Other areas, such as a lounge and a bathroom, have even more objects with which your brave slice of bread can interact. I’ve had many moments like this with different objects in the house: fish bones, bowling pins, butter trays, some potato chips stuffed inside a water pitcher, silverware. My journey ended there, unfortunately, as the game treats the dirty floor like lava, bringing down the bread’s edibility rating to zero. The chair fell over, and my slice of bread slipped through the slits and onto a skateboard, which I then managed to roll across the floor until its nose hit a wall. One of my favorite early moments in I Am Bread was latching onto a jar of jam with the grip function and swinging so fast that the jar broke and flung my piece of bread, covered in jelly and embedded with shards of glass, into a chair. The way that I Am Bread makes it work is by richly rewarding players who are willing to figure out the intricacies of the control scheme, with zany displays that turn the mundane into exciting objects of play. To make the player confront the awkwardness of mobility when most games seek to divert their attention away from movement (or to draw attention to how that movement empowers them, like the speed of pilots in Titanfall) is rather bold and subversive design.
With a controller, the control scheme remains frustrating, but in a way that highlights what makes Bossa’s games so interesting, without distracting you because you’re too busy trying to figure out how you’re going to contort your fingers in order to guide your little piece of bread across a countertop covered in ants and wine glasses. The game recommends playing with a controller, which is pretty sage advice. Not only must you move with the arrow keys while tilting the camera with your mouse, but you must also control each corner of the bread (via the 1-4 keys) as well in order to climb up surfaces (just roll with it, okay? You’ve come this far). Much like Surgeon Simulator, the chief obstacle in the game is the complicated controls. In the new game from Bossa Studios, the developers of the hysterical Surgeon Simulator, you play as a piece of bread struggling to get across various rooms in a house to meet your destiny and become toasted. The elevator pitch for I Am Bread is its very name.