Born of Bread Review

Born of Bread is a party-based 2.5D game developed by WilfArts Studios Inc. and published by Dear Villagers. In it, you play as a little golem — charmingly called Loaf — made out of flour who came to life when the Queen's baker, an adorable old man, accidentally follows the steps of a spell! Now, the fate of the kingdom might rest in his bready hands, as he needs to go out and hunt the Sunstones before the Ember Empire, a group of hooligans out of time, do!

I'm going to be honest here: I'm not the biggest fan of turn-based RPGs. Although I have enjoyed some games of the genre — namely, Monster Hunter Stories — I usually get really bored, particularly when there are too many battles to sift through. Thankfully, Born of Bread did everything right to keep me entertained, as the fights are quick and engaging, there aren't too many battles (and you can dodge the enemies relatively easily for even fewer), and every ability comes with its own mini-game. That being said, a big reason why I enjoyed it so much is that it doesn't have too many tactics — as long as you hit the prompt at the right time and try to match the essence of your abilities to the enemy's weakness, you'll probably avoid many roadblocks. In fact, I found myself barely having to use turns eating food as long as I didn't make any risky moves or miss prompts! This might sound boring for party-based RPG veterans, but for us newcomers, it was just right!

There is a lot to love about Born of Bread, not just the fun combat. I found myself utterly smitten by the areas and chuckling along with the silliness and dialogue. I was quite excited about the game, but I didn't expect to love the cast as much as I did! There's a lot of humour at every turn, even in the achievements you can unlock. 

Aside from fighting all sorts of enemies, you'll spend a good amount of time just exploring the areas and using your party's overworld abilities to discover new secrets and items, like treasure chests and collectibles. This was probably my favourite part of the game — just walking around collecting things and finishing side quests. It has an almost metroidvania-style of progression, too, where you'll find places you can't access or quests you can't complete until you've got the right party for it, giving you more reason to go back to the earlier zones, and I was all for it. This was especially true thanks to the gimmicks found around that help Loaf traverse, like butterflies that carry him to higher areas!

I also quite enjoyed that most of the side quests gave something relatively important — whether it's a boon to provide you with more advantages in battle or a particularly high-quality meal to save for a rainy day. And although none of them are particularly complex, I enjoyed the lighthearted nature of the requests! There's also plenty of them, which adds a nice variety to what you can do whenever you don't want to advance the main story yet.

The only small complaint I have is that, sometimes, I had to figure things out on my own because there's not a lot of emphasis on the tutorials. As an example, during combat, Loaf streams to his followers (don't ask — this game is wacky!), and you can get bonuses during combat if you keep them entertained. The problem is that I went for hours not being too sure why they were losing interest! There are a lot of features just in the menu you can pop out, and if it wasn't because I'm well-versed as someone who is addicted to videogames, I would've gotten confused with a lot of them, like the boons; whenever I'd get lost for a long time trying to figure something out, I'd definitely find myself a bit bored. Perhaps a good way to fix this would be something I've seen developers do lately, where they add an area in the pause menu where you can open up a list of features and mini-tutorials. I think that's a perfect middle ground between not blasting people with explanation after explanation but also not leaving us dumdums to fend for ourselves.

Overall, there's nothing that Born of Bread doesn't outright tell you on its store page — everything you see is what you get: humorous dialogue, a lighthearted story, fun combat, and silly features like petting animals (I mean, who doesn't want to pet everything from squirrels and mice to pandas?). If that is the sort of title you want, I couldn't recommend it more! I really enjoyed my time with it, and I'm looking forward to WildArts Studio's next release!