Born of Bread [Review]
Born of Bread is a Paper Mario clone, but is that a bad thing?
Image: WildArts / Dear Villagers
Playing Born of Bread brings back memories of playing The Thousand-Year Door, the GameCube era Paper Mario game. The game’s got some rough edges, but overall it’s a great experience.
French Canadian studio WildArts’ adventure RPG Born of Bread stars Loaf, a flour golem accidentally created by the royal chef, who sets out to clear his father’s name of the heinous crime of disturbing the Queen’s dinner. Loaf soon finds himself on a quest to save the entire kingdom.
While four party members ultimately join Loaf, only one can be active with him at any time. Each has a unique ability outside of battle that helps open up new areas or secrets. One digs holes, another meditates to uncover hidden platforms, the third throws lanterns to make fires, and the final one can reach new areas using a grappling hook. Similarly, each has unique attacks in combat which must be individually unlocked with skill points.
Image: WildArts / Dear Villagers
In combat, all attacks are based on active inputs from the player. Most are based on timing with a few exceptions—press a button when the meter fills to the right spot, hold a button and release it at the right time, press a sequence of buttons before time runs out. These usually aren’t tricky, but it’s possible to not do any damage at all if you whiff it. Most attacks require spending WP, the game’s mana; this can run out quickly but is mitigated by a defend mechanic where perfectly timed button presses can turn damage into WP refills. Once you build up good battle strategies, combat is never very challenging. Even the game’s final bosses aren’t difficult. Like The Thousand-Year Door’s audience mechanic, Born of Bread has a streaming audience mechanic that can reward the player for taking certain actions in combat.
The main quest is complemented by a bounty of side-quests given out by NPCs throughout the game. Some of these have very useful rewards and fun subplots, so they’re worth doing. I’d even argue that some of the rewards are essential, for example one that expands your inventory from five to ten items; something like that should be a reward along the main quest and not something missable.
Image: WildArts / Dear Villagers
The game’s graphics are wonderful. The visual style is also straight out of Paper Mario, with 3D environments inhabited by cartoony 2D characters. What really sells the effect in Born of Bread is that the 2D characters are affected by the environmental lighting in a way that not only makes them feel like they exist physically in the world, but makes them look like they have volume by the way shadows are rendered on them. Despite this, it can sometimes difficult to judge positioning when doing jumps. The camera angle (and lack of significant camera control) is also problematic in that often the player must move toward camera to explore and ends up running blind because the field of view in that direction is so small.
The game’s writing is lighthearted and funny, similar in tone to Paper Mario, but not as sharp. While the story is pretty barebones, the characters are decently fleshed out. The villains are treated with empathy also; I wish we could spend a bit more time with them.
I had issues with the game’s UI. Swapping characters requires going into a menu; I’m not sure why this is the case when there are available buttons on the controller that go unused. On top of this, the menu is split into many tabs, so I needed to hunt for the character tab to switch characters. The tabs don’t loop, so I can’t skip from the last tab to the first. This is the case with most subtabs as well, such as switching between the main character tab and the skills sub-tab. Items, equipment, and perks (badges) each have individual tabs, making it all even more cumbersome. Then there’s a map tab, a quest tab, and an options tab. Some of these things could have dedicated controller buttons, like viewing the map or quests, or not need a menu interaction at all, like my character switching example.
Image: WildArts / Dear Villagers
Another irritation has to do with limited inventory space. When I pick up an item and my inventory is full, I’m asked to drop an item. This is fine, but there’s no option to use an item rather than drop one. So I drop an item, then need to go back into the menu to use an item, and then pick up the item I decided to drop.
Fast travel comes in too late and then requires two load screens because you must go to a fast travel hub; this could have been a UI popup instead. Perhaps this isn’t an issue on PC, PS5, or Xbox, but on Switch load times were not trivial. My final issue is being forced to fight lower level enemies that no longer grant XP when backtracking. This isn’t something all RPGs do, but it would have been nice for the enemies to either run from me or be auto-defeated.
Image: WildArts / Dear Villagers
I completed the game’s main quest in around 15 hours, including a lot of time spent on side-quests. I had a lot of fun, but some poor design choices and irritating bugs keep the game from being truly great. I encountered a handful of crashes, cases where camera issues require a game reset, and bugged quests. Many of the issues I brought up (as well as the bugs) could be fixed in updates, so I hope WildArts addresses them. My score would be higher if not for these issues. Either way, I recommend checking out Born of Bread.
Born of Bread is available now on PC, Switch, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.
