One button games often have a maddening simple premise that cranks up in difficulty over time. Cakefoot follows this trend by making a 2D minimalist platform game that reminds me a bit of the electric wire dexterity game. Dodge everything and reach the end of the wire at each level. Prepare to be enraged.
Cakefoot is literally a walking slice of cake but the character never stays still. If you press a button you’ll walk forward. If you let go you’ll walk back at a slower pace. Each level has an increasingly complicated layout of a single wire wrapping around itself, off the screen and with loads of enemies flying and zooming across the wire in various patterns. You need to dodge them all by moving back and forth to avoid everything. Levels often have checkpoints to start with but that’s only to ease you in gently before Cakefoot unleashes its harder modes later on. The 22 levels appear quite random but they are designed in a way to catch you out with irregular enemy movements or attacking projectiles set to target you where you stand every few seconds. It takes time to get used to how the patterns all cross over and their varying speeds but nothing is unpredictable, it just punishes gamers who rush.
Completing Cakefoot for the first time is only the beginning though. The game is a time trial speedrunner game as a clock marks your progress across the whole game. Complete it once and capture the coin in each level and you then unlock Beefcake mode which makes the levels harder. Say bye bye to checkpoints and watch your every move and although I didn’t quite get to see it all, Buffalo Beef Cake mode is harder still. You can also unlock mirror and warped modes alongside other visual effects as you go too. It’s really a cake that blossoms out after you complete it with much more replayability than initially meets the eye. Cakefoot also runs its levels using JSON and whilst I haven’t tried it, apparently levels can be created and shared using the syntax in the game.
Whilst arcade lets you try individual levels, the challenge and fun/frustration (delete as appropriate) comes from that race against the clock to get the quickest run. Sadly times are local only and I’d have loved some kind of online leaderboard integration to make the speedrunning aspect of the game easier to share and maintain. If you don’t like rage inducing games, Cakefoot will not convert you. I had a good time with it though and as long as I knew when to pick it up and put it down (helped by auto save per checkpoint/level), I enjoyed myself.
Review copy provided by developer. Out now on Steam.
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