"What's bread? Raw toast!" goes the old, bad joke. Turns out, it
wasn't a joke but rather an existentialist statement referring to
the lingering sense of incompleteness felt by all slices of
glorified sandwich wrapping. Thank goodness for Bossa Studios,
finally shining a light on the plight of the humble loaf, and
transplanting us staggeringly uneducated meat puppets into an
interactive recreation of bread's desire to reach its fullest
potential.
Or, it's a weird, possibly drug influenced way for the studio
best known for Surgeon Simulator to return to the
physics-based playground for another serving of abstract comedy in
gaming form. However you wish to read into I am Bread,
chances are there's an interpretation that suits.
On the surface, it's a simple challenge. Transport a slice of
bread across a room, find a way turn it into toast. That might be a
toaster, an oven hob or other, stranger appliances. Unfortunately,
bread lacks limbs or opposable thumbs, so moving the title
character becomes a matter of wrigging it about, using its
apparently adhesive corners to cling to surfaces as you navigate
the world.
You'll be all fingers and crumbs the first few times you play.
On a mouse and keyboard set-up, the number keys 1-4 are used to
manipulate each doughy right-angle, causing you flip or pivot
around the environment. Using the direction arrows can flip the
slice towards you or away, with seemingly no rhyme or reason. All
the while, a grip meter determines how long you can hold on to
surfaces -- many are the times you'll fall to your mucky floor
doom.
Plugging in a game pad makes things a little more
understandable, with the shoulder triggers controlling the corners,
but either way it's incredibly fiddly, and there's no real
consistency to the controls yet. But also like its body horror big
brother Surgeon Simulator, that lack of dexterity is part
of the charm. You'll never feel quite so elated as you do when you
finally get some bread to climb a kitchen counter.
Don't
miss
As you flip and fling your way around, you're rewarded or
penalised for what you slop on your slice. Tasty, toast enhancing
condiments such as butter and jam give score multipliers, while
landing on the floor or getting into the mess left on a counter
diminishes your deliciousness. The environment itself is both ally
and enemy, and in the absence of actual enemies, it really changes
how you start to think about the game world.
To probably everybody's amazement -- even those who made it --
I am Bread does have a story to tell too. Delivered
through medical reports and environmental clues, a very depressed
Mr Murton is suffering paranoid delusions, convinced that the city
council deliberately targeted his business for closure. How is this
related to mobile bread? Spoilers, sweetdough, but it's a very
strange direction.
However, the appeal of awkwardly lumbering bread around does
start to wear thin after a while, especially if the meta-joke of
the game fails to resonate with you. Even if you can buy into the
wry faux-enthusiasm of "OMG bread game!!!11!" you'll find the
frustration mounts a little too much. As you foul your slice by
falling to to floor or dropping in cat poop -- and you will do both
of those, likely many times -- the rapidly depleting edibility
meter is accompanied by a maddening warning noise that distracts
and annoys. Hammering the war buttons to get somewhere safe rarely
results in a quick enough reaction (we're not sure of the exact
neurological response time of bread in the wild, but we're
guessing: slow), and you'll inevitably restart levels far more
often than you'd like. As a result, repetition can soon set in,
turning parts of the game into routine, if tricky, navigation
chores.
This is all in Early Release though. Bossa are still tweaking
the recipe -- and hopefully using their loaves and looking at
player feedback -- and will hopefully come up with something a bit
tastier in the months before final release. I am Bread
could be brilliantly bizarre fun with just a little more time in
the oven, but at the moment, it's a little half-baked.
Source Article from http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-12/10/bread-bread-bread http://cdni.wired.co.uk/111x74/d_f/eternal_bond_03.jpg
I am Bread is the strangest game you'll play this year
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