Review: Lemon Cake’s PC version looks sweet, but leaves a sour taste in our mouths

I was pretty excited for Lemon Cake because of the art on the title card, but when the art didn’t match with the game style, I had to switch my excitement to having a fun management-style game. But, then it wasn’t controller-supported, and my fingers were less than excited.

Gameplay and Controls

Lemon Cake is a fairly standard baking management game. You grab ingredients, combine them, wait for them to bake, and then take them to the customer. Over time, you sell more and more items to upgrade the shop and suddenly you’re drowning in orders with no time to think.

In this game, you’ve inherited an abandoned bakery that just so happens to come with a pushy ghost who will effectively be your shop. When you upgrade, the ghost will offer you recipes to choose from to add to your menu. And, at the end of the day, the ghost is, also, who handles the upgrade shop.

Every so often, you’ll be visited by a second ghost, a health inspector. His function on the surface is to “inspect” the shop, but he simply brings a mini-game to help try and get a bit more cash flow. This is welcome because money comes a bit slowly.

Your upgrades are available as a branching network. You open up one thing, it leads to two others. Open up those and you get access to even more. As you’d expect, it’s pretty cheap to open up the first upgrades, but then it swings from things less than $50 to items hundreds of dollars more.

I feel like it would have been better to slowly increase the amount needed per upgrade rather than swinging widely from cheap to expensive.

Art and Sound

Lemon Cake is a game that initially took me in by the art on the title card, but that art style isn’t anything like what you get. The art in the game isn’t bad, per se, but I felt like I’d been switcheroo’d. 

The music is pretty generic and I turned it off early on. There’s no variance to it and if I had to liken it to anything, it reminds me strongly of some of the Sims music. Thankfully, the sound design is pretty solid. 

Coziness and Cons

So, as someone who hails from the Cake Mania and Delicious era of gaming, Lemon Cake should have been right up my alley. And it would have been if there had been controller support. 

There is ZERO reason that the PC version of this game doesn’t have controller support. It’s been ported to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and even Xbox. Out there, somewhere, the mapping for the Xbox controller exists already, and yet it hasn’t been implemented officially.

If you’re not aware, Steam offers developers a way to pair with Xbox-style controllers. So, while it would be crazy that controls exist already on any console, it’s double crazy that it exists on an Xbox and the support isn’t there.

Not only does it not exist, but it seems that pleas from the community have gone unanswered. This game isn’t brand new and the complaints about needing controller support go back over a year.

NOTE: You can override this a little bit by right-clicking the game title, opening properties, then controller, and finally controller configurator. This should open up a spot where you can click the gamepad. It doesn’t look like it does anything, but when you go back into the game you can open up the controller settings and assign buttons.

This won’t be obvious though, when you go to program something – for instance the UP movement, when you drag your thumbstick up, it will register as W. This does register that button for that function, it’s just not obvious. And when it comes to tagging recipes, I had to use the D-pad + Y and X to get all 6 recipes. This doesn’t help with navigating the menu at all, so you still need the mouse. On the front page, it blatantly says there is no controller support, so this is just a happy little workaround that should NOT be required.

Aside from the controller issue, the price point makes no sense at all. It’s cheapest on Steam at $14.99, then it’s $19.99 on PlayStation and Xbox, and finally, it’s a whopping $29.99 on Nintendo Switch. There’s zero reason for the prices to range so wildly and I absolutely HATE that the cheapest option is the most unplayable version. Yeah, I get that there are people who can play keyboard games just fine, but the strain on the hand can be painful.

Lastly, the art in the game is fine, but the title card art is what sold me. Who made that art and why wasn’t it implemented? Because I LOVED that art. I thought it was endearing and unique. It felt a bit like a bait and switch. 

Lemon Cake Verdict

As much as I’d love to tell you to get the Steam version since it’s the most affordable, I have to recommend staying far from it, even when you’re using the forced configurations mentioned. There is simply no excuse for the controller not to be mapped by the developers.

If you’re looking at this game, go with Xbox or PlayStation. If you must play it on Switch, wait for a sale. It’s not worth double the price of the Steam version.

Aside from the controller issue, this game is cute and is in line with other time management games. It’s not a bad game, it’s just bad planning.

You can find it for $14.99 on Steam, $19.99 on Xbox and PlayStation, and $29.99 on Nintendo Switch.