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STAFF REVIEW of Lemon Cake (Xbox One)


Tuesday, October 11, 2022.
by Peggy Doyle

Lemon Cake Box art I have always loved to bake. I remember standing on a little step stool and helping my grandmother make cookies and tea biscuits when I was small. I’ve continued that love of baking, having used my skills as fundraising initiatives as well as gifts, but the idea of actually opening and running my own bakery has never once crossed my mind. Thankfully, I can test my skills with no capital investment in the cute indie game, Lemon Cake, by solo developer Eloise Laroche of Cozy Bee Games. Published by SOEDESCO, Lemon Cake is a time management simulation game that was much more complex than I initially thought it would be.

After creating your own character, you stumble into a run down and abandoned bakery. With a little help from a loveable ghost (Miss Bonbon) who used to run the place, you start rebuilding the bakery. You start out with three recipes under your belt, a single working oven, and a wish for customers to support your endeavor. Luckily, you have a steady stream of customers from day one and you are able to make some money and start the upgrading process. Like all management style sim games, you have options on what to upgrade first. Will it be a second oven? What about extra window space to display your wares or an extra table for customers? What about a fruit tree or an animal to expand your ingredient lists? Perhaps it will be an upgrade to your apartment above the bakery? The entire gameplay of Lemon Cake is simple like this, balancing what to spend your money and time on.

As you level up, you will also open additional recipes to make for the bakery. Planning comes into play when choosing your menu for each day. You must balance the time it takes to prepare an item to the profit from selling it. This will vary depending on the number of ingredients used and how long it takes to bake. For example, simple candy may only have one ingredient and no baking time, but it also won’t net you a large amount of profit. On the other hand, some of the cakes have four ingredients and take 25 seconds to bake, but will net you $4. You will also get bonus money in tips if you balance your menu well. You want to keep the menu average reasonably priced, have a gluten free option, and also keep the options fresh. If customers see the same thing too often, they are less inclined to buy it. This was really the most complex part of the game. The menu had a large variety of options – candy, cakes, cookies, pastries, frozen treats etc. There were seven categories, each with multiple options within them.


Each morning starts the same. Water plants if you have them, brush your animals (cows or chickens), stoke the fires, and fill the window display with your choice of treats. I would often fill my window with the most expensive and time-consuming items on my menu to start the day before opening the doors to customers. Once customers come in, they will either purchase a premade item from the window or sit at a table and order from your menu. Trying to keep displays filled and customers orders done in a timely matter could get stressful, especially during the lunch hour rush. Seated customers only had a finite amount of patience before leaving, but thankfully there didn’t appear to be a penalty if you missed serving them. As you level up, the friendly ghost becomes an assistant and will serve seated customers coffee to extend their time they will wait. She will also clear tables which is helpful in that it gives you more time in the kitchen instead of having to multitask as much.

Each day will end with a profit report. You will also choose any upgrades and your menu for the following day based on what you learned from that current day. Occasionally another ghost (Inspector Moustache) will arrive and ask you to catch bugs in your bakery. It’s a mini game that was cute at first and helped get you some extra cash. Unfortunately, it felt more like busy work after a while and annoying. I wish you had the option to skip it.

I already touched on upgrades and earning money, but this wasn’t as easy as it sounds. You make money slowly and upgrades are quite expensive. Early in the game I would be lucky to make $40 per day and upgrades would routinely cost $200. Going back and timing the in-game days (approximately 10 minutes per day), I would estimate about 30-45 minutes to earn some of the upgrades. Upgrades included things like longer burning firewood, better quality ovens (so you didn’t burn food as quickly), and a sprinkler so you didn’t have to keep watering your greenhouse. Once you earn enough upgrades, I was able to make about $130 per day, but at this point in the game I had all the major upgrades needed. On the topic of upgrades, the best one, in my opinion, was the ability to turn your bakery into a cat café. Cute kitties and finding them homes... amazing!


Although simplistic, I couldn’t stop playing Lemon Cake. There weren’t a lot of mechanics involved but at the end of each day I always had this drive to do ‘just one more day’ to see if I could have a better one. I think that says a lot for this little game. I really wish it were longer and hope that maybe some DLC will be added in the future. Game mechanics could use some improvement. Often, I would find if I weren’t standing in exactly the perfect spot, I might pick up the wrong ingredient, or nothing at all. Character movement also felt sluggish until you opened a few upgrades like faster movement or dashing.

Spills in the kitchen also really slow you down, like walking through deep mud. You can clean these in between baking which takes time, or just leave them and deal with the slow movement. Eventually you can get a magic broom that will clean the spills automatically for you. Really helpful. The lack of counter space in the game was also an issue. Once you picked up an ingredient or a prepared food item, you needed to put it down before picking up something else. If you didn’t have someone waiting, or an open display area, you ended up having to toss it in the trash.


Lemon Cake is an indie game personified. This isn’t a bad statement, but rather meaning it checks all the boxes of what makes an indie game great. The animation isn’t perfect, but it works. The four rooms you occupy are all full of personality but lack a lot of small details. Each room has distinctive traits, from the bright storefront with tables, displays and the cat café area, to the kitchen with the stone fireplaces, the foliage filled greenhouse and even your tiny apartment. Graphically, Lemon Cake is colourful, cozy, and welcoming.

The soundtrack included basic sound effects associated with the daily kitchen tasks that added depth to the gameplay. The music, while not completely memorable after turning the game off, was relaxing and mellow and fit with the cozy vibe of the game play. The music created by Matthew Harnage did change tempo from early morning where it was more chill bubbly vine in the morning to a more up-tempo soundtrack including brass and horns during the busy lunch rush. It then winds down to a more mellow soundtrack with piano and guitars to end the day. It felt like something you would hear in a local café if you went in and spend the day.

With the simplistic style, rotating generic customers and tasks, some might find the game tedious, but I think this was brilliant. Let me focus on the tasks at hand and just take care of the customers. One of the cutest things was when customers would order a whole cake to themselves and then finish eating it in just a few bites. We’ve all had that feeling while gobbling up our favourite treats, I’m sure. Lemon Cake is a recipe filled with luscious graphics, sweet characters, and game play that I just devoured. I highly recommend you pick up this indie gaming morsel to satisfy your gaming sweet tooth.

**Lemon Cake was provided by the publisher and reviewed on an Xbox Series X**




Overall: 8.5 / 10
Gameplay: 8.5 / 10
Visuals: 9.0 / 10
Sound: 8.0 / 10

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