I Am Bread
Developed by Bossa Studios
Published by Bossa Studios
Available on PC, PS4, Mac OS X
You’re a piece of bread. Well, one slice of bread in a loaf. However, you are special. You have a quest, like no other piece of bread. You’ve always been a ‘do-it-yourself’ individual, even when you were just a single grain (work with me here, I know bread doesn’t grow from a single grain). So while most other pieces of bread would be happy to let the people do all the work, you’ve taken it upon yourself to become toast.
Bossa Studio’s I Am Bread puts you in the driver seat of a piece of bread, navigating your way through seven different rooms in a house. What are you trying to accomplish? Toast yourself, using whatever means necessary. You grab onto surfaces with the L and R button sets, and hold movable objects using the face buttons. After you grab surfaces you move with the left stick. The camera can be manipulated with the right stick. It starts out simple enough: get across the kitchen and into the toaster. However, as the stages advance, means of toasting yourself become increasingly more difficult.
I Am Bread has a cartoony feel to the graphics, but given the nature of the game, it works well. Every level begins in an organized chaos – much as one would have in a lived in house. As you contact and impact items, they fall, with some items breaking completely; or falling off the wall, in the case of paintings, for example.
The sound in I Am Bread is incredibly strong. From the light-hearted bounciness of the main menu theme, to the poppy, fast-hitting bravado of the garage, Bossa Studios spared no expense in creating great music. It’s very ‘big’, but it never gets in the way of your concentration, and it never seems to get repetitive. Never seems to get repetitive. Get repetitive.
I Am Bread utilizes a very easy to understand HUD. In the upper left is what can be considered your life. This is depleted in Story Mode and Zero-G by touching dirty surfaces; it’s depleted in Cheese Hunt by falling large distances. In the upper center is your Grip, which dictates how long your can hold onto surfaces before you fall. Last, in the upper right is the timer, counting up steadily.
There are six different game modes to play, each presenting a different set of challenges. Story mode weaves together a story of your becoming toast and a man seeing a psychiatrist. Cheese Hunt places you in the shoes(?) of a piece of Melba toast and tasks you with finding five pieces of cheese hidden throughout the different levels. Bagel Race is as it sounds – you are a bagel, racing around the different levels, competing for the fastest time. In Rampage, you are a baguette, destroying as many things as you can within the time allotted. Zero-G is the most frustrating of the game modes. Your mission is to navigate the levels using thrusters attached to your spacebread, in an effort to become spacetoast. Finally, Free-play allows you to explore any level you have unlocked at your own pace, with no fear of losing edibility.
If you’re looking for a game that has an ‘Easy to learn, hard to master’ appeal, I Am Bread fits perfectly into that category. Sporting enough game modes to keep you sufficiently frustrated, while still giving you enough hope to give it ‘one more try’, this title has incredible replay value. It also offers a good mix of Trophies to keep you coming back even after you’ve finished every game mode in it’s entirety. In short, I Am Bread is a fantastically odd game that you will be showing your friends over and over.