Sep 28
2023
The Bread Must Rise—Spice up a baking contest with necromancy!
Posted by: Mary Duffy | Comments (45)
We’re proud to announce that The Bread Must Rise, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app.
It’s 38% off until October 5th!
In this magical baking contest, you’ll team up with the Queen Undying to bake your rivals into an early grave—or out of the grave, with necromancy!
The Bread Must Rise is a 450,000-word interactive comedy/fantasy/baking/eldritch horror novel by James Beamon and Stewart C. Baker. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
Also, by lots of terrible jokes.
You’ve been chosen as one of six contestants in the Great Godstone Bakeoff! Godstone, renowned throughout the twelve mostly civilized realms as the “city of a thousand bakeries,” is not what it once was. The Queen Undying, a necromancer rumored to have a taste for human blood, has filled its streets with terror, while the robe-shrouded members of the Carb Freeon cult threaten bakers with impunity. And something is off with the City Council, a group of shadowy figures who nobody ever remembers seeing.
You’re one of Godstone’s top bakers, with a scrappy little business, a mysterious confectionary legacy from your late parents, and a former best friend who stole your recipes to make his own fame and fortune. You’ve got a lot to prove in this competition, and you’ll stop at nothing to reach the top of the profiterole tower.
But everything changes when the Queen Undying herself appears at your bakery. The queen has forced you to become her newest thrall, helpless to resist her eldritch power. And, for mysterious reasons, she’s commanding you to make her your baking assistant!
Exercise your breadcraft magic to turn the saddest soggiest-bottomed bakes into stunning showstoppers; sweet-talk the judges into giving you the win; or just put in good old-fashioned hard work. If you’re not satisfied with just making bread rise, maybe you’ll start making the dead rise, too: necromancy is powerful, and the Queen Undying’s spells might be just what you need to complete that recipe…or to take down your rival once and for all.
Play up to the press, win the adoration of your fans, and navigate the influence of the Carb Freeon cult as you bake your way to fame! The farther you go in the tournament, the closer you get to learning the secrets of your own past, uncovering clues about your parents’ life and death. And the closer you come to learning the City Council’s shadowy plans for Godstone…
• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, bi, pan, or asexual.
• Choose your ingredients: play in omnivore, vegetarian, or vegan mode.
• Manage your budget to fill your pantry with the finest magical and mundane ingredients.
• Find love with Godstone’s fanciest food critic, a dreaded necromancer, a former adventurer, the Bakeoff’s charismatic host, or even your best-friend-turned-worst-enemy!
• Quell the Carb Freeon cult or join its ranks.
• Sell out to the realm’s biggest bakery franchise or triumph as a plucky small business owner.
• Gaze upon the horrors of eldritch dimensions.
Will you take home the trophy or fade into bland obscurity? One thing’s for sure: you’ll never look at brownies the same way again.
We hope you enjoy playing The Bread Must Rise. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.
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I love the character development in this story. Congrats on the release to both James Beamon and Stewart C. Baker!
What can I even say about this game? It’s the eldritch take on The Great British Bake Off you never knew you needed. It’ll make you hungry - some of the time, anyway. It will make you laugh. It will make you cringe. It will make you do both at once. At moments when you least expect it, it just might warm your heart. It’s very, very weird, and it’s deliciously fun. I’m excited to see what the readers think of every game I’ve beta tested, but I’ve anticipated this release with a special kind of delight.
If you enjoy Douglas Adams and Monty Python and the way they combine genuinely clever wit with purely absurd silliness, this is the game for you. If reality TV is your guilty pleasure but you have to laugh at some of the gimmicky conventions of the genre, this is the game for you. If you’ve ever watched a cooking show and thought “This really needs more tentacles,” you’re weird and a little scary and this is definitely the game for you.
Congratulations to James Beamon and Stewart C. Baker on a wonderful accomplishment. I may well salute you in my mind for the rest of my life every time I eat a brownie.
That right there just sold me on the story, I was on the fence about getting it but yeah now I need to read this. Like right now.
The day is here and the bread will rise! As a big fan of Mel and Sue era Bakeoff (I’m a purist OK), and MasterChef: the Professionals, I have often thought it would be fun to add in an eldritch horror. Congratulations to James Beamon and @Stewart_Baker!
Also I love the fact that someone with the surname Baker has made a game about necromantic baking.
I wanted to pick up the pun, but you beat me to it.
First the stars, and then the bread. Next will be the integrated circuits of robots long expired rising! It’s really good that someone managed to pull off combining the ingredients of something mundane as baking with something that can only be described as pure fantasy. What an exotic dish! And what’s with the carb-free baking? I had hoped for something akin to the gluten and caesin-free diet that I have, but that sounds even more out-of-this-world. To the citizens of Godstone, that is.