Publisher SOEDESCO has released its new title Lemon Cake, developed by Cozy Bee Games which is essentially a restaurant sim, but the game only has pastries, and it is more of a running and managing your very own bakery. If you have played titles such as Overcooked, you will find some similarities, but Lemon Cake is actually more relaxed and offers much more activities to complete than just finding ingredients and cooking up things. This is our review of the PS5 version of Lemon Cake in which we bake some pastries and fulfill a ghost’s dream by baking a lemon cake.
Lemon Cake follows your journey as you wander into an abandoned bakery and find the ghost of the previous owner. After some discussion, you figure out that the ghost wants to see the bakery restored back to its formal glory and you gladly take on the job. The ghost explains that she was the master of baking the best lemon cakes and it is her dream to see that particular lemon cake baked just one more time. So, you decide to run the bakery and run its adjacent restaurant however you need to prove yourself before you get access to the ultimate recipe of the lemon cake.
In Lemon Cake, you start off every day in the morning by prepping for the upcoming day. Each day brings its own challenge for you and the game gives you time at the start of the day to prepare for the day. The menu for the next day is decided at the end of the previous day and you can only start customizing the dishes in your menu once you have unlocked enough. At the start of the game, you start off with basic items and recipes. You have one oven to bake the pastries in, one kitchen workstation, and a few simple recipes. Your greenhouse is also empty, and you do not have any animals as well so everything you need is right in your kitchen during the early phases of the game. With story progression, you also unlock some of the newer features of the game along with the ability to create complex recipes and add more recipes to each day.
The gameplay of Lemon Cake is where the game really shines. The different recipes that you choose for your day are all assigned to a button on the DualSense controller and after picking up an ingredient and throwing it into the bowl, you can choose which recipe you want to make. Simply pressing the corresponding button shows you all of the ingredients you need for that particular dish and after collecting them all in the bowl, you can mix them and throw the item into the oven for baking. Some items are made instantly and do not require baking, so it depends on the recipe chosen. Once the order is baked or ready after mixing it, you can either serve it directly to the customers if they have placed an order for it or display them in your display window where the customers can directly pick it up without you having to serve them personally.
Once you have served a customer, you will need to clean up the tables so that more customers can come inside and enjoy your pastries. This cycle continues no matter how much progress you make in the game. During this, you will also need to clean up the kitchen with your broom, pet your animals and water your trees to ensure that everything is giving you ingredients when you need them. This combines with your order taking, creating orders, baking, filling firewood in the ovens, and maintaining everything else. All of this combines for a challenge that is actually not that hard to master yet it is challenging enough to give you a headache if you are not good at multitasking. The game starts slow and then picks up the pace with its challenge but even at the later stages, it is nowhere as hard as titles such as Overcooked.
As you progress in Lemon Cake and purchase more upgrades, you will begin to add trees and animals to your kitchen as well. You will keep them in your greenhouse where you will need to water the trees daily in order to collect their produce and groom the animals to keep them fresh and clean. You can add different trees such as apple, cocoa, strawberry, and coconut while the animals that can be adopted include a cow that gives you milk and a chicken that gives you eggs for your dishes. While most of the ingredients are present right inside your kitchen, these special ingredients must be collected from their respective tree or animal and you can place them in your kitchen on counters for using them in your recipes however if you collect extra and have to leave some on the counters overnight, they will spoil so you need to keep a good balance between what you are collecting and what you are serving.
When it comes to upgrades, Lemon Cake offers four extensive upgrade trees where you can purchase new upgrades at the end of the day. You will purchase these upgrades from your revenue, so you have to sell lots of pastries to afford all of the upgrades in these trees. These upgrade trees include Store, Kitchen, Greenhouse, and Bedroom. Depending on the item, you will spend your money and purchase the upgrade which benefits you in that particular area. For example, purchasing Kitchen Counters allow you to store ingredients inside the Kitchen saving you trips from our greenhouse, and purchasing additional ovens allows you to increase your production output.
You can also hire assistants from here who will clean up the tables and serve customers coffee which allows you some extra time to prepare their orders. Advanced recipes require ingredients that can only be procured from these upgrades which add their respective source to your kitchen, so this is one thing that plays a crucial role in your gameplay and expansion of your setup. For increasing your income, it is vital that you purchase these upgrades in the game as well because spending money makes you more money. They allow you to become more efficient in serving your orders and more orders mean more money as well which allows you to purchase the coveted Lemon Cake recipe and start selling that to your customers. Apart from updates that affect the gameplay in diverse ways, you can also purchase some visual updates for your room. These upgrades are just visual and since you spend the night and morning in your own room, they add a little bit of visual eye candy to your room. You can also get some pets for yourself.
The visual art style of Lemon Cake is simple, yet it looks amazing. It gives a visual novel-sort of feel to the game and it feels like a proper small, pastry restaurant while you are in it. The animations are pretty cool to look at as well and the sound design goes well along the game. During my review playthrough, I do not remember encountering any sort of bugs or glitches in the game, but I would have loved it if the advanced features of the DualSense controller were made used for the game. The UI is kept minimalistic, and it allows you to view the entire screen of the game without being hindered by extra UI elements which keep things less complicated as well while you are playing it.
Final Verdict:
Lemon Cake is a simple yet challenging cooking game that keeps you on your toes throughout the day. I love the fact that it is simple enough for just anyone to jump in the game to enjoy it but challenging enough to keep things interesting and keep that adrenaline rush flowing. I also liked the art style of the game because it actually helps to keep the game simple and easy to look at so you can perform all of the tasks in the game easily. If you always wanted to try out a fast-paced cooking game but the challenge of titles such as Overcooked intimidated you, you can now go for Lemon Cake and give this brilliant cooking game a chance because it brings its own unique flavor into the genre by keeping things simple and challenging at the same time. If you love a challenge from your cooking games then you will definitely love Lemon Cake and if you want to jump into cooking games and start off slow, then Lemon Cake is a must-play title for you.
Final Score: 8.5/10
