Born of Bread is a—stop me if you’ve heard this one—hybrid 2D and 3D platforming RPG with cartoony, all-ages appeal. Everyone’s got Paper Mario and Super Mario RPG on the brain, but Born of Bread instead reminded me of dearly departed AlphaDream’s best outings: the slapstick, freewheeling Mario & Luigi series. Despite the wellspring of genre peers and a steep legacy to live up to, Born of Bread succeeds the most when it decides to do its own thing. And it very much does!
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Fun for the Whole Wheat Family
You play as Loaf, a sentient bread boy given form by sweet Papa Baker. His attempt to indulge the Queen’s fickle whims as royal chef backfires when resurrected Embers, remnants of an ancient society beneath Royal City, crash the impromptu dinner party and nick a fragment of the power-giving Sunstone. Papa and Loaf are sent into the nearby Forest of Roots with a bang, where their journey properly begins.
The kingdom is a silly, playfully anachronistic place. Residents dress in medieval style garb, but also start podcasts and save their game at floating network routers. Jokes, especially puns, fire off quickly, ricocheting between bread-based humor to straight-up referencing Al Gore. Truly something for everyone!
You’ll spend the bulk of your time with your party members: Lint, an anxious racoon and aspiring writer; Yagi, a humanoid llama himbo who wants to be taken seriously, and others I’ll let you discover for yourself. Despite the silly veneer, these kids deal with some serious issues: Loaf is often gawked at like a tourist attraction or declared an abomination. Lint grapples with abandonment issues and impostor syndrome.
Royal Town is harsh on young people in familiar ways: dismissing their concerns, downplaying their accomplishments, and denying them anything beyond busywork. Luckily, Loaf and company are a determined bunch.
Pumpernickeled-Up Kicks
Traversing the kingdom is a mix of platforming, mild environmental puzzles, and turn-based combat (more about that later). Additional party members join Loaf at a careful pace, each with their own skill tree and overworld ability: Lint can dig through dirt mounds, and Yagi can meditate to make ghostly platforms visible within his range.
Born of Bread trickles out these tantalizing hints of environmental puzzles early and often, giving you ample incentive to return to even the first steps of your journey. It forms a (mostly) satisfying web of map progression, faltering only when environments grow too fussy and overcomplicated.
Enemies are visible and will pursue you, entering a separate screen for turn-based combat once you make contact. Hit them with a ladle for a preemptive strike, or risk getting ambushed from the side. You fight with Loaf and another party member of your choice, using different attack types (hammering, piercing, melee, etc.) and elements to collect Might. Grab one hundred Might points and you’ll level up, stamping cards to allocate health, magic, and special attack points.
Other stamp cards give you additional boon slots, which buff your party in various ways, and expands your inventory-puzzle of a backpack. You can wield any weapon you can fit, and each has its own color-coded tetromino block space requirements.
Bread-Bowled Over
Quests are, for the most part, clearly signposted and not time limited. Tasks range from the usual suite of item-delivering, character-escorting grunt work to party-specific quests that sprawl over multiple chapters. One party quest ended in a wild moment that had me audibly hollering at the screen, opening a new dimension of the game that I hadn’t an inkling of. These showstoppers bolster a healthy range of optional content, anchoring them back to the overarching plot.
If a quest seems impossible at the moment, progressing the main story usually fixes the issue. I was utterly confounded by a story beat until my husband asked the best question in my 20ish-hour runtime: “Have you checked the foreground?” When in doubt, steer yourself towards the screen. Camera angles are mostly fixed, and items both crucial and optional hide just outside of it. Generally, paying attention serves you well, with oodles of items, money, and weapons carefully tucked away.
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Rye-otous World Building
Born of Bread continues the RPG tradition of lavishing equal attention to the main story and the world beyond. Characters arrive fully formed, complete with their own personality quirks and problems. Among my favorites are Oregon, a self-censoring, potty mouthed badger who gets stuck with the most thankless work in Royal Town, and Snowstorm, a career hero who looks like he was yanked out of SSX Tricky, ‘tude and all. Another highlight was the doting gay couple you meet in Llama Town. Love wins, baby.
Other, laser-targeted delights present themselves after a few hours of playtime. After you register at the Saver’s Guild, you’ll meet Dub, a shy dragon who canonically moderates and livestreams your fights as part of Royal Town’s administrative underclass.
This rendering of stream chat is painfully, hilariously accurate. Characters you’ve met will make chat requests that net you health or magic points upon completion, each with their own username and thumbnail.
Expand chat all the way, and you’ll be met with a firehose of in-universe spam links (my favorite being teehee-lovers.scam), bickering, emotes, and every complaint seasoned content moderators would expect. I felt absolutely soul-read, often idling turns to watch chat zoom by. Chat perks fold into battle nicely, giving you an extra hand when resources run low.
Slightly Overproofed
As finely crafted as Born of Bread is, not every aspect holds up. The game sometimes adheres to RPG tradition at all costs, including an infuriating misty forest puzzle better left in the past. Even with detailed information, the in-game map is borderline inscrutable, and more labyrinthine stages will force you to wander back and forth multiple times. This probably holds up better in short bursts, but in my embargo-fueled marathon sessions it grew almost intolerable during Part 3. Please, I’m begging for a minimap.
Saving your game is manual, for better or worse, and at drawn-out plot points that structure showed its’ limitations. There is another quality-of-life feature I dare not narratively spoil, and it dropped so late in the game that I was utterly convinced I had bungled something.
The spectrum of minor bugs and glitches I encountered on Switch didn’t help. Starting dialogue while a character overlapped with the environment soft-locked the game completely, forcing me to reset a few times. Cutscenes with musical cues would mute all sound effects afterward, even the helpful audio cues during fights.
During part 3, environmental textures would vanish altogether, leaving objects hovering in a blank void. One optional side quest struggled to trigger and eventually stopped firing off altogether. Nothing game-breaking beyond losing a few minutes of progress, but still notably annoying.
Verdict: A Crust-Have for Your Shopping Baguette
Born of Bread is perfect for the young—and not-so-young—weirdos in your life. (I would know from personal experience.) The humor lands in some unexpected places, and the plot is very much concerned with the ways adults devalue, demean, and demoralize the young people in their lives, well-meaning or not.
If this had released at the same time as say, Star Ocean: The Second Story or Tekken 3, it would have integrated into my 9-year-old personality just as much as newspaper comics the Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes.
Born of Bread’s narrative and mechanics soar despite some perplexing quality of life choices—and a slew of minor bugs that will hopefully be fixed soon. Although I’m always happy to see a tag-team turn-based RPG, the game sometimes hews too closely to structural and mechanical tropes better left in the distant past.
Born of Bread overcomes these setbacks through sheer force of will. The game isn’t afraid to take some wild swings, either. It’s more than a simple Mario and Luigi homage, and absolutely the funniest game I’ve played all year. Consider this a weighted Taylor-based average; I’m scoring Born of Bread based on how highly I recommend it, warts and all.
Amazing
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Writing that absolutely soars. | Puzzling quality-of-life omissions. |
| Lively art and music. | Minor bugs and glitches that were largely cosmetic, but still annoying. |
| Pleasing but not punishing battle system. | Tired tropes and puzzles that overstayed their welcome. |
| Wildly funny jokes of all kinds. | |
| Laser-targeted details and character work. |
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