Review: I am Bread
I couldn’t finish this game in time to post this review. I’m sorry. For a game called I am Bread, it’s really hard and time-consuming. It has a clumsy control scheme, and its level design is difficult to the point of sadistic. Sometimes it just feels like an exhausting and depressing exercise in futility.
However, will I continue to play it?
Yes.
I am Bread is maddeningly difficult, and I feel like that’s the point. You experience what it is like to be a sentient slice of bread, yearning to be toasted. The game captures the desperation, the resolve, and the herculean difficulty of such a quest. As a result, it’s bizarrely charming and strangely hilarious.
The gameplay is simple enough. You’re put in control of a slice of bread and you drag and flip and flop your way to the toaster. If you touch the floor, or certain other objects, your “edibility” meter goes down. If your edibility meter goes too low, you cannot become toast. If you take too much time to reach the toaster, you cannot become toast. If you’re playing it alone, trying to write an article to deadline, and getting madder and madder with every passing hour, you cannot become toast.
If it’s any consolation, the physics engine is satisfying and is sometimes quite exaggerated, so you can flop your way across a bench, smashing up bottles and jars and plates. You use the corners of your bread to grip to surfaces, so you can swing your way up a cabinet, before realising you don’t have enough weight or momentum to ascend the bench. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve misjudged a distance before realising I’ve wasted all of my efforts, I’m stuck on the floor, and need to restart the level again. I did find myself getting better at controlling the bread and there is something satisfying about guiding this lumpen, flaccid piece of thing with some degree of accuracy and control.
As a game, it’s maddening, compelling and thought-provoking. I understand what it represents. It’s a challenge that doesn’t have much pay-off. I’m simplifying it, but aren’t many games the same? Why do we put up with the monotony of grinding through an RPG to level up? Or shooting the same virtual people in the head over and over again? At least I am Bread is aware about its absurdity and futility and is imbued with a sense of bizarre, slightly unsettling humour.
According to the developer, I am Bread is “the story of a solitary slice of bread’s epic and emotional journey as it embarks upon a quest to become toasted.”
I feel like it’s a metaphor for life.
Posted in Blog, Games
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