Baking Time

Genre: Idle Game

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local Split-Screen)

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Review:

Baking Time is a family-friendly Idle Game released on mobile devices in 2023 and ported to PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2024. This game has you playing as a featureless yellow stick figure man with a chef hat gathering baked treats from a massive over, delivering them to a display tray, and accepting payments from an endless line of customers wanting to buy them, gradually hiring better and more competent workers to assist you with this task.

The presentation in this game uses simple, colorful 3D visuals with simplistic character models. It’s bright at appealing, but not distinct or memorable. This is backed by relaxed synthesized guitar theme and ticking sounds representing things moving around, along with a stereotypical cash register sound when a purchase is made. At the very least, the desserts look nice.

You’ll start the gathering up the treats on your own, which simply involves moving back and forth around on the tray of desserts to pick them up and carry them in a backpack. Collect all of them and a new tray replaces the empty one. And when your pack gets filled, bring them to the display case to unload them, then move over to the cash register to sell them to the infinitely long line of stick figure customers. Over time, you’ll earn experience to level up, which lets you choose between permanently moving slightly faster or having a slightly bigger pack so you can carry more.

Even with this being the case, this task gets to be repetitive, which is why you’ll want to hire workers to make things go more quickly, and purchase upgrades for them to make them more effective. Other upgrades include helper pets and “cookie monsters” that slowly give you free money over time (to be clear, this isn’t the Cookie Monster, but just a generic monster of the cookie variety). You can also buy well as access to areas farther to the right, with each successive area being more costly, but featuring a more lucrative dessert to sell. The workers are what makes this an Idle Game, as they will continually collect resources for you even if you do nothing.

Is this repetitive? Yes. Is there a greater point to it? Not really. Welcome to Idle Games. And as Idle Games go, Baking Time is decent enough. There’s nothing truly interesting or different to break up the monotony, no greater goal other than “number go up” and also getting farther to the right to get to even more lucrative desserts to sell. Wash, rinse, repeat. But if you’re looking to have a game playing in the background where “number go up” while you do something else, you could do far worse.

tl;dr – Baking Time is an Idle Game where players move around desserts to sell to waiting customers, hire help to do it more efficiently, and unlock more lucrative desserts to sell and start the cycle over again. It’s pretty repetitive, but as Idle Games go, this is better than average.

Grade: C+

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