Review: I am Bread – Half-baked – PC

Let me start out with this, I absolutely adore Bossa Studios’ Surgeon Simulator. I am Bread feels like a real attempt to take what worked well in that game and apply it to something that is different enough that works as an expansion of the original idea. In some ways, it does this perfectly, in other ways I found myself alt-f4’ing out of the game because I had about enough.

In I am bread, you assume the role of, well, a slice of bread that comes right off the loaf at the start of each level. You mission in each level is simple, get toasted. You can fail though, if you become inedible, which can be done by getting gross, which you will do more often than not. Obviously getting yourself in the toaster is an easy enough solution to start, but as you go through each level your opportunity to get nice and toasty become much more creative.

In one level, you can smash a TV and use the smoldering pile of rubble to toast up. In the bathroom, you can short out the power strip or cook yourself on a radiator. The last level actually lets your slice of bread get toasted by blowing up a gas station. The initial creativity of Surgeon Simulator is indeed intact.

There are 5 other game modes as well, each of which offer the ability to race as a bagel, smash everything as a baguette, hunt down pieces of cheese as a cracker or cause chaos in a zero-g gravity mode. These modes are great breaks from the amazing frustration that is the primary mode, story mode.

The game’s story is hilarious, the resident of the house that you cause most of your chaos in is convinced that all this destruction is cause by bread, meanwhile he looks crazier to the world around him. There’s not a ton of advancement but it is a good laugh nonetheless.

The major issue with I am Bread is that mostly everything in the game is incredibly inconsistent, Controls sometimes have a mind of their own, game physics sometimes freaks out for no reason at all and the game loves to crash at the most inopportune times. As a game that is made with the sole point of being frustrating, this is a bad thing to have going on. In Surgeon Simulator, there were odd bugs and glitches, but they didn’t really end up being game-breaking every time. I am Bread hit me with some sort of level-ending glitch each level I played. At one point, I wasn’t sure that the aggravation was ultimately worth it.

That’s the thing with I am Bread. It’s a game for video game masochists. It’s fun in small 15 minute spurts, which it can mostly be played in, but really feels to captivate for any sort of time after that. Fortunately, that brief amount of time can be spent playing with the baguette and smashing your problems away. 

Josh Knowles

Longtime games journalist and Florida resident. I'm a Guinness World Record holder, wordsmith extraordinaire, MOBA fan, devoted dad and husband. I'm here to spread the gospel of video games.