A slice of music in Hello Kitty Party Land

A cake in Hello Kitty Party Land can supply the soundtrack to your own little animation. Decorate it to make music, arrange pictures in a sketchbook, then let the two play together. Among the board games, shops and Sanrio companions, the Creative Labo has a particularly charming invitation: make something the rest of the group can watch and hear.

The party game launches today, 29 October, on Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. Its town includes more than 45 minigames, but the Labo deserves a detour of its own. Yesterday's official manual lays out a pair of connected creative toys: Melody Cake turns decorations into sounds, while Poster Studio turns layered stamps into pictures and a sequence of pages into animation.

Our look at Party Land's partners and cooperative minigames explored the appeal of playing towards a shared score. Here, the pleasure comes from arranging things. You choose the notes and the pictures, with room to alter a detail and see what happens to the whole. A familiar character can become the subject of something you've made together.

Decorations you can hear

Melody Cake sits at the left end of the Creative Labo. Its edible-looking surface is a musical layout: decorations on top control percussion, while those around the sides control the melody. Choose an instrument and its decorations each produce a different sound. The cake makes those two musical jobs easy to picture, giving a rhythm its own surface and a tune its own place around the edge.

You can loop playback while decorating, so a change has an audible result as you work. That's an inviting way into composing. Listening and moving a decoration become part of the same activity, and a tune can grow through small adjustments. The important feedback is the sound coming back from the cake; you can keep changing the arrangement until it pleases your ear.

There are practical controls behind the confectionery. You can change the tempo, and switching between 4/4 and 3/4 changes how the cake is divided. Position affects pitch. Those choices give you several different things to listen for: the pace of the tune, its grouping and the movement of its notes. The visual joke carries useful musical decisions, which is a lovely reason to spend a little longer with it.

A Cake Catalog holds up to 16 cakes, and playback can run through its contents in order. Four catalogues and supplied samples give you places to keep arrangements and examples to explore. Saving several cakes also gives a session somewhere to go after the first experiment. A single decorated surface can become one part of a longer sequence, with earlier ideas available to revisit.

Sixteen pages, one little film

Across the Labo, Poster Studio begins with stamps. Each sits on a separate layer, so a picture can be assembled piece by piece. You can change a stamp's colour, size and rotation, and alter the order of the layers. That's a useful set of choices for an activity dressed up as a simple poster maker: composition includes what sits behind something as well as where it sits. The layer controls also let you restore the last deleted stamp, a welcome invitation to undo a change and keep experimenting with the picture.

The sketchbook then gives those pictures a second purpose. Its 16 pages can play in sequence as an animation. A saved page becomes one image in a moving set, so changes between pages are part of the creative opportunity. Copying a page gives you a starting point for the next one; editing an existing arrangement is an appealing way to work out what you'd like to move.

This is where the cake returns. An animation can use a Melody Cake song as its background track, pairing the sketchbook and cake by their index number. Music and pictures have a destination together. Making a tune for a sequence of images gives both activities a specific project, and the finished playback offers something everyone can gather around.

A workshop beside the party

The Labo fits a town that already mixes games with quieter activities. October's guided tour introduced farming and fishing at Sky Farm, outfit shopping and a Photo Studio alongside the Game Park. That range makes a visit feel pleasantly easy to redirect. A group can arrive for minigames and find a reason to linger over a melody or a picture afterwards.

The creative tools have a particularly good fit with Sanrio's cast. Party Land lets you choose from 16 playable partners and meet over 145 characters, while its wider activities include collecting stickers. Familiar faces give the town its immediate welcome. At the Labo, the interesting next step is arranging colours, sounds and pictures into something with your own choices in it. A tune made on a cake and a tiny sketchbook film make a delightful souvenir of the party.