Game: The Witch’s Bakery
Genre: Adventure, Indie, RPG
System: Steam (Windows)
Developers | Publishers: Sunny Lab | Silver Lining Interactive
Steam Deck: Unknown
Controller Support: Yes
Price: US $19.99 | UK £16.99 | EU € 19.99
Release Date: October 14th, 2026
A review code was provided; many thanks to Press Engine.
The Witch’s Bakery is a 2026 casual adventure game developed by Sunny Lab and released by Silver Lining Interactive.
The Premise of The Witch’s Bakery
In The Witch’s Bakery, we play as Lunne, a young witch who opens her own bakery in modern Paris. She is a witch of the Heart, meaning she can enter people’s hearts and heal their emotions through magic. As we follow Lunne’s life in Paris, we bake delicious treats, meet a cast of colorful characters, and explore Paris and a world of magic.
Gameplay
The Witch’s Bakery is a narrative-driven single-player adventure that feels a bit like a visual novel. The gameplay is simple and intuitive, designed to complement the narrative rather than challenge the player. In short, if we were to describe The Witch’s Bakery as a cooking sim game, it would be for people who don’t like cooking simulations.
As mentioned, in The Witch’s Bakery we run a bakery in Paris while exploring the city and meeting new friends. The day is divided into three parts: day, evening, and night. During the day, we are in the bakery, serving customers. We play a few short mini-games solely to prepare dough. Our magical companion, Oreo, bakes and sorts the treats into their respective baskets. We would be fulfilling customer orders. So we need to monitor the dough supply and serve customers. If we run out of dough, Oreo stops baking treats. We can also prioritize a certain treat if the demand for it is higher than for the others. Sometimes we’ll get a customer with a special order, meaning they have some emotional ailment. So our job as witches would be to solve another mini-game, a maze, to help the customer. In general, the bakery’s open hours were easy to get through. The gameplay is fast and goes by quickly.
Unfortunately, the press copy I received for review had a bug that made Oreo stop producing baked treats at the start of each day, no matter how much dough I had in stock. It didn’t matter whether I prioritized any treats or restarted the game. The same thing repeated each in-game working day, which meant I earned much less than expected and, in turn, stalled progress and made it hard to get any upgrades I wanted. How I know it is a bug and not what’s expected: in the top corner of the screen, we can see how much of each dough type we have, so I knew for sure I had some in stock, yet Oreo said he had nothing to work with. Also, the very first one or two in-game days this bug didn’t appear, so I know what the baseline earnings look like. According to the developers, they are aware of the bugs and patches are coming, so they shouldn’t appear in the release copy. For now, I obviously can’t verify that.
After we close the bakery, we have some time to explore Paris. New locations unlock as the story progresses, but we’ll quickly have access to a nearby market where we can shop. We have a truly magical shop for supplies and books, and a decoration shop for our bakery. For decorations, we can choose from several styles. I really like mixing and matching items from the Art Deco and Fantasy collections.
During the evening, while exploring Paris, we also met some of our new friends. Some of them will stop by the bakery to make their first impressions. With the bug I was experiencing, I worried that when characters came to the bakery, I wouldn’t be able to fulfill their orders and move the story forward. However, those orders are a fixed story point, since the needed baked treat would always appear on the counter, no matter how bad the workday had gone. Some will be known to Lunne, some will be new. We have dialogue options when interacting with characters, and those choices will shape our relationships with them. We know there will be one romancable character.
Besides the usual baking and selling baked goods, another part of the job is healing people’s emotions. The simplest way to do that is to solve a little maze while giving them their order. While the mazes aren’t very difficult, even the easiest ones have an added challenge: a tidal wave of emotion barreling through and disrupting our work. Still, it’s not too difficult. However, sometimes healing will take us into people’s hearts, where we look for the source of pain. Sometimes that takes several trips into someone’s heart.
In the evening, we can head up to the top of the bakery and enjoy night views of Paris, with Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune as the perfect soundtrack. We can either read our books or head down to the atelier to try some new recipes. Trying new recipes in the atelier involves a slightly more complex mini-game than the ones during the bakery hours. Still, it’s not too complicated, and once we are done, the recipe will be added to the bakery options. Then Oreo will bake, and we’ll prepare dough.
Once we are done with everything, we can go to bed and start a new day.
According to the developers, depending on your playstyle and reading speed, a full playthrough takes around 20 to 25+ hours.
Visually, The Witch’s Bakery is stunning. We start with a cozy, charming animated intro that briefly introduces the world, and then we are off. The game looks and feels hand-drawn, like an old anime, particularly Kiki’s Delivery Service. Paris feels magical and alive, with people milling around. It’s nice to see some of the more iconic Parisian sights included. I really loved the Art Deco elements everywhere, and, of course, the Art Deco collection at the first decoration store. There’s also a beautiful statue somewhere in the game honoring all the bakers, which I thought was a very heartfelt gesture from the developers.
Since we have fantasy elements but are set in modern Paris, the game features a lot of magic. Our witch uses a smartphone to communicate and explore, but it’s common to see colorful spirits on the street or meet another witch.
Some Other Things
The Witch’s Bakery has all the usual audio and video settings, plus remappable controls. I played with a keyboard and mouse, but I imagine the simplified controls make it a breeze to play with a controller as well. The game has Steam achievements, but no trading cards yet.
The Witch’s Bakery has a Content Warning in the main menu of the game, as well as when starting a new game, for several things, including mentions of suicide, arachnophobia, mentions of violence and bullying, stress and burnout, side character death, panic attacks, and optional sexual content, since we can be in a relationship with another character and be intimate. Since this game deals with people’s emotions and heart pain, it mentions some of the causes of that pain. While the warnings sound dire, I think the game handles the difficult topics gracefully, at least up to where I am. In fact, the way The Witch’s Bakery handles these topics reminded me of Spiritfarer, another cozy game that handled difficult topics well.
The Witch’s Bakery is easily one of the most anticipated cozy games. Beyond its arrival on Steam for PC users, it will also be available on PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch & Nintendo Switch 2. We can also expect to play it on iOS and Android via Crunchyroll Game Vault soon. If there’s a game that seems like a natural fit for Crunchyroll, it would, of course, be The Witch’s Bakery, with its nostalgic anime visuals and a premise like a sequel to Kiki’s Delivery Service. For now, there are no plans to release the game for macOS.
Conclusion
The Witch’s Bakery is exactly what I wanted it to be: a narrative game about magic and emotions, with plenty to see, without getting bogged down in the shop-simulation part of the game. I can’t give it our highest rating because of that bug in the bakery gameplay, but barring that, it would’ve deserved it without a doubt.
Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot
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