Donutal demo lands on Steam

• Announcements by Sam Amiotte-Beaulieu
• Published:

Full version of alien-screening narrative adventure beaming onto Windows PC later this year

Border restrictions and immigration are hot topics these days, and the upcoming Donutal by Arc System Works promises to put you in charge of deciding which galactic aliens are worthy of entry on an entire planetary level. 

In the year 2206, Earth isn’t doing so hot: climate crises, resource uncertainty; you name it. Thankfully, the former International Space Station (now called “International Space Port”) is opening its doors to extraterrestrials in the hopes that visitors from beyond the stars could be the key to bringing Earth back from the brink of destruction. Recently reawakened from a 150-year cryosleep and notified of an astronomical amount of debt you are saddled with paying off, your job as the new “Chief Xeno Inspector” is to be the intergalactic gatekeeper to let in well-intentioned aliens while keeping out any bad apples who wish to potentially harm the people of Earth – or worse. 

There are no passports or identification for cross-world travel, so your job is to logically deduce the intentions of various species looking to gain access to your planet. To do so, you'll have to see through any lies and "uncover their true intentions.” If you succeed, you’ll “wave in the friendly aliens” and add some extraterrestrial boosts to the search for solutions to Earth’s dire problems. But if you fail and let in an alien that poses a threat to the species, then all of “Earth could be destroyed. No pressure though, right?”

Presented as a first-person slideshow with hand-drawn, anime-inspired artwork, Donutal is a point-and-click visual novel-styled deduction game in which aliens can visit Earth for “various reasons: tourism, migration, asylum, crime... or perhaps even in search of love.” Whatever the case, you stand alone in managing the flow of extraterrestrial hopefuls. Helping you get the hang of things is Dolphin, a human-looking android, which is good because there are a lot of details to juggle. A scanner allows you to detect any unusual findings about applicants and their belongings, and an automatic readout will track facts such as gender, diet, traits and purpose, giving you key background knowledge which you can refer to in a database. 

The crux of the game lies in its dialogue, however, as you have to listen to testimonies from alien visitors and cross reference their statements against what you already know or suspect. Rather than interrogating potential planetary visitors one at a time, you can summon two different applicants at once to ask various questions that can lead to different answers depending on which particular pairing you’ve chosen. Some species like the “highly intelligent and honest” Octo can have longstanding rivalries with others, such as the Takoo, another “cephaloid species from their home planet” with whom they are locked in a hostile relationship with for unknown reasons. New information will yield new lines of questioning, but you have only a limited amount of simulated time before you must make a decision, so you can’t simply exhaust all avenues of inquiry.

Aspiring Chief Xeno Inspectors can try out the demo now for Donutal on Steam for Windows PC, where you can play through the first few days of alien deduction dilemmas, complete with tutorial. No firm release date is available as of yet, but the full version of the game is due to arrive sometime later this year.