The Bread Must Rise—Spice up a baking contest with necromancy!

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Originally published at: The Bread Must Rise—Spice up a baking contest with necromancy! - Choice of Games LLC

The Bread Must Rise
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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Thanks for the kind words, all! This was a heck of a lot of fun to write (except when it wasn’t lolsob), and I hope that comes through. :slight_smile:

:joy:

I think Aletheia noted this too, once I posted the WIP thread!

As I mention in the interview though, I’m extremely mediocre in the actual kitchen. :laughing:

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We’ve got vegan and vegetarian, but no gluten-free, alas! Although actually if you go the carb-free route, I think most of the recipes do end up being free of gluten since they use a blend of almond and cononut flour! And if you’re doing vegan mode and carb-free, there’s no dairy, either!

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Congratulations on the release, can’t wait to play it! I really looked forward to this title!

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Thank you! Hope you enjoy. :slight_smile:

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This was quite a fun one! Humor hits that Discworld/Hitchhikers vibe pretty well.

Unfortunately( or fortunately, since it does mean i go through this again), croissants are just too darn buttery and fluf-ALL HAIL THE BREAD! ALL ARE NOTHING COMPARED TO THE GREATNESS THAT IS THE BREAD!

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I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought. What a Sweet introduction to the story. Fondant really Sours my taste I wish I could have taken the opportunity to run in his cupcakes. Also I ran into a Bitter bug. When I start the first round I bought the chupacabra first then everything else then I had to rebuy it in the end. No worries tho the timer’s ticking cause I sent in a bug report. I will definitely be buying the game!

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The third round is impossible to win despite having maximum stats. Could this be a bug?

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Two huge, outsized influences on me growing up, although I’m not sure if James was into them. Thanks for the comment and for purchasing!

And I agree about the croissants. :wink:

Thanks for reporting that! We will check into that over the weekend and get it fixed.

Just to clarify, what’s happening here is that you purchase a chupacabra, purchase the other things in the store, and then before you leave the store section, you have to purchase the chupacabra again. Correct? (There are some cases where you might actually have to buy a chupacabra twice, but it definitely shouldn’t make you do it if you haven’t left the store yet.)

The code that calculates the winners each round is ridiculous and complex despite many tweaks and fixes pre-release, so it could well be a bug.

We will take a look over the weekend and see if we can reproduce and fix–sorry about that!

Can you either submit a bug report about this with a little more information or send me a DM?

Things it would be helpful to know:

  • your stat values
  • if you got disqualified/requalified

(Also, thank you for purchasing the game!)

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Congratulations to James Beamon and @Stewart_Baker. Definitely gonna go for it.

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I loved the game, laughed every 2 minutes. Truly enjoyable and now I want to bake something.

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It’s the first ingredient I buy and I get it for two hours then I have to rent it again before I leave. Also I can’t get mine to sweat at all. My breadcraft was like 69 nothing talking nothing necromancy nothing. Should I just leave them alone lol

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Thanks for the additional info! It definitely shouldn’t make you rent it again before you leave the storefront.

Waiting until later in the round makes it easier to extract the sweat (or spores)–I can’t remember off the top of my head what the success check is if you’re trying it early in the round, but 69 does seem pretty high…

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I’m really enjoying this! Completely no hate for other recent stories, but this felt like a breath of fresh air. This is basically COG version of Discworld and I’m so here for it. Here’s to hoping people support this release!

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Thanks so much! :smiley:

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