Parents' Guide to I Am Bread

I Am Bread draws you in with its wonderfully absurd premise. It starts with story mode, which illustrates the gradual mental degradation of some poor schmo who thinks he's losing his mind: Random pieces of toast keep appearing all over his house, making him think he's being pranked. Little does he know he's sharing his space with the world's most ambitious piece of bread. This silliness could have been a great setup for a spectacularly unique game, since the point is to flip and/or drag a slice of bread across kitchens, living rooms, and bathrooms to some kind of heat source. Once there, you have to stay on or near that heat source until you’re toasted. Unfortunately, it's all messed up with a horrible control scheme. The PC controls are utterly useless and a great way to bring on a headache. Gamepad controls are slightly better but not by much. Combined with random physics-related accidents, a wildly swinging camera, and a quickly diminishing “Edibility” meter, play is a truly frustrating experience.

If you can stay calm long enough to get through story mode, unlockable timed physics-based challenges such as Cheese Hunt and Bagel Race provide moderately more entertaining fare. There's even a recently added space shooter mode called "Starch Wars" in honor of May 4. This mode, as the rest of I Am Bread, is amusing for around five minutes -- or as long as it takes you to chuckle at the sight of Tie Fighters made from bagels and crackers. Visually, the game isn't bad, but the art team's decision to go with realism makes for some fairly blah interiors. The music is probably the highlight, being a silly mix of piano, whistling, and ... is that a kazoo playing in the background? What I Am Bread amounts to really is a jokey one-liner stretched thin. Once you've absorbed the cutesy bread puns, it has nothing more to offer than a terrifically discouraging waste of your entertainment time.