We here at GamersPack play a lot of Overcooked together. We love working as a team towards a common goal while we scream our lungs out at each other until someone cries. It’s the best.
That is why we jumped at the opportunity to play Bake ‘n Switch at Gamescom. It’s a four-player co-op game with a cooking theme that is sure to turn best friends into life-long enemies. It’s also really, really fun.
The goal is pretty simple: bake as many cute buns as you can before the clock runs out. Just pick up a bun and throw it in the oven (and try not to think about the fact that these are sentient and very adorable buns).
You can combine buns of the same shape into bigger buns that bake for a little bit longer but give you more points. It’s a simple objective four players can achieve pretty easily.
Moving platforms, the different types of buns, and pesky mold monsters make things a little more complicated.
You can see in our Switch ‘n Bake gameplay video that getting buns into the oven isn’t the problem – being fast and efficient enough is the trick. Teamwork is crucial, with players taking specific roles like preparation, managing orders, and mold control. Mold are small, worm-like creatures that can taint any bun they touch, so fending them off seems to be a big part of the challenge.
Just like Overcooked, how well you and your friends work together will determine your high score. Naturally, it creates a lot of friction which leads to hilarious mayhem. You can quickly negate any progress your friends make by accidentally dropping a level-10 bun into a river, letting it get moldy, or covering it in the wrong flavor.
We didn’t get to try really complicated levels, but even the early ones were too hectic for us to score a three-star rating on the first try. Don’t let the theme and cute visuals fool you, getting the high score in Bake ‘n Switch is not a cakewalk.
When you need to blow off some steam and show your friends how a pro bakes, you head into PvP. There, it’s every cook for themselves as you need to put the right buns in your own color-coded oven and sabotage other players by throwing the wrong kind of buns into theirs. And we thought the co-op levels were chaotic…
We were running around like headless chickens, trying to both score points and prevent anyone else from scoring. It was a mess, and only one of us (me) ended up with a positive score in the end. But it’s a fun mess, the kind you get when from having too many cooks working on one dish without a recipe, and somehow make a perfect meal.
Developer Streamline Games is planning on cooking Bake ‘n Switch on Steam Early Access later this year, so the game won’t come out half-baked. When it’s ready, Bake ‘n Switch will be served on PC and Nintendo Switch.
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