Sushi for Robots has a wonderfully irrelevant streak to it. Robots are trying to take on human traits but find themselves getting very confused by our behaviour such as enjoying bad TV shows and choosing to watch them over good ones. They do however all love sushi and have absolutely no patience to wait for it to arrive on their conveyor belts. Its this that drives the logic based puzzle game Sushi for Robots. A fun feeding frenzy that had me scratching my brain more than I care to admit.
Each level contains increasingly complicated conveyor belts for sushi to be passed around. Robots sit around the edges and you’ll need to deliver the right colour sushi to the same coloured robot to win. Robots won’t eat sushi of other colours and it will pass them by but from level 2 onwards a time limit is placed on every level to get everyone fed or you’ll fail. This brings in other gameplay elements called stickers. There are different types and some are placed on the conveyor belts and some are placed alongside them. You’ll need to use these to win the levels and then use them strategically to hit the time limit.
You’ll start off with direction arrows to whip sushi off a conveyor belt and jump over a gap These can shorten longer routes or move sushi between multiple loops. Then you’ll have colour stickers that change sushi colours. Wasabi warps must have a start and end point and sushi teleports between the two sides. Then you get break stickers which smash up other stickers when they’ve been used. These are all used to move sushi around economically to meet the very strict time limits and what makes it tricky is that unless you break something, it runs forever. So what was the exit portal can be the entry portal again. Careless placement of movement arrows will backfire by sending your sushi somewhere you didn’t mean to. As levels will have three or more robots to feed, you’ll be working out the logic to make sushi arrive on time and sometimes in a certain order. Later levels arrange the robots into queues and so ordering your sushi for arrival is crucial.
If I’m honest, after the initial 30 levels I started to really get stuck. The time limit was sending me round in knots trying to work out how to do something. There are no hints but instead the game offers a creative mode. This removes the time limit altogether and offers a more relaxed way to play. I really enjoyed this because it allowed me to start to spot the errors of my solutions by watching them go much slower and be inefficient. There is also a mode where you can unlock every level too but that locks you out of achievements when you do. Again this can be helpful if you just get a mental block on a set of four levels and want to skip them for a bit. I really appreciated the creative mode though as it helped ease me into the level design much more smoothly than the base game did. I found the tutorial a bit lacking , especially when new concepts are added in. It also doubled the 80 levels to 160 because now you could solve them very differently to the time limit version.
Whilst I did enjoy the graphics, the dirty rustic floor dulled the overall colour palette of an otherwise beautiful game. I did enjoy the soundtrack though. It’s a mixture of sushi and spa background music and was suitably relaxing and helped me focus. The offbeat robot chats after completing a set of four levels was unusual but endearing and fed into the generally quirky vibe of the game too.
I think fans of automation and production games will enjoy the bitesized puzzles Sushi for Robots provides. It was a challenge for me but a welcome one and I was always delighted to conquer a level when it all clicked eventually. This might not look like an obvious game to pick up, but its an enjoyable slightly leftfield recommendation from me to puzzle and strategy gamers.
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