Bread Baking In Video Games

In September last year, as part of a series on card games, I wrote about card game mini games in video games. It was fun to conduct a little bit of research related to a specific topic in the world of video games. Since you are reading this on Brain Baking, my interest is always piqued when a game allows me to bake crusty baked goods.

The idea to dig into the topic of bread baking in the many virtual gaming worlds came to fruition when I played Bug Fables in 2021. As I wrote in the review:

As a professional baker myself, I especially adored the baking honeybee in the Golden Outpost, that exclusively sells flour, which you can use to bake tarts, doughnuts, croissants, glazed honey treats, cupcakes, and more. Discovering new recipes was a great distraction—albeit an expensive one, if an expensive ingredient was turned into a mistake, healing one measly HP and TP (“team points”, or mana, just like in Paper Mario).

Bug Fables is a love letter to Paper Mario where the lovely toad Zess T. cooks up jummy stuff for Mario to recover heart and flower points—but Zess T. doesn’t specialise in (bread) baking: she’s a chef that whips up as much spaghetti as cupcakes. You can have Zess combine cake mix with inky sauce to bake a choco cake. Eathing the cake will replenish 5 HP and 15 FP, but alas there are no bread-like recipes present in the game.

How about a recipe in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild? The closest thing I can think of is throwing a carrot into the fire that yields a carrot cake. Bug Fables still wins, where the baker—with proper baker’s hat—can be seen popping dough into the oven using a pizza peel. In Breath of the Wild, the cooking/baking process is the same: throw stuff into the cauldron, do a happy dance, and poof.

How about farm simulation games like Stardew Valley and its inspiration Harvest Moon? In the former you can cook (indeed, not “bake”) a crusty baguette in the kitchen using wheat flour. There are a lot of recipes that require wheat flour such as pizza, muffins, and pies. In many iterations of the latter, such as the GBA’s Friends of a Mineral Town, you can buy bread in the store and use it as an ingredient to whip up raisin or curry bread, jam buns, or even a cheese fondue. Weirdly enough, you can buy flour that’s required for baking an apple pie, noodles, and (pan)cakes but you can’t bake bread with it.

Many RPG Codex members dug up computer role playing games where you can bake bread. The list includes the Ultima games (VII, Online¹, …), EverQuest, Arx Fatalis, The Elder Scrolls games (Skyrim), … In Morrowind, you can grind store-bought bread in a mortar and pestle to turn it into a restore health potion, but there exist survival mods such as Morrowind Crafting that introduce cooking. Still no dedicated bread oven, though.

In 2018, James Davenport wrote about the rise of video game bread for PC Gamer, focusing on the early presence of bread in games. But the presence of bread doesn’t automatically mean the crusty goodness can be baked yourself. The article does mention World of Warcraft—the MMORPG as another subgenre of games where crafting and thus cooking is a big part of the meta game. Still no dedicated bread oven, though.

In Level 5’s Fantasy Life you can become a cook who masters their skill using three mini-games inside the kitchen: the frying pan, the cutting board, and the oven. Baking is done in front of the oven, not the pan, effectively splitting how ingredients are converted into an edible end product. Except that there’s nothing to consume as it’s not that kind of game. Also, I can’t seem to find bread-specific cooking recipes from the game: only the classic apple pie that requires Faraway Wheat. I’m waiting to play the game until I eventually buy a Switch 2 so I’ll report back when I know more. Some Rune Factory games seem to approach bread baking the same way.

Maybe complex roguelike games offer a more realistic way to produce bread? According to the Dwarf Fortress wiki you can bake bread: “You can use flour or sugar milled from plants to either bake bread or make candy”. The Dwarven Cuisine mod adds more variations that even require making dough that then can be turned into bread by baking it. This is the only example I could find of a video game that introduces a “kneading” step before baking!

A surprising entry popped up during my research: The Sims. In the Get To Work expansion of the fourth instalment, you can have your sims engage in some serious cookery/bakery activities. It’s not just bread but also bread sticks, bagels, whole wheat loaves, potato bread, and even a sourdough loaf! As a huge fan of sourdough, I guess The Sims 4 wins this one.

And then there’s Bakery Simulator that takes virtual bread baking to a whole new level. Even the reviews say mixed. Get it, mixed? As in mixing dough? No? OK then. Other dedicated cooking simulation games include Lemon Cake, a game I discovered thanks to Kat Thompson’s article on virtual armchair baking for Bon Appétit that looks like a cosy variant of the frantic multiplayer Overcooked! series.

EuroGamer’s YouTube video “5 Brilliant Games About Bread (that you probably never even knew existed)” showcases how the physics-based game on bread called I Am Bread redefines bread slice stickiness. It might not enable you to bake a lovely loaf of bread, but a game where you are the slice and have to slather yourself with savoury spreads deserves a special mention:

Let me know if I missed a game that features getting your hands dirty with dough and oven. I have to run; writing this post made me hungry.

Addendum 26 May: besides the blatant neglect to mention Minecraft, I apparently also forgot to mention the The Settlers series. The bakery is a physical building you must place near a mill (to be placed near a farm that produces grain) that will produce bread for your villagers to feast on. For a strategy game, the food economy chain in The Settlers is surprisingly complex. If you want to train a worker into a baker you’ll first have to craft a rolling pin!

cooking   bread baking  video games