Luckily for you this bread is a limber fellow, and is able to stick onto walls, push chairs over, and do other such things to help him stay well away from the dirt. If the bread falls to the floor, the three second rule kicks in and you’ve got to get the bread back to safety immediately or it will be rendered too foul to eat. The second challenge is to not let the bread come into contact with contaminants, such as the floor.
No one likes eating old bread, after all. The points of conflict are twofold on the one hand you need to get the bread toasted quickly, or its quality will start to degrade. This involves bouncing the piece of bread around a room, looking for something to stick it into or onto that is hot enough to toast it. I Am Bread is broken up into levels in which players take control of a piece of bread, and have the goal of getting that bread toasted. Instead what we get is a poorly executed attempt at existentialist thought, coupled with a game that plays absolutely miserably on the iPad. Like the best existentialist works it’s got some serious thinking and even angst under its gleefully surreal edge, and it’s precisely this that I Am Bread lacks. The Metamorphosis, after all, is a deeply existentialist work designed from top to bottom to question the nature and purpose of humanity and life within it. Related reading: An interview with the developer, Bossa Studios, from 2013. As a none-too-subtle homage to Franz Kafka, and, specifically, his seminal work The Metamorphosis, this should have meant a game that I would devour and then ponder over as not just something delightfully weird, but something with a great deal of deeper meaning. I Am Bread is a game I should have loved.