Love and Pies – mobile game – Tartan Moa

Love & Pies is a popular match and merge game where you merge tasty treats while decorating a cafe – and enjoy a telenovela style story along the way. Love & Pies launched globally in September 2021, is regularly featured as Editor’s Choice on Google Play and the Apple store, and has over 7+ million downloads so far.

Part romance, part mystery, all fun, it’s a story full of twists and turns. There’s a diverse group of characters like old flames, a nasty nemesis, eccentric relatives and lots of suspicious locals all while trying to solve the grand mystery.

As Narrative Lead, Laura was responsible for narrative design and writing on the game. From 2018 to 2024 she created the game bible – including characters, world building, storylines and backstories – wrote all in-game scripts, dialogue, and barks, and contributed to UI, UA and marketing.

Love & Pies is incredibly popular, and player metrics show how important the narrative is. There’s 60% retention by Day 1, a whopping 20% D30 retention, and an amazing 10% retention by D120 – the top 25 per cent of mobile games only see an average retention of 4% D28!

Reviews and articles:

Love & Pies: A Masterful Pivot to Merge2 on Naavik: ‘Another aspect in which Love & Pies is best-in-class is its narrative… When working your way through the game’s narrative, it becomes crystal clear that this company truly cares about values even outside its own work culture. Love & Pies characters are deep, rich, truly funny, and represent people from many different walks of life, a lot of them minorities in some way. Most importantly, this is all done without it feeling forced, making it a true benchmark in casual F2P narrative.’
Why Love & Pies is the Most Innovative Match 3 Game? on Game Refinery: ‘sitcom-styled narrative gameplay that introduces a lot of characters and choices through sophisticated storytelling‘
It’s Love, Pies, Mystery & Heartbreak Galore In Love & Pies! on Muse World: ‘...believe us when we say that this puzzle game is not like the rest! There’s puzzles and tricky levels, but also an intriguing story, love, pies, mystery, romance, heartbreak, and everything else under the sun in your average Spanish telenovela in Love & Pies!‘
Love & Pies is the Best-in-Class Recipe for Free-to-Play Storytelling
How Trailmix went from Soft Launch to Global Success on Unity
A blog post by Laura on celebrating diversity in Love & Pies during Pride