Mai-Chan’s Sweet Buns is a match-3 puzzler about completing orders in a bakery! Created for the A Game By Its Cover Jam 2018 by Krystian Majewski, this adorable pixel art game belies a simple, yet challenging task — rotate your cursor to select rows or columns and serve pastries as per the order cards displayed.
You interact with Mai-Chan’s Sweet Buns with your keyboard by selecting and rotating with the “x” and “c” keys respectively as you line up buns, pretzels, and so much more. Alongside the repertoire of tasty treats comes 3 varied powers that you can use to aid you in the game. By selecting Mai-chan’s Star Box, you can activate powers by spending stars that are earned when either a row or column is filled with one kind of pastry.
Even for a short jam game, I found myself really enjoying and digging into the meat of the game (pun very much intended). When I first played Mai-Chan’s Sweet Buns, the game only came with one mode, but since then it gotten a lot sweeter with the addition of hard mode (with much tougher orders to clear) and a shop where players can purchase powerups to change up the game.
It’s a clever way to keep players thinking and playing, as more powerful powerups are locked behind higher prices, but Mai-Chan’s Sweet Buns never feels like a grind, in fact — I enjoyed the process of fulfilling orders in Mai-Chan’s bakery. It made way for more orders to be fulfilled, and there was a certain sense of satisfaction as a row or column lined up perfectly to help me knock out several orders at once.
Protip when playing the game: remove items at the top first, because it will allow newer pastries to fill those slots and allow you more variety. Planning whether to rotate your cursor horizontally or vertically added a layer of challenge — if I serve this now, will the oncoming items fill the right slots at the right time?
I’m still working through the hard mode as I want to unlock all the shop items. Upgraded powers help boost the already heavy-hitting base powers — Nom (removing one pastry from anywhere), Table Flip (reshuffling the order cards and redrawing them), and Diet (reducing a card with a value of more than one to just one).
All in all, Mai-Chan’s Sweet Buns is a tasty treat for players who want a game that doesn’t just look good enough to eat, but plays well enough for you to feel full!
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