TikTok showed me an adorable co-op platformer called Bread & Fred

polygon.com:

In Bread & Fred, you’re tied to another penguin by a very short rope, and you’ll need some serious teamwork to make the climb. So, Ana and I (Nicole) are taking on our impressions together, as a team. Think of this story as the rope tying us together to bring you our thoughts on the game’s chaotic platforming. We’re each writing a paragraph and then letting the other take over; Ana’s paragraphs will be in italics.

Bread & Fred was released in May by a three-person indie team called SandCastles Studio, and it has been hugely popular on TikTok since. It’s a game that’s perfect for the internet in the same ways Fall Guys or Overcooked are: It requires skill, but even the worst players are rewarded with slapstick animations of squished penguins and hilarious falls.

I can only take a step or two until the rope goes taught, and I’m stuck in place until my partner makes progress on their end. Actions like basic jumps to a nearby platform require a level of coordination sometimes hindered by stream latency and potential lag in voice chat. My partner and I stay in constant communication. All of this just so that we can climb a few measly meters.

It’s hard. The platforming looks relatively simple, but deceptively so. What looks to be simply jumping over gaps is made complicated by the short rope. Thankfully, Bread & Fred does have several options to make the game more approachable — one crucial example is a checkpoint system that you can turn on in the options menu. It allows you to put a flag in the ground, which acts as a spawn point if you make one disastrous fall. (We made plenty of those as we started our journey up the mountain.) Bread & Fred also has a handy in-game countdown timer, too, which became essential for