ISSUE #0 - PAOPULEAF KINGDOM

Welcome to Issue #0 of Cookie Walk, an informal monthly review magazine for Cookie Run: Kingdom that talks about the most recent update, from new cookies to costumes to minigames to story, and my thoughts on the overarching structure and writing of the game. This issue I’ll be talking about my background with the game, my kingdom, my favorite cookies and costumes, and my broad thoughts on CR:K as a whole.

Since this is the first issue, to set out some expectations: This is not a gossip mag. I’m pretty uninterested in the Cookie Run fandom, and even less interested in publicizing what thoughts I do have on it. I might highlight some fanworks I enjoy, but that’s the extent of it! This isn’t a professional magazine either, and you’re going to get a lot of my personal opinions mixed in with the critique. Your mileage may vary!

Paopuleaf Kingdom

a mycookie dressed up like the chess choco twins, with a dreamy background, and the title 'guest at the funeral'.

I’ve been playing CR:K since around October 2021, when I installed it thanks to one of my friends showing off some of the Kingdom cookies. I had been playing Ovenbreak on and off before then, but the gameplay loop of Kingdom hooked me much quicker—and it helps that back in 2021, there were not nearly so many mechanics to keep track of. I’ve set down the game for a month or two at a time pretty frequently, but it’s the one mobile game I’ve actually come back to over and over again.

The thing about playing a gacha game for long enough is that eventually you have enough in-game currency to do whatever you want. I’ve had every cookie pretty consistently since August 2022, and there’s a lot of delight for me in keeping up with the most recent PvE meta, especially for Guild Battles. I’m currently the leader of the guild I’ve been in since joining the game, which largely consists of me and fifteen friends who haven’t logged into the game in literal years. The fact that I can propel us into Master 2 tier singlehandedly is an art. (Would I be better served by joining a different guild? Probably. But the sentimental value is too high.)

While I enjoy PvE meta… I will never be one of those people who spends hundreds of dollars on the game just to get into the upper echelons of the PvP arena. I’m content with being able to keep up with the meta just enough to get currency for the costume gacha and occasionally one of the arena-exclusive cakehound designs. I hover around Master 3 most seasons, which nets me a pretty good reward. The feature they added for decorating your arena platform is very cute, and I like it a lot. Currently I’m waiting to see what the second, fancier set of Timekeeper-themed decorations will look like before I buy anymore, so mine is looking like this:

The Kingdom decor system is the other thing I enjoy being able to indulge in as much as I want, with literally no upper limit on my budget. Ostensibly I could fill every square of my kingdom with 500-diamond items and it’d be fine. Right now it looks like this:

I’ve been slowly making my way through unlocking the rest of the available land, but it’s a long and tedious process, considering that I’m at the point where every new expansion takes about a month to go through. It’s a staple in a game like this but it does get irritating! Once I have everything unlocked, I’ll probably go through and tear up the whole thing again, but the Dream Train area and the Statue Garden will likely stay the same. They’re my favorite decor sets, and I’m pretty happy with how they came out here.

Staples of the Pantry

I was going to make a tierlist for all of the cookies across every game, and to be fair to myself I did get about 30% of the way through one before I realized that 500 cookies is a) way too many to sort & b) way more cookies than I have actual, meaningful opinions about. My passive up-keep with the plots and cookies of Ovenbreak and Witch’s Castle are truly not enough to fully form thoughts on them…! Though I do really like seeing what’s happening over there. So for now, here’s just a selection of my favorites!

Cookie Jar

little explanations within!

  • Dark Choco Cookie: I’m always really delighted by a tragic character who doesn’t believe they can find redemption, but has more good in them than they think. I started CR:K before the update that added Dark Cacao, his kingdom, and the canonical start of Dark Choco’s face turn, but I was so compelled by the concept that I started one of my longest fanwork projects ever about it. Oops! He holds a really special place in my heart, and I’m always hoping to see more of him with each update—I will eat up every crumb (ha).

