Freshly Frosted Has Me Dreaming Colorful Donut Dreams

ign.com:

I first played Freshly Frosted at night, for a few hours before bed. I went to sleep, and dreamt of donuts. The next morning, I woke up and instantly went out to buy a dozen. I couldn’t get the idea of warm, neat, colorful, sweet donuts out of my mind.

Fundamentally, Freshly Frosted sounds like it’s less about donuts and more like it’s about machines. It’s a puzzle game about laying down tracks of conveyor belts that will get donuts from point A to point B. Along the way, they can pass by machinery that will apply, in order: frosting, sprinkles, whipped cream, and cherry toppings, with each level requesting a certain amount of donuts with specific toppings. So it might ask for a plain, two frosted, and one with whipped cream, but you’ll need to apply frosting and sprinkles before the whipped cream can be added. The puzzles grow increasingly complex, adding more topping stations, tricks like merging conveyor belts, and of course, more donuts. It’s all very mechanical sounding, when you describe it that way.

But actually playing Freshly Frosted is anything but. Its intricate conveyor belts are set atop a pastel cloud wallpaper lazily drifting by as you sort your donuts out. The donuts themselves are all tidily frosted by soothing, rhythmic machinery gently bap-bap-bap-ing toppings on to the beat of a gentle soundtrack that intensifies when your factory starts up, and quiets while you think about your next move. Each level is introduced with a relaxed voiceover that encourages the player, waxes philosophical about life, and of course, imagines more and more donuts. The donut machines are (per the light story introduction) constructs of the speaker’s mind, but after just a few minutes of donuts, music, and color massaging my