Thank you Ultimate Games S.A. for sending us this game to review!

Cakey's Twisted Bakery is another in the long line of the so-called "mascot horror" genre popularized by the crazy and unforeseen success of Five Nights at Freddy's (FNAF). The fact that there is a subgenre to denote horror games which take place in what would otherwise be a kid-friendly establishment and that almost always involve the gruesome off-screen deaths of children should be enough to explain just how wildly popular it has become. Besides FNAF itself having 10+ games at this point as well as two feature films and several book series, we also have games like Poppy Playtime, Garten of Banban, and an uncountable number of "FNAF-clones" which essentially copy the first game's mechanics while changing up the settings or characters.

Because of its crazy popularity, the market has been saturated with these types of games for over a decade now. So it's no wonder to find something like Cakey's Twisted Bakery among them. This particular game is much more straightforward in its sinister nature. In the Cakey universe, children are routinely snatched from their beds, dragged to some twisted underworld bakery/restaurant, and cooked up for the monsters there to eat. You play as Ivy, the elder sister of George, and you have both been kidnapped and taken to Cakey's. Your mission is to find and save George and escape before the creepy mascot creatures catch you.

What makes Cakey's gameplay different from your typical mascot horror is that, in order to escape, you must actually defeat the monsters by baking pies and throwing them at the monsters, chunking down their health bars until the drop keys, unlocking the next area. The game is played in three stages, each of which has you being pursued by one of the three mascots. Defeat all three to unlock the exit and the area where George is being kept, then make your final escape.

There are 4 pie variants and 6 different ingredients needed to make them. These ingredients are scattered throughout the restaurant. They must be picked up and returned to Cooker Jr., the robot chef that bakes the pies for you and tells you helpful tips like "Stop hiding and start baking!"

There are three difficulty settings: Normal, Hard, and Endless. During Normal mode, the game autosaves every 3 minutes, so your progress is never too far lost should you be caught. In Hard mode, dying will completely reset your progress. Endless presumably just has you cycling through all three mascots until you inevitably die; I have no desire to put this theory to the test. Upon beating the ending on the Normal difficulty, you see a cryptic note sent to the Cakey monsters from a mysterious person. It makes me wonder if Hard mode doesn't also unlock some further lore about the Cakey universe. It at least gives a potential reason to play the game again, which is sorely needed; I completed the game on Normal difficulty in under 4 hours, and that's with me playing in an overly-cautious way.

Unfortunately, the gameplay loop of Cakey's Twisted Bakery is tedious. See, the monsters are not always vulnerable to the same pie. So in the early game, you spend your time running around, trying to gather the various ingredients for your pies, and then hope you're holding the right one when the monster comes trudging by. If you miss, you're looking at 15 minutes of wasted effort just to bake another one. As the game progresses, the monsters need to be hit more times to be taken down. This is offset by items you find in the unlocked areas that multiply the number of ingredients you stuff into Cooker Jr. with each trip, but it still involves a lot of waiting around and hoping you have the right ammunition on hand at the right time.

Further, the monsters don't just have free roam of the bakery; the bakery also has 4 slime doors that act as portals where the monsters temporarily retreat to between cycles of trying to find you. This leaves the player with roughly 30 seconds every time the monster disappears to get ingredients without fear of being caught. But so far as I can tell, there is no way to predict either which portal the monster will emerge from or which pie they will be vulnerable to when they do; it changes every time.

This brings up another mechanic that is slightly comical: hiding. There are a few locations where the player can "hide"; the game helpfully says "Hidden" in the corner to let you know that you can't be seen. But these hidden locations are in open boxes and under tables that the monsters are literally facing as they pass by. If they spot you and you go into a hiding spot, they immediately stop the chase, like you've simply ceased to exist. Moreover, you can full on pelt them in the knees with a pie from one of these hiding spots and they still are unable to see you. It really drops the tension but ups the frustration when you realize that the safest way to win is to just sit under a table in the middle of the bakery and wait for the monster to walk by while vulnerable to whatever you're holding.

I have mixed feelings about the graphical direction of this game. It's not that the polygon count is too low or anything like that; it's that the colors are often oversaturated. See, much of the restaurant is dark. Your flashlight doesn't emit a white light, however; the light it emits is bluish. The effect is that nothing seems like it's the right color when you're looking at it. Everything is saturated in these purple and blue tones that make it look like you've already been eaten by a cake monster and have frosting in your eyes. What's more, the monsters, while interesting in design, are low in detail; they stretch and move in very odd ways. The final monster in particular is supposed to have this gaping mouth full of sharp teeth, but when he turns his head, the teeth and mouth all kind of stretch along with him. The textures of things also seem at odds with what they should be, like the skull on top of the one pie, or the very strange texture of the creepy no-eyed diners in the dining area that serve only as decoration.

There isn't much to say in the matter of music. Each monster has music that plays when they are nearby, but nothing I'd go buy a soundtrack to listen to. Sound effects are a different matter. The sound they make when they catch you sounds very, very similar to the original FNAF jumpscare sound, and the burping, glorpy sound they make when they eat you whole is...uncomfortable. The restaurant has lots of different noises that constantly make you unsure if you are hearing the approach of a monster or not, which really ratchets up the stress while you're still trying to figure the game out. Most unsettling is that some of the boxes that you can hide in are one among a tower of boxes, all of which have sad, scared, children inside of them, some crying, some banging on their crates to try and get out. The sound design is likely the strongest part of this game.

I played Cakey's Twisted Bakery on the Switch 2, and I didn't have any stability issues while playing. The only complaint I have is that the camera sensitivity only has 5 notches, and each tick changes the sensitivity by a huge amount. I consistently found it difficult to click on things, with the cursor needing to be in just the right location to pick things up or put them down. But if I dropped the camera sensitivity by a single notch, I turned way too slow to properly navigate. It just seems like an odd design choice to have such a coarse level of control for something that most games usually give very fine tune control over. Being on the Switch 2 also doesn't enable the new joy-con 2 mouse capabilities, nor are there any motion controls; you're stuck with the default controls.

This game has very obvious moral issues, but essentially nothing past those. As mentioned previously, children are frequently kidnapped and used as ingredients for these monsters to eat, or just eaten wholesale if they catch you running about. The ESRB says that there is blood, but in the strange blue lights, it was never obvious to me what was meant to be "blood" and what was meant to be...I don't know, frosting? Some of the pie ingredients have names like "flesh cube" and "brittle bone".

During the credits, I saw that Cakey's Twisted Bakery looks to have been made by a 3-man team, which is pretty impressive. I will give them credit for that: they did make a mascot horror game that had something different to offer in terms of gameplay, and they really did a good job using sound effects to keep tension high. Unfortunately, I overall found the game to be more tedious than engaging, and the mascots to be unpleasant to look at. It is only $4.99 on Steam, which might be worth it to gamers who absolutely love any kind of mascot horror. It is also out now on all major consoles, albeit with a higher price of $9.99. Cakey's may claim that their pies are always fresh, but they go stale fast.

-maestro_dana