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.