Last year, I played a game, and I was trying to finish it 100%, only I had misunderstood a part of the early game, and ended up skipping out on a lot of information that only showed up every seven days game time, so now at the end of the game it was a lot of pointless busywork to get to the several pieces of info I needed to finish. Which would still have been okay, because kid friendly games are hard to come by, but then I started playing some Mario stuff instead, and it never happened, and now Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends has fallen off of Gamepass, which means it will never happen, but unlike a lot of games I played enough to form an opinion of but then never finished, at least I’m here writing a review of it.
The deal is, you’re a robot who makes (or maybe more appropriately, serves) sushi, and you’ve been hired by this old mayor to make his town popular. Half of the game is, every evening you open your restaurant and tell your sushi-making machine to start, er, making sushi, which you then try to match to what your patrons are in the mood for. They give you money and acclaim, if you do well at this. Then in the other half of the game you use the money and acclaim to buy things. Furniture, ingredients, costumes, that kind of thing. But you also are trying to make friends with all the people who live in town and newcomers as the town grows, because doing so will allow you to unlock newer, cooler things to buy as well as letting you delve into the (improbably, sushi-based) mysteries of the town’s origins.
Anyway, I did all of that, but didn’t quite get all of the possible sushi recipes, because some of them were locked behind a traveling sushi chef who visits once a week, but I didn’t start talking to her until pretty late in the game, because I didn’t know when or how to find her at first. Oops.
It was pretty fun, though towards the end even before this sushi chef fiasco, it started to feel more like work than fun to unlock the last few bits of relationships, mysteries, etc. I think maybe a lot of games do that, towards the end. Which is a pity.