I Am Bread Review

The life of a load of bread is not an easy one. All it wants to be is toast, and yet it’s always being uniformly sliced and shoved into a suffocating plastic bag, turned into sandwiches or, heaven forbid, forgotten about for days on end before being fed to ducks. Well, not this loaf. This loaf’s taking matters into its own crusts.

From every fibre of its existence, each slice summons the strength and ability to grapple with the world around it and grab, flip, slide and hump its way over to a source of heat in order to turn itself into a delicious slice of toast. As you might have guessed, I Am Bread exists in the same genre as other ‘strange control scheme’ games like QWOP, Octodad and Surgeon Simulator – which was incidentally the last major hit out of developer Bossa Studios.

Of course, unless you believe that toys really do come to life when you’re not in the room or that fairies live at the bottom of your garden, the manner in which the slice of bread is able to get around is thoroughly unrealistic. The four corners of the slice are able to grab onto the world with spider-like abilities, and by grabbing on with just one or two corners at a time, you’re able to swing the free corners around and flips the bread along the surface, in practically whichever direction you see fit.

It takes a while to get used to, but after the tutorial area and a few levels, it’s really not all that hard to pull off some rather adventurous and audacious moves – the tricky part is doing so consistently. You can build up a fair amount of speed as you flip your way across the work surface or up a wall, certainly, but you can also use that initial burst of momentum and time releasing your grip on the table just right to hurl the bread off the top of a cupboard and down onto whatever it is you’re aiming at below.

But even then, there’s the constant tension and even frustration of battling with the controls. Even when playing with a controller – which is absolutely the recommended control method – and once you’ve achieved a certain degree of mastery, it feels like an uphill struggle to get the bread to simply do what you want it to. This isn’t helped by the fact that the bread always looks the same, regardless of its orientation, so there’s often a few seconds of studying the button icons to determine which corner is which, or simply blindly pressing to grab with any and all corners. Then there are the moments where the game engine just freaks out and can’t quite cope with the contorted shape it needs the bread to maintain.

All the time that you’re grabbed onto something, the grip meter ticks down until you lose it and fall to the ground which quickly saps your edibility percentage to zero. So too does water, trails of ants on the work surface, mouldy patches on the walls, even discarded plasters on a bed – this guy’s a bit of a pig – which stick to the slice just as you can cover it with butter, jam and liquorice all sorts. With the potential frustration of not being able to succeed, there’s also a magic marmalade that appears after a few failures and lets you simply get through the level without worrying about what you touch.

What’s quite gratifying is to see how the game has evolved from the initial nonsensical playground and into a full game, by way of Early Access. The seven levels play out over the course of a week and see you exploring a new room within a house, with each level prefaced by a psychiatrists notes on a man who becomes increasingly obsessed with proving this loaf of bread is alive. Sadly, it never really affects the game itself, other than to give a reason for why you’re playing through a bathroom or a garage and having to cook your bread in increasingly inventive ways.

There’s also extra modes that are unlocked as you complete each day. You then replay finished levels in free roam, destroy everything in your path as a baguette, hunt for cheese as a cracker and even navigate through zero gravity with tiny little thrusters attached to your slice of wholemeal. As strange as the original control system is, it adapts relatively well to these new game modes and there’s a little extra fun to be found within as you get to see the levels as more than just an obstacle course to overcome.

Even with those extra modes, it’s thankfully a relatively short game. The chirpy and cheerful music loops around, while skateboards, Jenga blocks and jam jars feature regularly, and it’s just the kind of game that could easily outstay its welcome. At a handful of hours long, it’s a short blast that’s great to load up when you’ve got friends over, much like Octodad and Surgeon Simulator are.

Amidst the recent spate of so-called simulators, I Am Bread manages to stand out as one of the more ludicrous creations. The controls are relatively easy to grasp and once you’re done with the main missions, the extra modes put a different twist on proceedings, but as always with these games, it’s really at its best when you can share the nonsense with others.

Score: 6/10

Version tested: PC