The Game Bakers is an independent studio based in Montpellier, France. Emeric Thoa and Audrey Leprince founded it in 2010. Both had worked at Ubisoft on big-budget licensed games, and they left to build something more personal. Their stated philosophy was to "make games as we cook: with a lot of love," and the partnership still holds today, with Thoa as creative director and Leprince as executive producer. The studio got its start on mobile with Squids, an iOS tactical RPG from October 2011. In Squids you flick a party of squids across the battlefield like billiard balls, a simple idea with real tactical depth. It was well received, reaching a 77% Metacritic aggregate by February 2012, and it won an EIGD award for art direction. Squids grew into a small series. Squids Wild West followed on iOS in June 2012, and Squids Odyssey collected the adventures into a console-style compilation for Wii U and Nintendo 3DS. Combo Crew, a mobile brawler, earned an Apple Editor's Choice nod before the studio shifted its focus to console and PC games.
That shift began with Furi in 2016. The game launched on PC and PlayStation 4 and later came to Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 and Amazon Luna. Furi is built entirely from boss fights: sword-and-gun duels against the guardians of a floating prison, each one blending precise hack and slash with bullet-hell shooting. Takashi Okazaki, the creator of Afro Samurai, designed the characters. Every boss and arena has its own electro or synthwave track, commissioned from established artists including Carpenter Brut and The Toxic Avenger. The studio self-published Furi, and it earned generally favorable reviews along with an 86 from PC Gamer. Haven arrived in December 2020. It is a third-person role-playing game with survival elements about Yu and Kay, two lovers who flee an authoritarian society that forces arranged marriages and escape to the lost planet Source, and you can play it solo or in two-player co-op. In January 2026 came Cairn, a "survival climber" in which you control each of mountaineer Aava's limbs on the way up Mount Kami while managing hunger, thirst and temperature. Comic artist Mathieu Bablet served as art director and lead writer, and Martin Stig Andersen handled audio design and co-composed the music. Cairn sold over 200,000 copies in its first three days, and the studio calls it the conclusion of a "trilogy on freedom" that began with Furi and Haven. The Game Bakers is still independent and still publishes its own work, making focused, distinctive games where every duel, climb and quiet moment feels deliberately crafted. Furi is the sharpest way into that body of work.
