REVIEW: I Am Bread


Title	I Am Bread
Developer	Bossa Studios
Publisher	Bossa Studios
Release Date	April 9, 2015
Genre	Sim, Platformer
Platform	PC, Mac
Age Rating	Not Rated
Official Website

I Am Bread is a game that was made. You play as a slice of bread. You have to go from whatever arbitrary shelf or flat surface you’ve been put on, find a heat source, toast yourself and then you win. Congratulations. Good job. This game has been popular among YouTubers for months now, including (but not limited to) Markiplier, Pewdiepie, The Game Grumps, Rooster Teeth, Toby Turner… I’ll end it there, but it keeps going. It’s another in a long line of games designed to be “lol so random” because bread/goats/dicks. The only problem, and it’s… well, a big one, is that the games that came before it did it better.

I Am Bread | Controls — You are bread. Hooray.

So, let’s start with the mechanics. It plays like a bastard version of QWOP/Mount Your Friends/Goat Simulator. You can use either keyboard or controller. You hold down buttons to hold onto the floor/wall/whatever, or you can hold down other buttons to grip things permanently and fling them around with the comedy physics, because lulz. You have to hobble-crawl across a bedroom/kitchen/bathroom/gas station and find the heat source, ignite the heat source, toast both sides of yourself, then that’s it, level over.

But that’s not all! There’s also a grip meter. As you hold a thing, it goes down. If it hits zero, you can’t hold things anymore until it refills. If you lose grip and fall to the ground, you touch the floor/pile of nail clippings/dirty thing, and your edible-ness goes down. You hit 0%, you lose. And it goes down impossibly fast. You touch the ground, you’re basically boned. That’s OK, though! If you lose enough (twice), the game will just assume you’re a bit thick and give you a jar of miraculous marmalade that gives you unlimited freshness and grip. Then, instead of any slight challenge, the game turns into this weird, boring treasure hunt, only the treasure has been replaced by boring heat.

I Am Bread | Baguette — You are baguette.

See, the problem with this game is that, once you strip away the bread gimmick, all you’re left with is a set of barely adequate controls, vaguely challenging sort-of puzzles, and… that’s about it. With a good enough gimmick, it could be decent, but it’s isn’t good enough, and it’s not. There are a few jokes that land; the bread-themed classic book titles were pretty good, but that’s not enough to sell a game.

The story is… wait, let me rephrase that. This game has a story. Weird, right? Apparently you’re slowly making a man go insane as he gets more and more convinced that his bread is destroying his home. Because why not, I guess. It’s delivered on pages of text between levels.

There is also sound. You make walking noises, things make breaking sounds when they break and you make a weird… pan-fried sizzling sound when you get toasted. Which I guess makes sense, because toasting doesn’t really have a sound. I’ll mention the graphics here, because they’re not notable enough to get their own paragraph. The game looks perfectly serviceable, nothing stood out as bad. Obviously, it’s not going to be a graphical powerhouse; that was never the intent behind it.

I Am Bread is a game, definitely, but it does nothing that earlier (better) games like Mount Your Friends or Goat Simulator or even QWOP did. If you have a YouTube channel and want something you can yell at for your audience, this might be one of the things for you. I Am Bread is is $12.99 on Steam. It’s not a bad game, per se (I managed to get five hours out of it without going too crazy), but, if you absolutely have to play it, wait for it to go on sale.