Operation Cream Cake

Hello there! I'm quite enjoying the game - Wainscott's dialogue is very fun, and I very much enjoy seeing him be sweet to O'Neal, befriend Malcolm, shoot down Leclerc's too-strong advances, and throw hands with sexual predators like Flyte and Unnamed American Guy - but unfortunately I've gotten completely stuck. I collected all the ingredients O'Neal asked for, and I've got the bowl and the whisk and the cake tin, but I now have no idea what to do next. I tried giving and showing him the ingredients, but that didn't seem to work. I've wandered around and talked to everybody again (O'Neal, Flyte, Leclerc), but didn't seem to get any new cutscenes. I know the game has two potential endings, but I cannot figure out how to get them. Is there a walkthrough or a hint system at all?

Also, I do recommend noting in your game that "INVENTORY" is a valid input! The pop-up blurb saying that LOOK, TALK, GIVE, SHOW, and the directional inputs are the only valid inputs may result in people not being aware that INVENTORY is something they can type, which would result in them not being able to find the photograph and show it to Malcolm to get the flour. I only figured it out because I've played a fair number of text adventures already, but since the genre has tragically grown quite niche since its heyday in the early years of computers, many players used to more modern gaming interfaces may not know. Noting that you can press ENTER to continue after the first cutscene might help them, too!

I did notice a bug while playing which is that when a player types only TALK, SHOW, GIVE, or TAKE without a subject such as TALK O'NEAL or TAKE EGGS, the game gives an error message like so:

Then it crashes immediately afterward. Initially, I didn't know that you had to write TALK O'NEAL and TALK wasn't automatically applied to whoever was in the area, so the game crashing made me think that it, like a sad number of other games on itch.io, might be broken. After saying "TALK O'NEAL", it worked fine, but it was a bit of a struggle initially.

(I also noticed that when you try to take "CAKE TINS", it doesn't allow you to talk them, but it does allow you to take "CAKE TIN", so having "TAKE CAKE TINS" lead to you taking a cake tin would probably be helpful for players, if possible! It does make me wonder if there's a way to access the BOOKSHELF in the bistro, but no commands I've tried on the BOOKSHELF have worked. There are other times where cutscenes will repeat, even if you've already got the necessary item, like if you show the photograph to Malcolm a second time, or how the cutscene with O'Neal and the American will repeat ad infinitum if you try to use a number of commands.)

Ultimately, I'm having a lot of fun, and I'm hoping to get the endings and see what they're like! I'm curious if my friend will ever make it here, or if O'Neal or Malcolm will be involved in the endings... Delighted to find out! (And if my reading of the text is at all on the mark, I'm equally delighted to be playing as an "invert", so to speak - given that I'm a queer man myself!)