Duration: 15:44

18 views

2

Donut Dodo was released in June 2022 for PC and Switch, where you guide a baker to collect donuts spread across 5 levels. The game's main gimmick is after you collect a donut, one of the other donuts on screen will start to flash - if you collect only the flashing donuts, they are successively worth 150 points more. Which donut starts to flash seems more or less random.

Each stage has 15 donuts, so the maximum amount of points you can gather from donuts is 16,215. Missing one donut will break the combo and start you from scratch, which will can cost you between 2,100 points for the stage or 8,400 depending when you break the combo. (Assuming you only break it once)

Each stage has a timer that counts down from 9,000 - when you collect your last donut you get a stage bonus based on the time left. This can add up to 30k+ points per run, so it's an incentive to try to play as well as you can quickly. Nothing happens if the timer hits zero, you just get no points.

Adding to this, each stage has one bonus fruit that spawns early in the stage (though at a seemingly random time). These fruits start at 1,000 and increase 1k per fruit you collect, with a special burger appearing in stage 2-1 worth 25,000. The fruit values continue to increase into the second loop, so even if the game tells you cherries are worth 1,000 points the second one you get is worth 1,000. In total the fruits add 74,000 to your score.

Complicating everything are a series of environmental hazards, enemies, and the titular dodo. Every higher difficulty adds more enemies, and increases the speed everything moves at and the frequency of the dodo's attacks. Things can get pretty hectic; the enemies and hazards can easily trap you, put you in a position where you can't collect your fruit on time, or choose between dying and breaking your donut combo. Keeping an eye on what's coming from every side is important. There are four main enemies:

- The Dodo, who will flash and shoot fireballs at you (or drop them on you, depending on the stage). The hitbox for his small fireballs is surprisingly large; it's best not to mess with them.
- Small mice, which run back and forth, only turning around when they reach the end of their platform or a wall
- A toilet, which can follow you up and down ladders and off of ledges. Its behavior is influenced by your position, so you can bait it to moving in a way that's more manageable. It's too tall to jump over, but if it back you into a wall you can sometimes avoid taking a hit by jumping just as it turns around.
- A ghost, which starts spawning on Medium and Hard and flies in a sine wave pattern across the screen.

Finally, you get 6,000 points per extra life at the end of the game (3,000 in the Easy Medium course), so relatively few risks taken for score are worth losing a life over. Extends are granted every 15,000, so scoring well will build you a big endgame bonus - you could potentially get as many as 19 extends, meaning a no miss scoring run could leave you with 22 total lives and a 132,000 bonus.

To break 400,000, I would need decent times on all stages, collect all donuts without breaking the chain, collect all fruits, and lose no more than two lives. Or, in a no-miss run you could break the chain a couple of times, or miss one fruit. The top score on steam seems to be about 420k, which is probably near the top end of what is possible given the time bonuses and the random nature of the donut order.

This run had 9 deaths. Everything else went well enough - my time was good enough that with 7 fewer deaths + the saved respawn time I'd have just barely made it to 400k.

The game has four courses - Easy/Medium, Medium/Hard (both two loop courses), Sugar Rush Speedrun (which takes the Hard course and challenges you to clear it quickly - I don't know if there's any benefit to collecting donuts in a particular order there), and a weekly score run.

There's an Exa Arcadia port which has a main game of all three loops and score attack modes for each individual difficulty, as well as a different character (cosmetic to my knowledge), an additional stage and retooled scoring:
- donut score increases by 125 instead of 150
- fruit values always stay at their original values -
- extends are every 100k
- fruit are always worth their initial values (ie, the second cherry is worth 1k instead of 7k) the burger is worth 20,000 instead of 25,000
- you get two bonus rounds for a relatively free ~18k
- spare lives are worth 5,000 at the end of the game
- the timer on the ferris wheel and dodo lair stages has been increased to 11,000. I'm not sure if anything happens when the timer is depleted.

I've seen scores for the Exa version around 420k. Napkin math tells me 440k is probably around the score ceiling.

It's Windows/PC only, but it runs very well in Wine, and most of my time with the game has been with my Mac.