For a pale-skinned, blonde-ish ginger, last week's Gamescom in Cologne, Germany was a bit of a nightmare. With the temperature rarely dropping below 30 degrees C, maxing out at 36, and with way more sun than our pallid Midlands complexion is accustomed to, we pretty much bathed in sun cream each morning. And while we managed to avoid being burnt to a crisp fairly well, we did manage to toast ourselves a little on the show floor - playing Bossa studios upcoming Playstation 4 game, I Am Bread, a simulation game that's much more on my level. Trains, planes and automobiles are a tad too complex you see - baked goods are more my style. And tastier too.
For the uninitiated, I Am Bread is an emotional rollercoaster ride of one slice of plain white loaf's perilous journey across the kitchen to become toast. Hailing from the same school of hilariously awkward controls as parenting superstar Octodad, it's up to you to shimmy your way from your table towards any hot surface to turn yourself into a nice piece of toast. Of course, you could just use a toaster, but where's the fun in that when you have lightbulbs, car engines and hair straighteners on offer?
Also, rockets.
The level we played all started rather normally - you're a freshly-sliced piece of bread, still slightly attached to your loaf, sitting on a table laid for breakfast. Sounds simple enough - but it's the controls that are the most complex. Each corner of the slice is controlled with a different one of the controller's rear buttons/triggers, L1, R1, L2 and R2 - but rather than pressing the button that relates to the corner you want to move, you actually have to hold down the one you don't want to move, pivoting your bread around it with the analogue stick. Which is a lot easier said than done, as it turns out.
Freeing ourselves from the yeasty confines of our mother loaf, our first few steps into the world were somewhat less than careful. Careening straight into the nearest jam jar and almost falling off the table ourselves, we shattered said jar into a million tiny pieces, getting ourselves covered in way more broken glass than actual jam. But it was OK - despite the slightly crunchy texture of our slice, it didn't seem to affect the 'edibility' rating in the slightest, still sat at a delicious 100%. Because, while your primary objective in I Am Bread is to cook yourself, you do still need to do it in style, which means retaining at least a modicum of edibility during your travels.
It all started so... normally.
Still getting used to the wonky controls, we wobbled our way around the table with all the grace and poise of a drunken, pregnant hippo, picking up a few broken egg shells along the way, before eventually falling straight onto the dusty kitchen floor (still 100% edible though!). Given the appalling state of the floor (our bread was visibly gathering dust), we decided we'd best not hang around too long, and decided to take an alternate route over to the toaster at the other end of the kitchen - we decided to climb the walls.
We're not sure whether it's down to the slightest smear of jam (it wasn't), or whether we're just a phenomenally sticky slice, but weirdly enough, clinging onto the walls is actually fairly easy. Breaking free of the laws of gravity, we found we could cling onto the wall relatively easily, and got into a pretty solid rhythm of holding on with one corner and swinging around and over, traversing the wall with ease with monkey-like precision - and even going around a couple of corners, wheeling our way all around towards, and over the fridge at quite a pace.
But we must have got a tad cocky, because somehow, we managed to trip over our fingers mid-climb and fell from the wall, landing, rather unceremoniously, into a dog bowl. That'll effect our taste, if nothing else. Still, not to be put off by our slightly soggy accident, we hauled our egg-shelled, glass-shard-covered, slightly jammy and dusty piece of bread back up the wall, still with that toaster in our sights, and still, somehow, 100% edible. We're not sure if I Am Bread simply has a different definition of edible to us, whether our short stint on the floor was within the five second rule (we sincerely doubt it) or whether we'd simply managed to glitch it, but we weren't going to complain.
Having scaled the wall successfully, we found ourselves slap bang on top of a cooker - a cooker which some totally reckless person had left switched on. But as a piece of bread whose sole mission was to become toast, we figured this was as good a time as any to take the final step, and promptly flopped our totally 100% edible body down onto the ring. Much like in real life, knowing when a slice is toasted to perfection can be a bit hit and miss - which is why I Am Bread opts to give you a nice, friendly percentage showing your current done-ness, for each side of your slice. So there we sat, hearts racing, as we watched it climb, praying we don't tie our fingers in a knot when it comes to the crucial flip over. But, after a slightly hairy pirouette on our end, we managed to flop over pretty much perfectly, at 101% doneness, shuffling our slice over the ring once more to an equally perfect 100% on the other side. Win!
Health and safety would not be impressed!
While we were pretty chuffed with our performance, it seems the game's scoring system was a little bit harder to please, as despite our (likely glitched) 100% edibility rating, we still got lumbered with a disappointing E rank, which apparently 'kneads improvement'. Apparently, your rating is based on several things outside of edibility too, such as the time it took you to toast yourself (a fairly respectable eleven and a half minutes, or so we thought), and tastiness, for which we scored a paltry 11%. We're not sure what planet these I Am Bread people are from, but there was only a hint of floor fluff, dog bowl water, broken glass and egg shells in there - we're sure health and safety would be willing to overlook those, really. Especially with the added smear of strawberry jam, too. Everyone likes jam, right? Right?
I Am Bread is flinging itself onto the Playstation 4 'this summer' - so will presumably be hitting the Playstation Store any day now! Hilariously hard to control and refreshingly different, we can't wait, and as a bargainiferous £6-£8 download, it's hard to say no to.
