Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends Review

Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends is a nice and cosy restaurant simulator developed by Catch & Release and published by Humble Games. In this game, you play as Sushi Bot, the best sushi chef ever created with the goal of becoming renowned around the world and pleasing your creators. Beginning your culinary journey in the small town of Rolling Hills, you'll be building up your skills, reputation, and friendships with the entire town as you turn a local sushi restaurant into a landmark to revitalise the community… with a little help from the supernatural.

First, let me gush about the presentation. All the characters, especially Sushi Bot, are really cute and distinct and I quite liked the dialogue. It was often funny and nice to read, and the characters do have story arcs, as simple as they may be. As for the music, it was fine. It fits the atmosphere of Rolling Hills, but I would've liked it if there was music when exploring the town. You only get to listen to songs while inside buildings, while outside is complete silence. Although, this could be a stylistic choice, taking in the peaceful air while you're out and about.

Enough about that, though. Let’s get into the real meat (well, fillings) of the game. Every day will entail the opening of your sushi restaurant. You can’t save or go to the next without doing your job. The running of your restaurant is actually really simple. You don't cook or prepare anything, all you have to worry about is serving customers. The Sushi-Matic will create them for you, spawning five dishes randomly selected from your repertoire of recipes (it’s food gacha), and all you have to do is deliver the preferred flavour and expected quality to the right customer to earn perfect ratings. While you can serve them any sort of food and they won't be too mad, you'll get bonuses if you attend to their tastes. You’ll also have to worry about what the customers do while they’re eating. They’ll doze off and leave early if you don’t wake them up, take flash photography and stun you, talk on their phone while annoying other customers, or just make a mess of their table and throw trash on the floor. It can get pretty hectic as you try and ensure everyone leaves satisfied, but it’s definitely satisfying to complete every order with all five stars.

...Real hard-hitting choices here.

Ah, but there's more to Rolling Hills than a nice sushi place. Why not explore the small town and see what it has to offer? You'll meet a variety of characters during your time in town, spend some money at the shops, and even take the time to clean up the community by picking up discarded cans (which I got unreasonably angry at, stupid litterers).

There are only three locations in town worth visiting every day. You can go to the market to buy ingredients that improve your recipes (which, funnily enough, encourages adding oysters to dango), spend time at the cafe to hang out with friends over coffee and dessert, or head to the furniture store to make your restaurant a little more pretty. Speaking of which, furniture isn't just for letting you unleash your inner interior decorator; each item in your restaurant will provide bonuses that will either make earning money and EXP easier or make running the restaurant more manageable like increasing customers’ patience and making your food maker recharge faster. Making friends and growing your relationships isn't just for some fun dialogue either. You'll learn new skills and earn bonuses depending on how high your friendship is, so it's always worth a trip to the coffee shop to hang out.

Not every game lets you be a robot sushi chef in a pope hat.

Actually, the progression is quite nice. While you’re trying to make your restaurant the best it can be, you’ll have tasks to help guide you and progress the story. As you complete these tasks, you also get new abilities such as a dash, an item finder, and um… time stop. You also get Little Bots to help you clean and enhance the effects of furniture, which can really lighten the load on service.

I didn't have any issues with the performance and it is relatively glitch-free. However, I think the biggest issue was pathfinding and collision. The pathfinding isn't the best sometimes, where customers can't get to a table and might get stuck on something, but the bigger problem is collision, because it works a little too well. Sushi Bot is big and can't get through gaps in furniture humans can very easily, and if a Little Bot is standing in the way (usually because a careless customer used the floor as a trash bin), you and any other NPC can't get through, especially if it's in the doorway where they will bunch up. However, I should note that eventually, NPCs will teleport to their destination so it's not that much of an issue. I also found decorating a little slow. The game did recommend using a controller, but moving furniture around is a little too slow. It does make for greater control, but when you have more space, it will take what feels like ages to shift around your things. Also, icons overlap so if you position your tables wrong, you can’t see what types of food are on the conveyor belt.

Make friends with clowns, Shakespearean playwrights, and... influencers (they're actually kinda nice).

Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends is just really good. It’s not exactly the biggest game out there, but I felt at peace as I was playing even as hordes of customers came in looking for the highest quality sushi. If you want something not too intense but satisfying all the same, I definitely recommend getting this. Be warned though: you might get a craving for sushi after a play session.