Review: I am Bread

When somebody pitches you I am Bread, that person will sound like a madman. During the main story you are playing pieces of bread trying to become toast. As you progress you unlock more modes, like Bagel Race, Cheese Hunt, Rampage, Zero G and Free Roam.  In these modes you don’t play different types of baked goods, bagels, baguettes and crackers. What sounds mad in theory actually works pretty well.

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During the main story, yes there is a story revolving around a loaf of bread, you try to get your piece of bread to any kind of toasting apparatus. This could be a lamp, the stove or a boiler. The main challenge of the game is to find your heat source and getting there. As the controls are difficult to learn and even more difficult to master, the “getting there” part will take you the longest. The missions end once your bread’s edibility went down to zero. Touching the floor and other filthy parts of the house will decrease your edibility.  You control the corners of the bread with the triggers and bumpers of the gamepad. With your left trigger you decide the direction the bread is supposed to take. But you can’t hold on forever, at some point you will lose grip and fall.

After most levels you unlock additional modes. The first one is free roam. In this mode you can explore the rooms without danger of not being edible and the wanting to become toast. In your exploration you can choose any of the other baked goods to explore the environments.

The mad geniuses at Bossa Studios even included a racing game in this Frankenstein of a game. In the Bagel Race, you race a bagel through an obstacle course. The controls of the Bagel are much easier than those of the bread. The only challenge in controlling this wheat donut is climbing on top of things.

The next mode – Rampage – is the dream of every ill-tempered Frenchman. A baguette is put in a room with lots of fragile items all around them. As soon as the timer starts, these items have to be smashed. The controls of the baguette are easier than the bread one, as it’s just two buttons instead of four. It’s your goal to smash as much as possible in the time limit.

During Cheese Hunt it’s your goal to get all the cheese. Your baked good this time is a cracker. It controls nearly exactly as the toast, but with one key difference. Instead of worrying about edibility, it’s stability you have to worry about. As crackers are, they break. So you can’t fling yourself across the room anymore. You have to be careful.

The last unlockable mode is by far the strangest. During the other modes, it was still kind of believable. Baguettes smash things and crackers love cheese. But who ever heard of a bread flying through rooms to get toast. In Zero G, your piece of bread has strapped on its engines and flies through zero gravity to become toast. The levels are the exactly the same as in the story mode, it’s all just flying around. It actually steers pretty well and it great fun.

As fun as these additional modes are, they are a bit gimmicky. The main draw of the game is the story mode. Their semi-Open-World gameplay will motivate you far more than smashing a baguette for a two minutes. And the story is actually pretty fun? It’s only told through slips of paper at the beginning of each game. These slips tell the story of the breads owner, who slowly goes mad because of your actions.

There really isn’t a lot to say about this game, it’s way more fun to watch someone play it and playing it yourself, of course. As the controls are incredibly hard, playing can become a chore after a while, but the game knows this. After a few failed attempts you get access to the “Magic Marmalade”. It makes you invincible and you never loose grip. And with that the levels never become too difficult. Once you failed enough times the game gives you the option to just make it way easier to finish.

If you like challenging games that have a bonkers story and fun gameplay, this is the game for you. In what other games is it possible to launch a piece of bread across the room with a chainsaw?

Tags: Bossa Studios, i am bread, Mac, PC, puzzle