- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
I wanted to share something for those interested in less known, historical oddities today.
Girl of the Bakehouse ~ Withered is a short kinetic novel from a Chinese doujin group called MICA Team - group which later found their footing as a gacha developer with games like Girls’ Frontline 1 and 2 as well as Project Neural Cloud. The game had a very limited release (400 copies, available only during few Chinese cons) and never received an official English version so the only way to play it is to use a fan translation packed with the full game. I’m not linking it here since we didn’t have a conversation about how to handle such cases on the community level but anyone interested in checking it out feel free to message me or just check the fan patch release on game’s VNDB page.
Action of Girl of the Bakehouse takes place in a small town occupied by an invading military forces and follows two characters: Mendo (a war reporter attached to said military) and Jefuty (a local girl whose parents were killed by the troops). The story itself is pretty simple and focuses on revenge - not the exciting and fun kind of revenge but rather the sad and “unnecessary” one. It’s down to earth, it’s personal and it’s tragic (from a purely humanist perspective).
On the production quality standpoint the game is alright - it’s an amateur production and it shows, though I don’t think it necessarily takes away from the experience. The writing is good for what it is, not the best thing I’ve read but also never got boring or took me out of the experience. The art is pretty rough, music and sound effects do their job well. As long as you don’t expect a high-budget affair your time with it should be a positive one.
Considering the limited release and the amateur development you’d probably be prone to expect this to be a neat but long forgotten curio. Wrong, this title isn’t just a one-off but was actually remade twice - first as Codename: Bakery Girl and later as Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery (the only one available officially these days, here is the Steam page in case anyone’s curious).
Both games moved away from a pure VN approach and changed into tactical RPGs. The story itself also evolved, with Mendo becoming a soldier/agent tasked with extraction of a mysterious person from a hostile territory (Jefuty).
World building got a lot more fleshed out, leaning further into the sci-fi setting as well as providing new details about who, what, where, why, the history of the world and much more.
The world and lore of these remakes were also utilised in already mentioned gacha games, with Girls’ Frontline titles acting as prequels (though not directly related) to Mendo and Jefuty’s story.
I always had soft spots to historical oddities and rough but ambitious attempts by indie developers. Trying out this small but passionate project, one which gave start to a franchise spanning universe I fell in love with almost 7 years ago, was a really fun experience. I’m glad I finally got a chance to see it for myself.
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Hey, thanks for the images and writeup, we need more original content like this on Lemmy! Sounds interesting, especially since other people clearly saw the value in this diamond in the rough. I tend to actually prefer more sketchy-looking art (as in “clearly the artist’s rough draft” and not “creepy, bad, or not-entirely-legal”), so the images you have shown do not turn me off at all. It’s cool to learn about this.
Someone read this, yay! Posts like this one are something I’d like to do more of whenever I have some time. Hopefully doing so will encourage others to share their finds as well. It doesn’t matter whether they’re widely known or completely hidden, perfect or just alright - as long as there’s something interesting about them I’d love to know.
I also don’t mind the art style (more variety in this regard is always nice to see) but I know some people can get really hung up on production values so I’d rather be upfront about it.
I am also one of those people who gets hung up on production values. It seems I might have different standards though. I have specific taste in artstyles and the screenshots here do not seem to violate it. There are some rough-looking non-VNs that I have issues with because it does not really look coherent or good, but I think because VNs usually both demand good art but you do not have to make as many art assets for a zillion objects and environments and NPCs, you can focus on making good art for comparatively fewer things.
Ahh, I got you. Guess this disclaimer was mostly towards people like my old co-workers who wouldn’t even look in the direction of an old (as in 2+ years past release) mainstream game, let alone an indie one. They also wouldn’t even think about trying a VN but that’s a different matter.
While I’m sure I have some limit to what I’d be able to bear in terms of production values the most important thing for me is consistency. As long as things mesh well together I’m more than happy to give the thing a fair shake - that and there has to be something there that can grab my attention in the first place.
