Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends review: The power of friendship and robot sushi (2024)

Here at Shacknews, we have a review scale that rates games in a 1-10 range. As a freelancer, I typically have to adjust my evaluations a little based on where I’m writing. I have my own personal tastes of course, and sometimes my senses of what my own criteria are have to be shaped a little to fit these other boxes. Sometimes there are external forces at play as well, and these can come in all kinds of forms. For instance, while playing Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends, my wife literally stole my Steam Deck and devoured the whole thing in less than a weekend. I haven’t seen this kind of gaming feeding frenzy in my household in a while, and now I’m rethinking everything.

Sushi bot, roll out

I’m not really, but a fun anecdote about how my Steam Deck is a hostage in my own home fits the vibe here. Rolling Hills is a cute, dopamine-driven little adventure that fits firmly in the “cozy” category, a genre of sorts we’ve seen rise out of the tremendous stress of being an adult in the 2020s. You play as an adorable little robot that’s one timely merch deal away from a sold out plushie run, who happens to be purpose-built for making awesome sushi. The mayor of Rolling Hills, so desperate for local commerce he makes dangerous, short-sighted tech-adjacent deals (Elon Musk would love this dude), has brought our pal Sushi Bot on board to run the local shop.

As the sole employee and owner of SUSHI, which is what the restaurant’s banner says, Sushi Bot uses its bizarre technological wizardry to produce sushi on a little conveyor belt, and evaporate leftovers into nothingness. Feeding the denizens of Rolling Hills and making a few dollars is Sushi Bot’s main goal, but along the way the journey becomes much more about making friends and becoming a true member of the community. Also, buying furniture and decorating the shop is really important, because the local Stuff Merchant said so.

The circle of sushi life

Rolling Hills has a loop, and that loop is unchanging for the game’s relatively short runtime. You start your day with a budget based on the previous day’s revenue, and you can spend some time either getting new stuff for your restaurant or spending some time bonding with a friend. Then you open up the store, sell your sushi, fight to keep the shop clean, and end the day. As you do better you’ll solve the mystery of a local legend (that conveniently involves sushi), grow your restaurant, and forge unbreakable bonds that result in passive bonuses to your daily grind. Rinse and repeat until credits roll or you get sick of it.

The weirdest part of Rolling Hills is how you don’t actually make the sushi, despite Sushi Bot’s reputation as a miraculous chef. You gain new recipes by various means and purchase ingredients to upgrade those recipes. Recipes even have different properties, such as helping relax impatient patrons or magically cleaning tables. But it all comes out of the conveyor belt machine and the row of product you get from pressing the button is randomized. Customers make requests based on color and quality, but unless you have an eagle eye there’s less emphasis on caring which specific roll you’re dishing out as long as the color matches.

Simplicity ends up coloring the whole experience. In some ways that’s totally fine, and in others it’s a bit of a bummer, as it’s hard to tell if the game has a difficulty or variety issue. Either way, something feels a bit lacking. Even as customers bring new problems to the table, such as making messes or loudly yammering on the phone and bothering everyone else in the room, things never get so hectic that managing customers becomes super challenging. And as you progress the story through leveling up your store, you spend more time doing business than anything else, leading to a feeling of repetition creeping up between major moments. There are a lot of fun ideas, and the aesthetic is charming as all get out, but the concepts altogether are stretched a touch too thin for what’s on offer overall.

The real sushi was the friends... wait, that doesn't work

A little more complexity, or a little more variance in the moment to moment gameplay, and Rolling Hills would likely have been a slam dunk. Instead, it’s a charming but somewhat forgettable experience, never quite hitting the gas all the way in any one direction. It tries to do a few different things, like offer daily challenges for unlocking hats for Sushi Bot and additional recipes, but the payoff there is another dead end that doesn’t meaningfully impact the loop or progression. At the end of the day, running the shop still feels the same, and the most memorable part of the challenges is the UI that hoovers up screen space the moment you stop moving.

Like I said, I watched in awe as my wife absconded with my Steam Deck and steamrolled Rolling Hills like it was the most delicious plate of sushi the world has known. But then the feeding frenzy was over, and it was almost like it hadn’t happened afterwards. There’s magic in Rolling Hills for sure. But it’s a very fleeting magic, and a little more sauce would have made it a much more impactful source of wonder. It was definitely cute, though!

Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends is available for PC, Xbox One and Series X|S. A PC code was provided by the publisher for this review.