  • Pumpkin Pie Cookie: If there is anything I love in this world it is cute, creepy little girls who are so incredibly haunted (especially if she’s probably a ghost herself). She carries around a living doll that either has her sister’s ghost or an unrelated demon she’s playing house with?? She loves fashion and Halloween?? She’s a little scary?? All incredibly good! One of my pipe dreams is that CR:K will do another Halloween event and actually give Pumpkin Pie a costume. Did you know that in terms of release date she’s the oldest Epic cookie to not have a costume? It drives me up the wall!

  • Cotton Cookie: At least in part because her release came right after I joined, and because she was a staple on my team for months, Cotton Cookie has a special place in my heart. Lantern in the Snow continues to stand as one of my favorite CR:K side stories they’ve ever done, almost five years later. I love when they do fairy tales, and it’s one of the very best. I love tragedies…!

  • Caramel Arrow Cookie: Similarly to Cotton Cookie, Caramel Arrow was a staple on my team for a long time, and I love her in the Dark Cacao Kingdom chapter duology as well. Loyal to her king but thrown out on word of his obviously evil advisor… compassionate and determined to a fault… While to this day I have issues with how Chapter 14 wrapped up the plot threads introduced in Chapter 13 (or, more accurately, how it didn’t do that), Caramel Arrow’s devotion to Dark Cacao compels me greatly. Let me see more of her history with Dark Choco…!

  • White Lily Cookie: WHITE LILY COOKIE ARE YOU FREE ON FRIDAY NIGHT. WHEN I AM ALSO FREE. If there is anything I love MORE in this world than creepy haunted girls it is morally dubious women who are haunting the narrative, big-time. Of course this does not excuse CR:K bringing her back to life only to kill her again but hey, that’s a critique for another time. White Lily has by far the most compelling story in CR:K (sharing that honor with Dark Enchantress for obvious reasons), and her complicated relationships to the other Ancients both in the wake of her death and the aftermath of her resurrection are delicious. (PureLily, you will always be famous to me.) It is for her that Hope for Freedom is my favorite of the Beast-Yeast episodes.

  • Dark Enchantress Cookie: DARK ENCHANTRESS COOKIE, ARE YOU FREE ON FRIDAY NIGHT! I can see how people love White Lily without loving Dark Enchantress, but I am not one of those people—they are two sides of the same coin and I think they’re both fantastic. CR:K really fumbles Dark Enchantress’ writing in parts, but ultimately I think she has some of the sickest motivation of any of their antagonists and—for all my issues with the finale of Act 1—a really sick transformation from cookie to something other. Her glow-up is bonkers but fits her very well. Her relationship to Red Velvet and her situationship with Pomegranate are some of the highlights of the game as a whole. I love evil women consumed by revenge and hubris.

  • Chess Choco Cookie: Before the end of 2025 my other CR:K pipe dream, in addition to my hopes for a Pumpkin Pie costume, was that Chess Choco Cookie would be added to the game. They’re a very delightful pair with a really fun little side story in Ovenbreak and an enticing plot hook involving both Dark Enchantress and Dark Choco. And I love that they got to run a hotel in Kingdom as well (even if I’m a bit sad Earl Grey didn’t feature with them)! They are strange, codependent little guys and I am obsessed with the fact that they have a weird variation of chess where there’s only 16 squares and they just play with pawns.

  • Timekeeper & Croissant Cookie: My t-shirt that says “I <3 Selfcest Yuri” is raising a lot of questions already answered by my t-shirt. In ALL seriousness, they are both fascinating characters on their own, with their convoluted relationship to each other—across all iterations—being only a highlight of their stories. I love Timekeeper’s relationship to themself, and to the passage of time, as a strange sort of immortal who is also, constantly, dying.

