Love & Pies is the Best-in-Class Recipe for Free-to-Play Storytelling

Love & Pies is a f2p merge and match puzzle game, developed and published by Trailmix Games, a studio founded by ex-King devs now backed by Supercell, where players beat levels to renovate a cafe and help Amelia to find answers to her mother’s disappearance.

Mobile f2p games are built to fit into players’ daily lives by being accessible and long-lasting. With Love & Pies, Trailmix is on a quest to combine that with great storytelling — scripted drama that engages an audience motivated strongly by story.

The Fiction Through-Line

At the core of Love & Pies are the puzzle levels where players primarily spend time and money in the game to earn stars. The (near endless) repetition of this core is kept fun and rewarding by the meta where players spend stars to renovate the cafe.

The fiction through-line runs through the gameplay loop to create a coherent experience, setting the aspiration for playing the game: to help Amelia solve the mystery of the cafe (and maybe even find the love of her life)!

The strong fiction through-line helps form a clear connection between the core and the meta — Beat levels to earn stars (core) to complete tasks and renovate the cafe (meta) to meet suspicious locals and follow the story to help Amelia find her mom (aspiration).

The Prologue

The opening video establishes context with meticulous precision, in all of 15 seconds and 7 cuts, the player is caught up to the background information necessary to have before the start of the game:

• The main character (Amelia) is a divorced single mom travelling with her young daughter (Kate) to
• return home to her mother (at the Windmill Cafe) who happens to have big news, but
• when she reaches her destination she finds her home in flames!

This setup of increasingly bad luck makes Amelia a relatable character for her audience and is followed by her immediately deciding to roll up her sleeves and set things right:

‘I know it’s a mess here, Kate, but I’m going to fix everything up. This used to be my home a long time ago — I’ll make it home again.

The Subplots

As Amelia starts restoring the cafe, the story introduces the support cast of characters which build upon the central mystery (who started the fire?) with secrets of their own like:

• Eve the reporter, who believes Amelia’s mom herself started the fire,
• Joe the ex-boyfriend, who still harbours feelings for Amelia,
• Sven the gay uncle, who is worried for his sister,
• the antagonistic Edwina, who runs the rival cafe,
• Yuka the childhood friend, who trusts no one (and has a crush on Eve) and
• Raj the lawyer and friend to Amelia’s mom.

As the player repeats the gameplay loop, the story builds on the mysteries of the past and present: will Amelia fall for her ex-boyfriend or be swayed by his identical twin? Will she keep the rival Global Megacorp Clean Bean Cafe from ruining her business?

These subplots weave naturally around the fiction through-line, supporting the main plot — will Amelia be able to fix up the cafe and find her mom? What kind of trouble was her mom in anyway?

Whether the audience is reading or skimming through the dialogue, the game uses snapshots of the past and present to visually engage the player with the overarching beats of the expanding narrative.

The sit-com storyline to find the culprit, with a dash of romance, is elevated by characters of color with a wider array of sexual orientations not commonly seen in casual games, but hit home with it’s audience like the binge-worthy Netflix Originals that play right alongside it.