Being a slice of bread isn’t exactly easy.
You’re baked into a nice loaf with your other sliced siblings, and then shoved into a bag to live on a grocery store shelf for a while. If you’re lucky, a customer will select you as part of a weekly grocery run. If you’re VERY lucky, you’re also seated at the “front” of the loaf near the bag’s opening. This is pretty nice, probability-wise. Your bready destiny has a much higher chance of coming to fruition.
Things are a little more grim for the other slices toward the bottom of the bag. In my household, the bottom of the bread bag tends to sit for a longer stretch. It haunts me on the counter, asking me to make breakfast, begging to form a more perfect union as part of an egg and cheese sandwich. “Or maybe just get the jam,” it cries. “Toast me! This is my destiny.”
I’d like to think that thoughts like these are exactly what passes through the protagonist’s mind in I Am Bread.
Atmospherically silly and charming, I Am Bread tasks you with the challenge of piloting a sentient slice of bread through various landscapes in the hopes of finding a means of becoming toast. Loading screens show notes from the homeowner’s psychiatrist, which reveals that he’s in the middle of an emotional collapse. You feel bad for this guy you never see – he keeps finding cooked toast scattered in his house, and is deeply concerned that people are messing with him.
I’ve been excitedly playing video games for 26 years, and believe me when I say that the controls are going to be incredibly difficult for anyone of any level of gaming experience. It’s the point, really. You’re going to laugh at your inability to do anything useful early on, much like games like the infamous flash game QWOP (https://www.foddy.net/Athletics.html?utm_source=The+List&utm_campaign=c3c42380e5-Digital+Ops+-+QWOP+%). Your little bread slice can inch along surfaces and “grip” using any of its four corners. You can use a keyboard or controller, but the controller felt way, way more fluid. In the main game mode, you not only have to try and become toast in increasingly inventive ways, but you also need to stay edible! What good is dirty toast? Stay off the floor and out of the garbage, or else your Edibility will steadily drop to 0%, rending you sad and untoasted.
For me, I Am Bread is a game that’s far more fun to watch than actually play, but I have to attribute that to personal failing as a gamer. Don’t get me wrong – I had a blast attempting to pilot the controls, but my laughter in the early game quickly turned to frustration as I realized just how bad I was at steering my little slice of bread. I almost got into a nice groove, rapidly cartwheeling across surfaces, trying not to get gross. Still, I could never get very far, and often just flopped over to become a sad, inedible, bug-laden mess.
The atmosphere is exactly what it needs to be. The game is absurd, and sets that tone from the get-go. The controls are frustratingly difficult, but I can’t imagine that it’s all that difficult for a slice of bread to hang around. Even then, practice makes perfect, and you can already find YouTube videos of folks slinging themselves around the maps with the greatest of ease.
There are even a few other game modes as well! You can participate in Bagel Races and wheel rapidly around the map, and the developers even added “Starch Wars” for May the 4th as a free update.
The game’s good for a laugh, and might be worth your $12.99 if you’re looking for a challenging game with unique gameplay. It’s an absolute hoot to play in a group regardless of skill level, and part of the fun is in making it oh-so-close and then catastrophically failing. I had more fun playing this with others than by myself, and that was mostly because I’m bad at it. The blow of losing ad infinitum is greatly softened if you can all laugh at it.
3/5