Iced Wardrobe

no explanations here JUST titles

  • Vestments of Old Memories (Dark Choco Cookie)

  • Return of the Prince (Dark Choco Cookie)

  • Cheesin’ Beyond the Veil (Mozzarella Cookie)

  • Yogurt Phantom (Strawberry Crepe Cookie)

  • Red Camellia (Cotton Cookie)

  • Stargazing Scholar (Eclair Cookie)

  • Feelin’ Blue & Pink (Parfait Cookie)

  • Absent-minded Maid (Matcha Cookie)

  • Veil of Mourning (White Lily Cookie)

  • Architect of Abundance (Golden Cheese Cookie)

  • Dread Trident of the Abyss (Sea Fairy Cookie)

  • Meow-Meow Spacesuit (Astronaut Cookie)

  • Punkromantic Fashion Show Model (Cotton Candy Cookie)

  • Director of the TBD (Croissant Cookie)

  • Ruler of the Ephemeral Flow (Timekeeper Cookie)

So Far…

Through the Crispia chapters of the game, there’s the feeling of a development team finding their footing, before they come into full swing as the shape of the Ancients’ storyline solidifies. Dark Enchantress and her henchmen’s plots feel ripped straight from a Saturday Morning cartoon, with some brief dips into horror, until that dynamic flips during Citadel of the Frozen Cliff—and they quietly vanish for a while. The story of every Ancient is painted across two acts, each of them dealing with the aftermath of their part in the Dark Flour War, and the tragedies they endured then, and in the years after. They do pretty well by this format! While I think some of the stories deserved more time in the sun, it’s a neat bit of structure that lends itself well to the gacha game format, and to incredibly dramatic cliffhangers.

They continue this two-act formula to the Beast-Yeast chapters, and… yet again, the Ancients are brought low in the first before rising from the ash in the second, but this time they’re being (homoerotically) tormented by monsters from the far past, Cookies who once harnessed the same power they did before it was split and they were sealed away. The dynamics between the Ancients and their Beasts are pretty interesting, and the environments of Beast-Yeast they inhabit are, for the most part, vivid and horrifying. Their ability to warp the world around them has the great effect of making them feel like a much more immediate and dire threat than Dark Enchantress’ slow planning in the background, but don’t get me wrong– the tastes we get of her plan through the accompanying side stories is haunting, leaning hard into the horror of cookie experimentation and Witches as a sort of eldritch horror.

Then we hit the end, and things sort of… crumble. What’s good is really good: the trio of experiments and their fraught relationships, Dark Enchantress’ transformation into an unsustainable facsimile of a Witch, Gingerbrave’s interactions with the Ultimate Cookie in the Oven, Pure Vanilla hitting Shadow Milk with his car airship. The story begins to strain against the restraints of the format, with the episodes breaking from the usual thirty-levels-in-order format to include an Espresso interlude where he deals a pivotal blow to Dark Enchantress’ magic circles. Unfortunately, this last act suffers from several things: the need to set up Shadow Milk as the next main antagonist, the undermining of Dark Enchantress’ overarching plan and motivation, and the fact that they kill White Lily to replace her with a little homunculus light. Hello?

Listen, the most important thing to know about my personal thoughts going into Act 2 is that I don’t enjoy Shadow Milk Cookie nearly any time he’s on screen. In both Spire of Shadows and Beacon of Truth, he’s got a good dynamic with Pure Vanilla and some real fun writing, but every other time—the ‘violent jester turned overbearingly egotistical auteur with a penchant for monologue’ bit is OVERDONE! It truly is! He isn’t even the Beast with the most interesting relationship to the Witches (one day they will get back to whatever the fuck was happening in the catacombs with Silent Salt/the Salt of Solidarity pre-canon). I’m hoping they bring me back around to him, but I’m not holding my breath.

What I am the most excited for is the Time Balance Department, and the glimmer of more horror on the horizon. Timekeeper is by and large my favorite Legendary, and the TBD as a whole is one of my favorite settings and cast of characters in Cookie Run as a whole. I’m VERY excited to see what more they reveal about them!

I’m posting this late enough into the month that I do have a lot of thoughts on the update, already, but all of those will be saved for Issue #1! I’ll see you sometime in June with the next edition of Cookie Walk, this one on the Arcana of Truth and Deceit.