Born of Bread, out today, is a Paper Mario-style RPG starring a cheeky dough golem
Pastry Mario, then?
When first I learned of Born Of Bread, it was getting towards lunchtime - yes, 10.30am absolutely counts as "getting toward lunchtime" - and my brain was immediately filled with savoursome thoughts of simulated baking. Born of Bread isn't actually a baking sim. Even better than that: it's some kind of spin on vintage Ninty RPG Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, except that instead of being made of paper, the main character Loaf is made of living dough... but kind of looks like he's made of paper, this being a 2.5D game with flat character art. Look, just watch the trailer while I make myself a sandwich.
Out on Steam, GOG and Epic Games Store today, Born Of Bread is a balance of exploration, puzzling and party/turn-based combat, sprinkled across a multiple-region world of bamboo forests, jaunty castles and twinkly purple caves. The graphics are colourful, the music is bouyant, and they've taken a leaf from the book of Dredge in making the inventory screen a Tetris-style minigame.
Your task in the game is to stop some evil invader or other: the trailers seem more interested in puns than plot, for better and worse. I hope there's some kind of maximum pun count per scene. I'm sternly resisting the urge to drop any bread puns myself in this post, because I am a serious journalist and not some kind of rank comedian. No really, I'm not even going to do the joke where I 'accidentally' leave a pun at the end.
The highlight looks to be battling, which compares again to Thousand Year Door in avoiding nerdily large numbers and placing the emphasis on cute, cartoonish interactions and QTEs. You also get an audience: in Thousand Year Door, fights took place in a theatre with crowds of Goomba spectators, whereas here, the whole thing is livestreamed by a friendly dragon, and you can fulfil chatbox requests for extra rewards.
Something tells me this will live or die on how much you enjoy the humour, or at least, how much you can tolerate it - I would definitely try the demo before allowing yourself to be wooed by thoughts of papery bread or bready paper or, ugh, I've just revolted myself.
If you're a Thousand Year Ado(o)rer you might also enjoy Flipping Death, which Alyse described in 2018 as a mixture of "the humour of Psychonauts, the mechanics of Paper Mario, and the wacky, noodly designs of Dr. Seuss".