Saturday of Play.NYC. Also, the third official day of AnimeNYC. Now you wanna talk crowds, let’s talk crowds. Boy howdy, the Javits Center was packed. And you know what? It made me feel as though…some cleaning was needed. Get that real Lemony Fresh scent in there!

Yes! My Saturday pick was something that blended two genres I love. Puzzles with indirect story-telling elements. And “powerwashing”. Let’s call it powerwashing.

Before we get too far into the lemon-scented weeds, be sure and check out GSC’s highlighted games from Thursday and Friday!

Saturday’s Highlight – Lemony Fresh

Lemony Fresh, per their Steam page, is a blending of platforming, puzzles, and cleaning up the filth of a family’s home. Coming to us from My Dog Zorro Games, Lemony Fresh was (and it was great for them) always busy whenever I had previously stopped by to check it out. So imagine my luck when I managed to snag a seat on the busiest day of the convention.

So, what is Lemony Fresh? You start the game as an adorably smol lemon. An adorably smol lemon that has a lot of cleaning ahead of them.

It falls to our citrusy friend to use his power washer and vacuum to clean up this home, as well as free the other fruit-based lifeforms in this house. Because you will need all of their help to get into some of those more hard-to-reach spaces.

As you make your way through the home, you’ll start to be able to piece together the lives of those whose whom you are in. A shoe in this doorway. A note on that calendar. All of these little tidbits of information start to provide our lemony friend a portrait of the lives in this domicile.

Thoughts on Lemony Fresh & The Future

Lemony Fresh was adorable. The art design was just perfect for such a cozy and relaxing title. Additionally, the controls felt very intuitive and if I’m being honest, I felt like I was playing what was essentially a polished and publicly-available game.

In speaking with one of the developers from My Dog Zorro Games, the game itself will be available for a demo online in the very near future. In fact, Play.NYC was the only place you could play this demo! I was also able to hear that Lemony Fresh will be looking for a Q1 2027 release to PC.

Be sure to join us tomorrow as we round out our coverage of this year’s Play.NYC and our last highlighted title of the weekend.