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Donutal Review: Saving Earth One Alien Interview at a Time
By Justin D Williams
When I first started Donutal, I wasn’t expecting interviewing aliens to become as entertaining as it did. The basic idea sounds almost too simple: extraterrestrials arrive at an international spaceport, I question them about why they want to enter Earth, and then I decide whether they should be allowed in. Once I started meeting the different species, comparing their stories, scanning them for potential threats, and seeing the consequences of my decisions afterward, the job became surprisingly addictive. What I enjoyed most about Donutal is that it never needed combat or complicated mechanics to make me feel responsible for protecting Earth. Most of my time was spent talking, investigating, and trying to figure out whether the alien standing in front of me was being honest. Sometimes I felt like an immigration officer, sometimes I felt like a detective, and occasionally I felt like I was simply waiting for an alien to say something ridiculous enough to make my decision for me.
My job throughout Donutal was essentially deciding which extraterrestrials could enter Earth and which ones needed to be turned away. Every alien had a reason for visiting, but I quickly learned that simply asking someone what they wanted was not always enough. Some applicants were completely harmless, while others gave me reasons to start questioning whether allowing them onto the planet was really a good idea.
The interview menu gave me several categories of questions to work with. General questions allowed me to ask about their purpose for coming to Earth, Diet covered what their species eats, Home Planet taught me more about where they came from, and Required Information handled the mandatory details I needed before making a final judgment. Those categories sound straightforward, but deciding which questions actually mattered became an important part of how I approached each interview.
I also found some of the General conversations genuinely funny because certain aliens were incredibly blunt about why they were visiting. There were moments where I expected someone to hide their intentions, only for their answer to basically tell me that letting them through would be a terrible decision. I would sit there looking at the screen thinking, “Well, you certainly made my job easier.” Not every applicant was that obvious, however. Some required me to dig much deeper, and those were the interviews I enjoyed the most because I had to start putting information together instead of simply reacting to one suspicious answer.
One feature I regularly relied on was the scanner. If something about an applicant seemed suspicious, I could scan them and investigate whether there was anything potentially harmful about their biology, genetic makeup, or something they were carrying. I liked having that extra investigative tool because it meant the interview wasn’t entirely dependent on trusting whatever someone told me. There were situations where the conversation seemed harmless but scanning gave me another piece of information to consider. That made me more cautious as I played because eventually I stopped assuming that a friendly conversation automatically meant I was dealing with a safe visitor. Then there is the Ventilate button, which is easily one of the funniest examples of workplace problem solving I have seen in a while. If an alien becomes hostile, I can essentially solve the problem by ejecting them into space. It sounds extreme because it absolutely is, but it fits Donutal’s strange sense of humor and gives the interview room a little more personality than I expected from what is otherwise a very dialogue-heavy game.
I liked having these different options because they stopped the gameplay from becoming nothing more than selecting dialogue choices until the game told me I was finished. I was deciding when I had enough information, when someone needed additional investigation, and when I should stop trusting what I was hearing.
The part of the interview system that really made Donutal click for me was the ability to bring two aliens into the room together. Once I discovered how useful that could be, I started thinking much more carefully about who I wanted to interview at the same time. Different species can know things about one another, so putting two applicants together can reveal information I would never get during a normal one-on-one conversation. Sometimes one alien helped me understand another species better, and other times the information created even more questions than I had before. What made this especially interesting was that I couldn’t automatically assume everyone was telling me the truth. An alien might know something important about another race, but that didn’t necessarily mean their version of events was completely reliable. I still had to decide whether I believed what I was hearing. That uncertainty gave the conversations more depth than I expected. Instead of simply collecting answers and checking boxes, I started remembering what previous applicants had told me, comparing stories, and using what I already knew about different species to decide whether something sounded suspicious. I felt like I was actually getting better at the job as I played. There isn’t some massive action-oriented skill tree making me stronger, but my own knowledge of the different aliens became a form of progression. The longer I worked at the spaceport, the more confident I became about recognizing behavior and knowing which questions might actually give me useful information.
