This game was originally covered as part of our Nindie Round Up series that sought to give coverage to a wider breadth of Switch eShop games beyond our standard reviews. In an effort to make our impressions easier to find, we're presenting the original text below in our mini-review format.

A typical arcade-style time management game, Julie’s Sweets has you running a small café and --eventually — different, larger levels inside a thinly plot-driven, cooking-themed sim.

The plot involves you guiding Julie through key decisions in her young life, helping the family business and enrolling her into cooking school to make the best dishes possible. It’s about as stock as one can get and bears more than a casual resemblance to Waku Waku Sweets. The gaming community just goes mad for stories about young girls who love to cook, it seems.

Gameplay-wise, it’s a little basic, with the main goal of satisfying customers by creating various dishes being pretty easy to manage. That said, as multiple orders flood in, with different meals each time, it can get pretty frantic and challenging, especially in later levels. You’re timed on how long your patrons have had to wait based on a decreasing heart gauge, which can lead to some intense juggling and combos when things really start to heat up.

Admittedly, once on a roll, the act of preparing and serving food, and earning hearts and new tools, actually becomes rather addictive, if monotonous. Unfortunately, though, its repetition is akin to unimaginative free-to-play games, along with its shallow end goal, strikingly ugly visuals, and dull, simplistic gameplay.

The visuals are indeed a bit unnerving, with Julie’s wide eyes staring directly into your soul every time you boot up for that overly long loading screen. The other characters share this accidentally horrifiying design and look unappealing as a result. The music is also quite stock, sounding reminiscent of old-school social media games like Farmville with its chill acoustic guitar and repeating medley.

Overall, Julie’s Sweets isn’t a bad game; it plays well for what it is and can be addictive once invested, but the shallow story, scary visuals, and lack of replay value let it down.