I love a good restaurant-themed game, but held off on Lemon Cake until Steam Cooking Fest 2024 because it looked a little too simple and repetitive for me. It is, but it's also a great game for certain types of cozy gamers (see "Recommendations" below for the tldr).

In Lemon Cake, you breathe new life into a semi-haunted bakery by assembling pastries, sweeping up flour spills, and serving customers to earn enough money to unlock upgrades like window displays, more ovens, a greenhouse, a farm, and decor items. That's it. That's the story.

First, points to the devs for creating such a unique art style for the game; everything from the pastries to the rosy-cheeked customers to the cows clearly belong in the same world. That world just happens to be a children's book, which is... not my speed.

Due to the cutesy art and limited character customization options (which include a ton of hair colors, a few skin tones, and a few clothes that look either itchy or impractical for a kitchen), your avatar looks like a kid no matter how hard you try to make it look like an adult.

Each day plays in 2-3 phases:
1. Cafe Management. You make pastries by selecting a recipe, combining ingredients in a bowl, transferring the result into the oven, stoking the flames with firewood, and waiting. You stock your window displays with pastries and open for business. Customers shuffle to tables, you click to take their orders, bake their orders, serve the orders, and clean the dirty plates. In between, you replenish your window displays. Rinse and repeat until end of day.

2. Upgrades and Recipe Management. After reviewing your financials, you can purchase upgrades and set your menu for the next day. Upgrades are unlocked in three trees and become increasingly expensive, so you'll need to do a lot of grinding to unlock everything. Your menu gains buffs and debuffs based on variety, item type, and time; you're penalized for selling the same things every day, rewarded for adding gluten-free options, and generally encouraged to strategize and experiment to earn more tips.

3. Possible Minigame. Occasionally, you have a minigame like catching bugs to appease a ghostly food inspector. Most of the time, you retire to bed.

On a stress scale of 1 (Cozy Caravan) to 10 (Cook, Serve, Delicious!), I'd say Lemon Cake might peak at a 3 during Lunch Rush. Your friendly bakery ghost warns you about customer satisfaction and burning pastries, but you have the most patient customers and forgiving oven in the history of café management games.

If I hadn't previously played Magical Bakery, I might have been more charmed by stoking the oven with firewood or by your avatar's plodding pace. As it is, I mostly found "cooking" to be tediously repetitive and hated that I couldn't toss ingredients into the bowl without first selecting the recipe. My frustration was amplified by the music, which speeds up a little during Lunch Rush but otherwise plays on an endless loop; it quickly goes from cute to dull to annoying.

My biggest gripe, though, is that this game -- which is available on consoles -- doesn't include controller support; it reportedly runs on Steamdeck, but refused to recognize any controller that I plugged in. Worse still, the keyboard controls are silly and your character responds slowly. If you enjoy a good survival game, the avatar's laggy and inaccurate responses will make your eye twitch.

I personally prefer a little crunch in my management games and more streamlined controls in my cozies, so Lemon Cake was not the game for me. But if you enjoy the art style and are looking for a low-stress repetitive task game to both zone out with and grind in, then this is a quaint little bakery to lose yourself in. But maybe pick it up on a different platform.

Fantastic game, its a very cute art style that my girlfriend fell in love with. I think the developer did a great job with what they had available in the game. The people leaving negative reviews saying its "too grindy" would be the same people to complain it being "too easy" if adjustments were made. Its a game that keeps you busy.. sounds like job well done to me. Fantastic game again.

Such a fun cozy cafe sim!

Things done well:
- So cute and cozy, beautiful graphics, and kitties!!!!
- Really well paced action for the most part, really enjoy the grind and feel everything has just the right lifespan.
- Upgrades are well paced and make me want to grind the game more, really enjoying those. I feel like they give just enough buff to satisfy but still leave room for the "but I could have more"
- This is more neutral, but the NPCs posing obstacles can be fun, but makes navigating the cafe floor really frustrating during rushes. Most days it's fine, but I have turned the game off once or twice because of this one. Sometimes, it works out well I'm able to find a little loophole and I'm really proud of myself, so I guess interpret this one as you will depending on your play style.

Things to improve/frustrating
- there's a glitch where if you are sweeping the floor when the inspector comes, then you get stuck in the animation and have to restart the game to play the mini game
- there's a glitch where if you water the cocoa tree too close to the water spout, it'll water then put it back which is frustrating during rushes
- the grab box for the window between the cafe and kitchen is really small, and it's probably fine as it is, it's just frustrating because when it looks like I'm standing right in front of it, it doesn't register.

Thank you so much for the wonderful game, it's been an amazing break for after school and work. Just enough brain power to want to progress, but no super intense story or dialogue that would bog my brain down. Cute and fun!!!!!!!!!