• Price: $29.99 USD (digitally & then physically later on)
• Developer: Cozy Bee Games
• Publisher: SOEDESCO
• Release Date: September 30, 2022

A review code was kindly provided by SOEDESCO on behalf of Cozy Bee Games. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

I’ve got a major sweet tooth and a passion for simulation games, so I was excited to check out Lemon Cake on Switch. In the game, you find a rundown bakery haunted by Miss Bonbon, who ran the business when she was alive. She laments that she can’t make her favorite dessert anymore: the titular lemon cake. Miss Bonbon recruits you as her apprentice baker so that she can teach you how to rebuild the bakery, create baked goods to sell, and run the business.

At first, you’ll only have some basic recipes like bread, which are easy and quick to make. Some of the ovens haven’t been repaired yet, so you’ll have to make do with the one you have until you pay to fix the others. Every day you’ll have to go and open the bakery for business. Customers will slowly trickle in, sit down, and order a single dish. (It may have made things more interesting if some customers ordered more than one item.) You can only bake and sell items when you’ve put the recipes on the menu for the day – and you can’t change the menu again until the end of the day. Customers will give bonus tips for having a vegan option, if there’s variety in categories (cookies, candy, etc), or if items haven’t been served much recently.

Once a customer has placed their order, they’ll have a “patience meter” of sorts that goes down the longer they wait for their food. It’s not that big of a deal in the early days when the recipes are simpler and take less time to make, but later on the recipes take longer. Make their dish as fast as you can, and when they’re finished eating you’ll have to clean the table to make room for a new customer. And at around noon the lunch rush will arrive, so it’s important to have some food ready in the window display cases.

Besides the dining room, there are 2 other rooms in the lower level of the bakery: the kitchen and the ingredients room. You’ll have to clean up the messes that appear in the kitchen so they don’t slow you down when you run between the rooms. (There’s also a cute mini game where Miss Bonbon has a health inspector alter ego with a mustache.)

Similar to the recipes, you’ll only have a few ingredients available in the beginning. When the orders come in you have to go to each ingredient and drop them in the mixing bowl one at a time. Unfortunately, you can’t pick up multiple ingredients at once to maximize efficiency (until you unlock the rail cart). However, you can become a more efficient baker by making the dough for baked goods in advance, and once you’ve unlocked the kitchen table you can place dough or finished products there to prepare in advance for additional orders. While it seemed like a majority of the dishes are made in the oven, there are some candies that only require the mixing bowl or frozen goods that need a refrigeration unit of sorts to make them.

You can unlock the additional recipes by leveling up, and you can acquire new ingredients and cooking tools through the above “benefits tree.” Spend your hard-earned profits, and you can also get things like more window displays, a window between the dining room and kitchen, a rail cart to bring multiple ingredients to the kitchen, and more. There’s even a coffee machine to unlock, which increases the amount of time that customers are willing to wait. (That was one of my favorite perks.)

The ingredients room includes the newly unlocked fruits and livestock-based ingredients. Plants need to be watered several times a day to make sure they continue to provide ingredients. And the cows and chickens need to be brushed for them to keep producing milk and eggs. Eventually, you can unlock a sprinkler system to automate that process for you, and you can slowly reduce the amount of work in the ingredients room. I found it hilarious that I had livestock inside my bakery.

To be successful, you’ll need to get into a daily routine. When I unlocked more window displays and ovens, I would make enough items to place in the displays before even opening the bakery – and I’d also start some more pastries in the ovens. I’d also make sure that my crops were watered and my animals were clean. These preparations made it a little easier to manage the busy day of sales ahead of me. I’d often have to run around the bakery, which was made difficult by the stamina meter.

Days in the bakery can be tiring, so it’s nice to have a room above the bakery. You customize your character’s appearance at the beginning of the game, but unfortunately you can’t really customize the bakery or your room. There are some cute set furniture options that you can unlock though, as well as some pets like a corgi, cat, and rabbit. (I wish we could name the pets we get, but they’re adorable and you can pet them.)

I really love how vibrant the colors are in Lemon Cake. I spent 110 in-game days using more than 40 recipes to satisfy my customers. It’s a fast-paced Diner Dash “Bakery Dash” game with a lot of perks to unlock, so if it sounds like something you’d enjoy, start up your Switch – and ovens! And when you need a break from the action, you may want to check out the other game from Cozy Bee Games, called Bunny Park (reviewed here). They’re both wholesome games that have different energy levels!