When I set out to review Bread & Fred, I was genuinely optimistic. I liked the game’s style, and I was intrigued by its co-op mountain climbing gameplay. I had hopes that this might be a modern advancement of something like Ice Climbers—or at least how the Ice Climbers would theoretically work in a game based on how they play in Super Smash Bros.
Like an intrepid climber, I set out with hope and optimism in my heart. However, what I quickly found was a mountain that had been coated with bacon grease, and instead of a climber’s pick, I had been given a spoon. Bread & Fred certainly has interesting ideas, but its gameplay was so deeply frustrating every time I sat down to play it that it wasn’t long until I shut it off and threw whatever device it was on down a well…so now I need a new Switch.
Weirdly enough, if you play single-player you don’t even play as Bread or Fred. You play as some guy named Greg and his partner…a rock. But honestly, this might be one of the few reviews where I skip past the story—you’re a penguin or two penguins who climb a mysterious mountain for no specific reason, possibly glory, possibly fame.
But the story hardly matters here because of how much it’s overshadowed by Bread & Fred’s gameplay. Now, that isn’t to say it’s particularly bad. Because, in theory, it works and could probably be pretty fun. It’s a semi-co-op physics platformer where players use each other—or, if you’re playing single-player, a rock—to throw and swing from platforms. One player acts as the anchor while the other acts as the pendulum, and the two need to work together constantly in order to ascend.
It’s a really neat idea. However, the reason I despise it is the same reason I loath Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy: Bread & Fred is a game that does not respect the player’s time and actively works to waste it. While the game works for the most part, the physics can be a bit unpredictable, so not every throw of the partner or release of the swing is going to work all the time.
“Bread & Fred is a game that does not respect the player’s time and actively works to waste it.”
And when you’ve spent five to ten minutes trying to methodically climb through one particularly difficult part, only for the game to slap you in the face and erase all your progress on an arbitrary whim, it fills you with a special kind of feeling. It is not anger or despair; it is just profound knowledge of the limited time we have on this earth and the better things you could be doing with it.
Granted, it’s worth mentioning that this game does give players a checkpoint system, but it’s squirrelled away in the Accessibility Options. Don’t get me wrong, it is good that it’s there, and any difficult game should have options to make the experience more fun and playable, but the fact that it is an option, and one that’s turned off by default, means that’s not the way the game is meant to be played.
But in the spirit of fairness, I will say there are a few things I like about the game. As I said above, I like the concept of gameplay. I like that the main characters are penguins—those guys are pretty cute. Also, I really like Bread & Fred’s art style, which utilizes a bright, colourful pixel aesthetic not dissimilar to Celeste—which, for the record, is an equally punishing but much better-built game about climbing a mountain.
Like Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, Bread & Fred seems like a game where the joke is: “Haha, isn’t it hilarious that you just lost 10 minutes of progress because of a bad jump?” Or, more so, it seems like the kind of game made for streamers to play together and yell at each other for more nebulous content—in fact, the game’s Steam page even makes a joke about how you have no one to blame in single-player.
I wish I could’ve loved Bread & Fred, but every attempt to play it just aggravated me. Maybe if I go back to it with the checkpoints turned on, I might have a better time, but playing it the way it wants to be played is just annoying. Every moment of reset progress in Bread & Fred just reminded me of all the better games I could’ve been playing. Games that are difficult by design, but respect the time and effort you put into them.
