One of the biggest problems a game can have is how it can keep the players engaged. Given that the player will be spending a good amount of hours in a game, it’s good to try and ensure that when the players inevitably come across the gameplay loop each has, you do your best to spice it up. Adding new challenges, giving side quests and bonus objectives, and gradually increasing the difficulty are ways to ensure the game doesn’t get too boring. Stagnating will lead to players jumping ship and not seeing the game as worth recommending. Despite a decent start, Rolling Hills: Make Sushi Make Friends soon shows its hand too early and doesn’t do much to keep players wanting to stick around for the long run.
You play as Sushi Bot, the robot who wants to make sushi for a big town. He gets an invitation to a popular place called Rolling Hills. However, he got scammed by the mayor, Coggie, as the town is a rather obscure place in the hills. Despite this mix-up, you do end up deciding to stay there, and now it’s up to you to bring this small little corner of the world onto the map. With just a sushi shop and a small community, you need to make sushi grow the community and see just what’s going on that made this place forgotten over time.
When you first start off, nothing is wrong at first in terms of gameplay. You start off learning about the town and all the mechanics there. The first thing to do is run your sushi shop, and this is where you’re going to be spending most of your time. Here you get to take in the landscape and meet some of the characters you see in the game. You also get the chance to get acquainted with the sounds and graphics of the game. In terms of audio, when it’s there, the sounds are decent, with them helping to enhance and show off the small-town vibe the village has. The music, while it can get repetitive if listened to on loop and repeat, also helps portray the calming and relaxing vibe the place has. The visuals are also cute and charming. From Rolling Hills looking like the town was ripped out of Animal Crossing to fit the cozy and playful nature of the world, to the character models looking endearing and toy-like, as if they were modeled out the sims from the MySims series and buffed out all the rough curves.
The main loop of the game is also pleasant for a bit. As hard as it is to believe in a game called Rolling Hills: Make Sushi Make Friends, you’re going to be serving sushi to the customers who come into your shop. Each customer will want a certain type of sushi represented by a symbol that must be of a certain quality as represented by a number. The sushi belt you have can only show off five dishes at a time before needing to press the button to give out more. Any customers that you meet the conditions for will be five-star reviews that will give you money and experience points. The less stars, the less rewards. There is no punishment for completely botching; it’s just something to look out for when you need to make money or grind experience points. There are obstacles added in to spice it up a bit, be it a customer on the phone annoying others into leaving, a sleeping customer, or simply just cleaning up after dirty clients; there are some challenges still for you to be on the lookout for.
You need to ensure you can keep increasing your shop’s prowess, and you can do that by buying ingredients and furniture. Ingredients will allow you to increase the quality of your food by five levels, with the second and fifth levels being the ones where your quality increases, so it’s good to make a habit out of buying them. The furniture shop is just as useful, with each piece of furniture helping the customers in your shop either wait to be served for longer, pay more, give more experience, or recharge your sushi machine faster.
Outside of your shop, you need to make good on the “make friends” part of the title. You have a cafe you can go to for friendship by summoning a friend for a meal and increasing your friendship level. Befriend more people, and you can get additional benefits for the cafe; from speeding you up after dashing, serving special cakes that will please everyone, and even giving you an additional helper in the cafe. You can only do it once a day, twice once you reach the first level of friendship with the cafe owner, so be sure to look over your friend list and see which attributes you want to unlock first.
That said, there is one big problem this game has that makes even the $15 feel a bit too much; what was just described here was all there is to the game. Very quickly you can find yourself falling into the habit of shopping for ingredients and furniture, having coffee with a friend or two, and then going to work, which takes around 5-7 minutes each shift, but ends up feeling longer and longer the more times you have to go through the shifts to get enough experience points to progress the story. It’s a game that is easy to learn, and just as easy to master sadly. You’re left just doing the same job over and over again until you get enough points to move on to the next story beat, which quickly grows tiresome, especially as you’re stuck listening to the same theme over and over again. The new residents you meet are fun and worth going through their friendship lines, but the main game of delivering sushi never gets to evolve past what you get at the start, except by making it easier by learning how to dash and how to freeze time.
Even the added challenges by the social media influencer you meet, Min, where you need to do certain objectives throughout the day don’t add much. Firstly, they’re stuff you more often than not could easily take care of if you can keep paying attention to the game as if it’s a school test. Secondly, the rewards you get aren’t that impressive, being just hats and other types of recipes you could make, and even the recipes aren’t mandatory for the story. Thirdly, by maxing out your friendship with Min you can get everything for half off. Finally, there’s nothing else for you to get after that, so you just end up stuck with points you can never redeem, making it feel like you saw everything, because you more or less did.
Overall, the game is harmless and isn’t bad. It still has its charm even if it feels like it skimped out on the difficulty a bit, and the writing is nice, if a bit corny at times for the characters that populate the world. However, in terms of the main gameplay, it doesn’t offer anything more that would make anyone want to come back for seconds. It’s best experienced on the Game Pass Store, and maybe during a sale. $15 is just a bit too high for what is being offered here. It’s not anything that bad, but once it went down the hatch and the credits started rolling, I was left wanting something more substantial. There’s always a market for cute and wholesome easy games, but it feels like a couple of ingredients are missing still to make this a meal worth getting.
