izigame.me

I really wish i liked this game, but it cuts short in so many aspects. I'll try listing the pros and cons, because i do think the game does a lot of things right. Apologies in advance for possible bad grammar and spelling, english isn't my first language.
PROS
The best thing i think this game does is it's characters. Everyone is very charming and sticks with you throughout the entire game, unlike others I've seen where some are forgotten after the chapter where they're introduced. Their personalities and gimmicks are very unique, and i think everyone can find a favorite from the group. I also love how Dub is your save point! Saving is an actual canonical thing in this game and its very neat.
You also get to see the antagonist gang interact with eachother and develop along the way. Those were some of my favorite moments.
Lastly, theres so many more minor yet still reoccuring characters that all have their own thing going on. Some obvious like Papa baker and Number One, but also more unexpected ones like Piper. It is probably impossible to play this game and not find a single character you enjoy.
The music and art-style of this game are also phenominal. I was surprised multiple times by the soundtrack suddenly going crazy, in a good way! And every area is guaranteed to look gorgeous with it's own unique aesthetic in this wonderful 2D world.
I also really like the menu. The weapon equip screen, the skill trees, the funny drawings for everyone and color palettes, even the way you unlock new skills. Its very unique and gives the game a lot of personality.
And, this may not be completely relevant but i feel it is worth mentioning, this game was apparently made by a very small team. And even though i don't have a particularly positive sight on this game, i don't feel like I've wasted my money. I feel this studio has a lot of potential and will probably make great things in the future.
Alright, now lets get to what probably most of you are reading for.
CONS
I'd talk about the biggest issue first, but i feel like there is no one single biggest issue. Its a lot of small things that ultimately bring down the experience for me. I'll just list as many of them as i can in a random order.
-The story
This might just be me, but i didn't feel gripped by the main story at all. The stakes were so insanely low. At multiple points the enemy just walks away with one of the artifacts you need, and in stead of going after him or stopping him, the main characters just keep talking and are bummed out. The final chapter was also WAY too short to do all the buildup justice, it was like 2 rooms long? And by that point i had already gotten so strong that i could kill the final boss without a sweat.
-Bugs, so many bugs
I hard-locked so many times during this game that i had to keep count. For anyone unfamiliar, a soft-lock is a commonly used term in video games. It is when you get stuck somewhere and can't do anything but open the menu and restart the level/go back to the last save point. A hard lock is when you can't even open the menu. By the time i finished, i had encountered 8 hard-locks (Either my game froze when doing random things, or i got stuck in some kind of menu and no buttons did anything) and a lot of those lost me huge amounts of progress because i hadn't saved in a while or it was after a long cutscene. I also encountered a few softlocks, but those are excusable because it was a result of me messing around perhaps a bit too much.
Thats not all. Theres many times where enemy animations worked incorrectly making me unable to time my block, or where suddenly the entire background in the overworld disappeared (happened mostly indoors).
And perhaps the biggest bug is that when your buddy defends, the enemy will not attack after. And while defending, you take 0 damage in stead of just taking less damage while blocking regularly. So you can attack with loaf, and defend with whoever else you were playing with and as long as your timing is on point you would take 0 damage. I had to stop myself from using this to not make this pathetically easy game even easier, but it locked me out of defending with my ally which was very annoying.
There are so many other things i encountered but i won't be listing them all, as that would be boring. Point is: This game is very broken.
-Combat
The combat in this game is fine in the beginning, but it gets derailed very fast. Theres a lot of ally abilities or weapons that can instantly kill every regular enemy on the screen in the first turn. Meanwhile the enemies deal pretty much the same damage throughout the entire game, and the only issue is when a lot spawn at once and you can't kill them all instantly. Its way too easy!
Why does Alfie get a skill that deals 3x3 damage, and then a damage up of one?! Thats 12 damage to every enemy on screen not counting crits! And if you do make skills that strong, at least start giving the enemies and bosses more health. From my counting the final boss had 80 health. Way too low!
I have not gone down a single time. In fact, i have not had to use a single healing item ever.
It also really doesn't help that you level up insanely fast. You only need 100 EXP to level up, and it stays at that for the entire game. I only healed through leveling, basically.
Not once has this game properly challenged me. And as someone who enjoys turn based RPG's, that s a pretty big bummer.
So in short, the combat is pathetically easy and keeps getting easier as you move on. And there is no hard-mode.
-A lot of little things.
Theres no way to change your controls. Would have been nice, since it says that the "Open chat" button is spacebar, but spacebar is also the "Confirm action" button. So opening chat doesn't work on keyboard.
For some quests, you get instructions from the quest-giver and then have to go do the quest. But if i'd stop playing before completing it, usually i didn't remember said instructions. A way to re-read them, or maybe having the npc's repeat them would have been nice.
The puzzles... can i even call them puzzles? They're either super long fetch quests (chapter 3 in it's entirety is a fetch quest, especially annoying because of the instructions thing i mentioned earlier) or they're "Use this character's right click ability" with no other challenge to it. Right at the end, in the final dungeon, theres a singular section where you have to use Chloe's ability in a unique way. But after that is already the final boss, so its too little too late.

I feel this game has so much potential! With just a couple tweaks and fixes it could be great! But right now it was kind of a bad experience, where the only thing keeping me going were the charming characters with mediocre dialogue.
I'll end this review with a question: Has this game ever been playtested?
In just my singular playthrough i found so many glitches, and the entire balancing of enemy and player strength was completely off. I feel like this could have been easily fixed if the devs asked some friends or family members to play through the entire game and tell them about issues they had.
I hope with feedback from the community, that maybe there will be a patch or something that tweaks numbers and fixes most of these issues. For now though, i would not recommend buying born of bread.