One of my favorite elements in Donutal is checking the newspaper the following day. After spending all that time deciding who I trusted and who I wanted to keep away from Earth, I could see how events were developing afterward. I really liked that the game didn’t immediately flash a giant “correct” or “wrong” message after every judgment. I had to make the best decision I could with the information I had at the time, move forward, and then potentially discover the consequences later. That made the job feel much more meaningful because my decisions didn’t simply disappear when the interview ended. The newspaper also became part of how I learned to play. I paid attention to what was happening because the information could affect how I viewed future applicants. Between the interviews, scans, conversations between different species, and the news, I constantly felt like I was building a larger picture of this universe. I also appreciated that my goal wasn’t simply to reject everyone who looked suspicious. I was trying to keep Earth safe while also improving its standing within the larger universe. That gave my choices a little more complexity because closing the door on every extraterrestrial wouldn’t actually accomplish what I was supposed to be doing. There were times when I wanted to be cautious, but I also understood that Earth could benefit from having relationships with other civilizations. That balance between protection and progress is where I think Donutal’s premise works best.
Unfortunately, the more species I met, the more I started noticing Donutal’s biggest weakness. Certain races appear more than once, and while an individual alien may have a different reason for wanting to enter Earth, some of the background information starts repeating itself. The first time I asked someone about their home planet, I wanted to read everything because I was learning about a completely new species. When I encountered that species again, hearing some of the same information wasn’t a major issue because I was still becoming familiar with them. After several encounters, however, I already knew what was coming. That was when I started skipping certain questions, particularly Home Planet. If I had already learned about a species’ world multiple times, I didn’t feel much reason to ask the same question again unless I suspected something was different about that particular applicant. For a game that relies this heavily on text, repetition becomes much more noticeable than it would in something where dialogue is only a small part of the experience. I was spending so much time reading that whenever I recognized information I had already seen, my instinct became to move past it and get to whatever was actually new. I think more individual variations in the responses would have helped considerably. Even if the basic facts about a species remained the same, having different personalities explain that information differently could have made repeated encounters feel fresher. The repetition never reached a point where I stopped enjoying the game, but it was definitely the biggest thing keeping me from rating Donutal higher.
On the technical side, Donutal ran smoothly throughout my entire playthrough. I played on my Dell G16 with an Intel Core i9-13900HX, 16 GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU with 8 GB of dedicated VRAM, and I didn’t encounter any meaningful performance problems. The game is not particularly demanding, so I wasn’t expecting my system to struggle with it, but it was still nice to play from beginning to end without technical problems interrupting the experience. Menus remained responsive, interviews transitioned smoothly, and I was able to concentrate entirely on the actual decisions I was making. For a game built around reading, examining information, and moving between different interface screens, that consistency matters. I never had performance become part of my opinion of the game because it simply worked the way I expected it to.
I came away from Donutal enjoying it more than I expected to. The idea of spending an entire game interviewing extraterrestrials could have become repetitive very quickly, but the combination of questioning applicants, scanning them, pairing different aliens together, and checking the consequences of my decisions gave the concept enough depth to keep me interested. The two-person interviews were probably my favorite part because they made me think about these aliens as species that actually know and interact with one another rather than isolated characters waiting for me to question them. I enjoyed experimenting with different combinations and seeing whether someone else could give me information that changed how I viewed an applicant. I also liked how much my own knowledge mattered. By the later portions of my playthrough, I wasn’t approaching every species like a complete mystery anymore. I remembered what I had previously learned, recognized certain behaviors, and knew which questions I probably didn’t need to waste time asking again. That last part is also where the game works against itself. Once I knew enough about certain species, repeated dialogue became something I wanted to skip rather than something I wanted to read. In such a text-heavy experience, that repetition stands out, and additional dialogue variations or voice acting could have made a noticeable difference. Even with that issue, I had a good time with Donutal.
Final Rating
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