Bakeborough

Genre: Top-Down Action-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Bakeborough is a Top-Down Action-RPG released in 2023 for PC and Nintendo Switch. In this game, players take the role of an anthropomorphic bran muffin on a quest to save his boyfriend after he was kidnapped by insects.

The choice to make all the friendly characters in this game some sort of food seems odd and inexplicable, and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the story or gameplay, it just seems like it was done expressly for the purpose of being strange. Beyond this odd choice, Bakeborough’s presentation is decent, using 2D pixel art graphics and a decent but forgettable soundtrack.

When it comes to gameplay, the most noteworthy element of Bakeborough is the mechanic that has you changing your character’s stats and abilities by adding or removing parts to your character’s own body, even making your eyes removable as an important gameplay element. I think this is a really creative idea with a lot of potential… too bad the rest of the game is an outright disaster.

Where to even begin? The hit detection is atrocious, and enemies don’t react at all to getting hit. The menus are extremely poorly-constructed, with controls that don’t work half the time – just moving an item in your inventory from one place to another is a crapshoot. Speaking of the inventory, this game is extremely unpolished with absurd glitches, such as a duplication glitch I found on accident simply by moving items back and forth in my inventory. And even if you ignore all of the stuff in this game that is outright broken, the game is full to the brim with fetch quests and enemies that do nothing but move slowly toward you and count on the game’s terrible controls and your weapon’s short reach to result in you getting too close and taking a hit.

In the end, what little Bakeborough does that’s interesting or worthwhile is far outweighed by everything it does that’s utterly broken. This game feels unfinished and amateurish in a way that’s far more frustrating than endearing. I suppose it’s appropriate to say this one needed more time in the oven.

tl;dr – Bakeborough is a Top-Down Action-RPG where players take the role of an anthropomorphic bran muffin on a quest to rescue his boyfriend. This game has some interesting ideas about inventory management, but overall this is a horrible, incomplete, unpolished mess of a game with far too many problems to be worth playing. In other words, it’s half-baked.

Grade: D-

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