Cakey’s Twisted Bakery Review (Xbox Series X|S & PC)

Cakey’s Twisted Bakery is like a well-frosted school cake that reminds you of simpler times. It’s familiar, palatable, and perfectly capable of tickling your tastebuds, even when you know all too well that you have digested the same layers countless times before. It’s Five Nights at Freddy’s, Poppy Playtime, and My Friendly Neighborhood all jellied into one sickeningly vibrant cherry Bakewell. Yet, there’s something about it that makes you want to take another bite and savor the moment.

If you’re unfamiliar with Cakey’s Twisted Bakery, then one can only describe it as a first-person stealth horror game in which you, a young protagonist with a sweet tooth for peanut butter and brittle bone, take to the dubious corridors of a bakery. Think Sweeney Todd (or Ravenous Devils, if we’re gamifying it) meets Poppy Playtime, and you should have a vague idea of what we’re getting at here.

It goes like this: you arrive at the bakery in the dead of night, not with the intent to waffle down pastries to satisfy your late-night cravings, but to locate and rescue your brother who, for some reason that’s completely unknown to you, is the latest victim in a malicious conspiracy. The bakery, which serves as the central hub for the game’s short sixty-minute cooking class, introduces you to Cooker Jr.—an overly giddy machine, naturally—and a handful of rooms, each of which contain ingredients of all shapes and sizes. The goal, in short, is to source items from various boxes, bake themed pies, and eliminate mascots that roam the corridors.

Unfortunately, Cakey’s Twisted Bakery isn’t without its sour patches and bad-tasting ingredients. Don’t get me wrong, the idea is great, as are the frosted mascots that flesh out the kitchen quarters in its flamboyant bakehouse. That being said, there can be a frustrating stealth-based game here, more so given that, well, it never really tells you how to sample your own baked goods, much less how to progress deeper into its clotted pantry. Instead, it drops you in at the deep end with a worthless flashlight that has an awful habit of switching off after ten seconds, and a selection of posters that describe how to make pies.

It took me a good ten minutes of aimlessly scouring the kitchen for clues before figuring out how to make ends meet in the bakery. At first, it was a game of cat-and-mouse—a tense affair that primarily consisted of running rampant with Flesh Cubes, Cocoa, and Milk, and baking peanut butter pies that, quite frankly, I had no idea what to do with. But then, it became a lot clearer. A slimy violet portal ushered in a mascot, and a color-coded health bar unveiled the solution. I needed to make pies, and I needed to launch them at the mascot before it caught up with me. If I could muster up the culinary skills to do that, then I could carve deeper into the bakery and unlock more rooms. George was waiting, and I had to make a boatload of pies before I could remove the shackles.

It wasn’t long after I landed the first hit that I came to learn the truth that, despite my best efforts to make a good pie, the mascots had a distasteful habit of  regenerating after each death, as was the kryptonite that would send them back to the abyss. If I fell to a mascot—an event that, annoyingly, was a little too frequent for my liking—then the game would return me to the beginning of a three-minute save window, and the baking process would begin from scratch. The ingredients that I would have previously collected would still be present in Cooker Jr., but from what I could gather, everything else was al dente.

At no point during the sixty-minute stint with Cakey did I feel threatened. Frustrated, at times, for sure, but never on the edge of my seat and gasping for air. If I came anywhere within spitting distance of the foe, I could almost guarantee that I wouldn’t be able to find a hiding spot in time. Cover was scarce, and, to put it bluntly, the mascot had more stamina than Usain Bolt. With that, I had little wriggle room to flex my culinary wizardry. It was all or nothing; a perpetual process of eliminating bad ingredients was the only way to carve deeper into the underbelly.

I’d be lying if I told you that I left the bakery with a bloated stomach. Satisfied, but not quite fulfilled by the layers that it drip fed me. The story was short, and with a lack of notes and areas to explore, it never gave me a dessert or anything meal-worthy. It was a simple fetch quest with light horror and stealth elements, but that’s about as far as it went. The jump scares were highly reminiscent of Five Nights at Freddy’s, and the tasks were squashed into a simple routine that, sadly, just left a lot to be desired.

In spite of a few minor flaws, Cakey’s Twisted Bakery is a solid mascot horror that still gets a lot of things right. With some clean visuals, original monsters, and a claustrophobic environment that has the power to make your skin crawl when you least expect it, you do have a pretty solid foundation to work from here. It’s still a short game, and it doesn’t do a lot to reinvent the wheel in terms of gameplay mechanics. Still, to call it a cheap rehash of a cult classic mascot horror just wouldn’t be an accurate description here.

Verdict

Cakey’s Twisted Bakery is as equally frustrating as it is annoyingly more-ish, with its characters, voiceovers and original recipes providing a palatable foundation for a surpassingly good, albeit short mascot horror game that can leave you feeling satisfied. It might not do enough to quell your cravings for a multi-layered cake with all of the frosting and toppings, but it does make for a rather delicious palate cleanser. Maybe that’s enough of an incentive to coerce your appetite, maybe it isn’t.

While I wouldn’t call Cakey’s Twisted Bakery a scary game, it is one that has the ability to tickle both your tastebuds and your nerves. If you can stomach that, then you should be able to feast on these questionable pastries for fifty or sixty minutes, give or take.