Sushi has quickly become a popular food item here in the West and these cozy types of games are also fairly popular. So a game that mixes the two, you would think would go congeal pretty well, right? Let's see if Rolling Hills can manage to craft a delicious roll for us to wolf down, or does it fall apart if poked at just a bit.
The story of Rolling Hills is fairly non-existent so we won't stay too long here. Essentially you're dropped into the small town of Rolling Hills as a robot that is driven to make and serve tasty sushi rolls. During your personal quest, you'll discover new recipes, make friends with the townspeople, and even call forth some supernatural entities to help you. And that's about it, the story doesn't go far or deep and really it shouldn't have given what the game is, but I couldn't help but still feel underwhelmed when this simple story reached it's end.
As the story is pretty bare-bones, lets hop into the core game and gameplay loop that will become all too familiar too quickly. Sushi-bot has it's own little restaurant of course where we can open up for the day, get some customers, and 'make' sushi. A huge missed opportunity makes itself known immediately as you'll discover Sushi-bot isn't making the sushi, a conveyor belt will spit out 5 random sushi dishes from the recipes you've collected. No mini-game where you craft the rolls, no decision making about what recipes are on offer at a given time, just press a button and serve whatever the machine gives you or reset it until you get something better. It just takes a lot away from what could be charming about running your own sushi place when you can't make the sushi in, RH: Make Sushi, Make Friends!
The restaurant itself can be given some life and personality as you'll be able to expand it a couple times to add more tables for more customers, change the walls and flooring, and add some decor that helps the profits, experience gains, and increases the time people will wait for their orders. As the game goes on though, it loses the appeal of designing the space how you want to making it the best you can for the best gains. By the end of my playthrough, the restaurant had the tables up close by the sushi-making machine and all the decor stuffed away on the other side of the building that made it look more like a packed thrift store. The customers are pretty bland yet somehow also ridiculous. While some will be your named friends from the town, the majority are nameless characters that you simply must offer 3 dishes of sushi to. To add some spice to the gameplay here, you'll need to; clean the tables, serve customers food who are loudly talking on their phones, and... wake up sleeping people so you don't lose money. Why the hell are people falling asleep in a restaurant and why do they also tell you to wake them up in their reviews if you fail to get to them in time??
What about outside the restaurant though, surely there have to more appealing things there, right? Well unfortunately the game falls into a pretty repetitive cycle where you'll; go to the cafe to build up friendships which offer perks and recipes, check the market for ingredients to upgrade your dishes, check the warehouse for better items to put in the sushi shop, then open your business and repeat. There are a couple more things you can do but you'll find they're pretty mediocre. You'll find spots to fish and call a friend to fish for you... no fishing mini-game. You can collect cans littered about town to recycle for 1 gold per can recycled or knock on 3 doors. And a little later on you'll gain 3 challenges you can take per day like... walk into the water or find the gift box that always has 100 gold which loses it's value real fast as your restaurant makes more gold than you have things to spend it on. There was a moment where I thought gardening might be introduced as a small plot moment asks you clear a field to grow some veggies but no... after that the field is just barren and never used again.
The final 'activity' is building friendships with people in the town which is done by taking them out for coffee/dessert. They do offer their own perks that can help with the restaurant or open new opportunities like new items for sale or the ability to restock the market. I would love to be able to tell you the townsfolk are charming and interesting but that would be a lie, I found myself quickly skipping through the dialogue as their stories are bland and not worth listening to. The game does unintentionally scare you as the friend menu shows spaces for 25-30 but thankfully there's less than 10. Though it is a little odd as nearly half the friends introduce you to their friend, fully modeled and all, but they don't become a resident or even show up at the restaurant, just felt like a weird waste.
So as the game doesn't offer anything worthwhile in it's story or gameplay department, surely the achievements will be easy-breezy, yeah? Mostly. There are only 12 achievos and you will absolutely have 11 of them snagged by the time the story is over. Getting the final one requires you get all the recipes but that just proves to be a slog. The restaurant can reach a maximum level of 20, each level up grants you another recipe and those final 5 just get tedious. You'll be praying to the warehouse god each new day that there's a ultra-charming item on sale to help speed things along. So while there's nothing difficult in this list, I absolutely hate when games bloat things like this where you have to play for an additional couple hours doing the same things over and over that will put you to sleep.
Running a sushi shop could have been a fun time and should have left a good impression but the incredible lack of things to do and what's offered is just so lame. I do understand that this is supposed to be more of a relaxing game, but that's no excuse for the lack of ingenuity on display here in nearly every aspect. It's a real shame too because some of the sushi dishes are very unique and look awesome but because all I can do is make their numbers go up and serve them, the spark quickly dies off. Unless you're looking for a pretty easy achievement list to burn through, I would let Rolling Hills: Make Sushi roll right down the hill and rest comfortably in the dump that is boring, forgetful games.
1.5