearance. Yes, it’s probably because it’s also coming out on PC and PS4, but that’s sort of beside the point. Not a ton of mobile games get shown off at E3, relative to console and PC titles, but Donut County ($4.99) did this year.

Donut county game length