Roll up your sleeves and become the best dough you have ever baked! Yes, it’s even better than the croissants you roll on the weekend or the cake you bake for your dog’s birthday. Born of Bread is an excellent Paper Mario-styled RPG you should check out over the Christmas holidays, even if it’s just because it’s gluten-free and full of puns. Bakers, let’s get baking!
Story & Loveletter
So, what do we get? You play as a flour golem with a never-ending childlike wonder and odd abilities. Team up with a colorful cast of characters, explore the different regions of a beautiful world ripe with mysteries and engage in a fun and quirky turn-based combat system. The whole story revolves around beings from another age causing havoc across the land! And with their mischief comes a significant threat to everyone. The unlikeliest hero, a golem born of bread, will find himself and his newfound friends in a drama that’s thousands of years in the making.
It feels like a love letter to the original Paper Mario games, and that’s a good thing. Bug Fables did the same but took itself too seriously on some levels, making it a great and challenging match. Born of Bread combines the quirkiness one expects from a Paper Mario game but also combines it with its sense of difficulty and humor, not often found in games like these. The story follows a standard build-up, meeting friends along the way, collecting pieces of an ancient treasure, and the whole shebang. But in a good way, since it works in the quirkiness of Born of Bread. I will not spoil too much of the game, but the chapters are good in length and offer enough diversity and challenge to keep you engaged.
Game mechanics
The mechanics are straightforward and will feel familiar to those who have played a Paper Mario game before. Attacks are mostly QuickTime-button-pressing-sequences and have different alignments that work like you would suspect in games like Pokémon. Ice/water attacks do more damage against fire element enemies; psychic attacks do more damage against ghost-type enemies, etc. The other way around does the same – attacking an enemy with a particular element or with a physical or ranged attack will cause defense up with the enemy.
Next to the standard spoon weapon, Loaf carries, you get all sorts of elemental weapons that lead to special attacks. Those weapons range from flaming whips to fish hammers and the such. Upgrading your backpack can equip you with more weapons and be a more versatile Loaf. With the help of your companions, you can become quite the combat expert, which is needed since the whole thing is live-streamed on the internet. This leads to gaining points to perform special attacks, just like the toad system in Paper Mario. A nice touch, although the chat – just like with Twitch – can be quite a bit too much to handle (so I turned that off most of the time).
Artstyle
Next to tinkering around with Loaf, you can play with one of the villains of Born of Bread. These sequences show off the more gritty side of the storyline and show just how much this game has to offer. It’s not all about flowers, happiness, and flour. It’s also about being an evil overlord caring for their team. I love the vibrant art style that pops and feels straight out of a comic book. Each ‘world’ has a distinctive feeling, with forests to canyons and haunted mansions in the snow. They made sure that the whole world felt unique and had its enemies. Combined with the lighthearted writing, the entire thing with Loaf, the adversaries, and the Savers Guild (a guild of superheroes carrying around scribes to save their heroic deeds) has a warm and wholesome feel.
Points of critique
Born of Bread is very good, and I highly recommend picking it up, but it did have some game-breaking bugs. My characters got stuck a few times, which resulted in losing a lot of progress. Content ranging from half an hour to two hours was lost due to not having an autosave function. Yes, that’s the charm of an RPG like this, but sometimes the segments are so long that you must find a spot to rest/save. Especially with the pretty small item pouch, it can be tricky to do prolonged questlines without adequate saving (oke, that’s one me). I do hope they release a day-one patch that tackles this segment. I started the game again to do the exploration and battles again since I love the skill point system, but it sucks to repeat specific steps over and over again.
Conclusion
So, to conclude. Born of Bread is a great and well-baked RPG in the style of Paper Mario, but it offers enough creative freedom to move away from the ‘oh, but they did this better in Mario’ stigma. The characters are lovely and well-written, and the combat system feels fresh. Using weapons and skill points to create a versatile protagonist and companion system offers a good take on the whole 2,5D RPG system and adds depth to how we should approach these kinds of genres. Born of Bread is a good RPG that lives up to the spirit of Paper Mario but transcends the stigma the genre often adds to games like these. Even with some technical hiccups, Born of Bread is one of my favorite RPGs of the year.
