There’s something special about the little short games that manage to cram a lot of awesome into just an hour or two. It’s not a common thing to happen, I’d say, as most titles tend to either aim at a longer gameplay time, or are very short experiments, that don’t feel like a complete experience. Even The Room series started as feeling like a really cool first part of something bigger and not as a complete package, even if the game was fun. But that’s what’s cool about two very different games, Gorogoa and Donut County, that will take you less than 2 hours to complete on the first try, yet still feel like a complete and fun experience.
Gorogoa might be one of the most curious puzzle games I’ve played. Apparently, it was originally envisioned as an interactive novel and in many ways, it still is, telling a simple, but surprisingly effective symbolic and philosophical tale of a spiritual journey through life and time. All while being a puzzle game where the main mechanic is about altering perception of objects on a 2×2 grid by looking at them differently or overlaying one of the images with part of the other, forming a new one. It’s actually one of those cases, where watching the trailer is a must to understand just how awesome it all looks in motion.
There are some hitches along the way occasionally, like the fact that sometimes one image can create action in another image and for whatever reason the check for if both images are ready for this sometimes happens very early, leading to unnecessary wait for another cycle of the animation, while in some parts it works very naturally. There are a few sections that could’ve had a little bit more subtle help, something the game is doing really well most of the time, as in few parts I understood what I could do, but didn’t understand what the end goal should be. But otherwise, it’s a rather short game that is absolutely beautiful, has a really good soundtrack and is a joy to experience.
Donut County is an extremely simplistic, yet very charming and fun title about using a magic hole in the ground to “eat” everything. It’s somewhat reminiscent of titles like Katamari Damacy or the American McGee’s Grimm in that it’s mostly about going from smaller to bigger coverage with your hole and solving relatively easy puzzles which might prevent you from growing the size of the hole. I cannot stress enough how extremely simple it is, being more of a virtual toy, than a game as how we tend to perceive them. Yet, that’s exactly what I love about it.
There’s something great about games that just want to be simple joyous fun times and focus entirely on that, and there aren’t as many titles that do that as I wish there were. There are a few things that can be a bit tiresome even here, of course, mostly due to the fact that there are moments where physics for objects you need to swallow works really bizarrely and you spend more time trying to catch that one last object you need than the game clearly wanted you to. But most of these hour and a half or two hours you’ll spend with the game will be about very chill gameplay, nice tunes and really cool art style. Have a garbage day!