Hidden Gem: Bonnie's Bakery

I love games that aren’t what they seem, like Doki Doki Literature Club and Prey (2017). They’ve mastered the art of surprise, leaving you bamboozled in such a way that you’ll wish you could play them again for the first time — and the only solution is to watch others play it with fresh eyes so you can relish in their shock. Melty Clown Studio’s Bonnie's Bakery is absolutely what I’d call a not-what-you-think title, and it’s a hidden gem you don’t want to miss.

Since I’m here to rave about it, this article contains spoilers. Please read at your own discretion.

The aesthetic for Bonnie’s Bakery is as sweet as the pastries you’ll be serving, with pastel pink dominating the colour palette and plenty of adorable animal clientele frequenting the titular bakery. In cooking sim fashion, customers come in with an order and you’ll be tasked with preparing it, clicking and dragging ingredients from Bonnie’s workstation into a mixer, cutting board, or oven.

With your trusty cookbook, you’ll always know what to do for a recipe. Red Velvet Cake requires Flour, Sugar, Milk, Eggs, Fat, and Red, for example, whereas a Meat Bun requires Flour, Milk, Eggs, and Chopped Meat. Bring the fresh treats to the right customers, and you’ll gain points, which affects how your performance is graded at the end of the shift. Score low, and your furry friend, Bear, will comment that Bonnie had a rough day. Serve everyone perfectly, and he’ll say, “I bet you’re gonna need a lot more ingredients to feed all these hungry customers!”

No matter how you end the shift, the second half takes you to get more ingredients, but restocking Bonnie’s workstation isn’t as simple as going to the local market. In the underbelly of the bakery, there’s a dark basement, chains, and a whole lot of blood. The cheery tune playing during your shift is swapped out for the eerie rumble of a dungeon, and instead of the delightful ding of an oven, the sound of wet footsteps fills your ears.

In this second portion of Bonnie’s Bakery, we’ve been suddenly transported from a cooking sim to a stealthy first-person survival horror situation. You’re now a defiant survivor, and Bonnie is the killer you need to avoid. To get out of her deathtrap basement, you’ll need to collect a set of notes that contain clues to a keycode. Every time you fail, the numbers on the notes are changed, so you can’t really cheese your way through it by letting Bonnie kill you.

I really enjoyed the switch-up in tone here. It’s not necessarily a surprise since the Steam page does hint at something nefarious going on, but it still works in a fun way and manages to be funny by playing into the dissonance. I loved going from the chill bakery setting to running for my life from a tall pink baker with a bow in her hair — ridiculous and scary all at once.

What did surprise me is that the game has different endings that are dependent on your performance as Bonnie in the initial half of the game, as that changes what evidence you find in the basement/dungeon, and if you find all of the endings, you can unlock a secret one (which is the most satisfying, in my opinion). I won’t spoil those just in case you still want to try out the game yourself, as I’ve already revealed the main twist.

The cooking mini-game and the stealth portions are quite different from one another but equally as enjoyable. With a bite-sized runtime of two hours, I’d recommend Bonnie’s Bakery for anyone who wants a little fun, cutesy game with a touch of body horror on the side.