10 Minutes with I Am Bread

Q: What is a baker’s favourite Beatles song?
A: “Loaf is all you knead.”

Avid CV readers might have come across my coverage of I Am Bread from the other day in which I could not believe that human beings would spend time and money to make such a game. Well, despite our cynicism, we were actually given a chance to play it. A year of toil had finally come to fruition for everyone involved with Cultured Vultures. WE HAD MADE IT.

Booting the thing up was half the challenge; the version I downloaded was unstable for some reason so it decided to crash a few times. Not to worry though, because as soon as I heard the jaunty soundtrack, everything in the world became A-okay. Literally everything, including famine. Which is apt because the game’s about making toast.

Q: What did the loaf of bread say to the police officer?
A: Rye so serious?

Now, let’s get down to the nitty gritty, shall we. This game, to put it bluntly, is fucking ludicrous and defies conventions of movement, space and time. It’s amazing.

By so eagerly trying to test the resolve of the player’s patience, I Am Bread separates the wheat from the chaff and provides a rewarding experience. As soon as you discover how to move in a particular direction without needing to swear at your computer, the game comes into its own. Truly a late contender for Game of the Year.

Yeah, about that, I actually just completely lied. The controls are stupidly complex and I didn’t even realise that I had to use the mouse – my slice was stuck on a two-dimensional plain of despair until the seventh minute of my playthrough. Maybe it’s more down to me being a bit dim rather than the game itself, who knows.

Once you get to grips with the mechanics of the game, you soon find that there’s nothing to really write home about. Take the demented controls of Octodad, throw in the aesthetics of Katamari and multiply it by Kingsmill and you have the gist of I Am Bread in its entirety. For a game which seems to be completely unique at first glance, it’s sadly quite generic once you take a closer look.

Q: Why are bread jokes always funny?
A: Because they never get mold! 

After ten minutes of I Am Bread, I had had enough. Once the novelty wore off (and it quickly did), I was left with just another kooky simulator that made me kinda hungry.