A Coding-Sushi Combo That Delights As Much As It Frustrates
Sushi for Robots caught me unawares. I’d assumed, wrongly, that it was going to be a friendly, cooking-based puzzler that I’d pick up and enjoy in the time it takes to swallow a sashimi. Pop in and it’s gone. But I was hopelessly wrong.
If I were to do some Trump-style redacting of that sentence, all I would be left with is “puzzler that I’d…enjoy”. Because all the other assumptions were wrong to a significant degree. If you’ve arrived at Sushi Robots with the same thoughts, it might be critical to your enjoyment if you think differently.
That’s What Sushi Said
Sushi for Robots is a puzzle game, but one focused on programming, not sushi. All of the sushi is ready-made, so there’s no cooking, preparation or Overcooked!-style rushing about. What’s left is closer to the precise management of Factorio and Satisfactory than Diner Dash.
Look at a screenshot of Sushi for Robots and imagine the conveyor belt as a process or circuit. Food loops around clockwise on the belt. This would go on forever if there wasn’t a turn-counter. You have a set number of moves on the belt before the level is over (although, you can activate a ‘Creative Mode’ to turn these limits off, should they bother you).
The aim is to get the right colour of sushi to the right colour of robot, all within the turn limit. It’s recommended that you press the Play button immediately to show the size of the task at hand. Perhaps the turn-counter is the problem, and you need to get the sushi to the robots faster. The colours might not be right. In later levels, the sushi can be on entirely different conveyor belts.
The Gates To Success
In your toolbox, to the right of the screen, are some gates. You can slot these gates onto the conveyor belt or around it, and they have an impact on the sushi once you press Play. The easiest to convey are the Colour Gates. Any sushi that passes through them will turn the relevant colour. But it’s worth keeping in mind that they turn every sushi that colour, as long as they pass through, and you may not want them all bright blue.
As Sushi for Robots progresses, more gates get handed to you – whether you like it or not (I was only just learning the previous ones!). Junction Gates allow your sushi to bypass sections of the conveyor belt. Portal Gates teleport your sushi to a partnering portal (the sushi is a lie). Break Gates destroy other gates once they have been used, and Swap Gates flip other gates around once a sushi has passed through.
For the first ten or so levels, things are comfortable. The problems to solve are easy to spot, the number of permutations are low, and you’ve only got a couple of gates to grapple with. But for the remaining seventy, well, things get wasabi hot.
Sushi For Robots is incredibly clever. I can’t tell you how relieving it is to play an Xbox puzzle game that does something different, and doesn’t scratch the overly scratched itches of sokoban, sliding puzzles, jigsaws and the rest. This is a cunning, superbly designed adaptation of programming, and it’s presented beautifully.
It’s also absolutely stacked with content. It’s utterly possible to sit, staring at the same puzzle for thirty minutes. Multiply that by eighty puzzles, and you get a good sense of how much good work is here. The puzzles are far from identikit, either, as they each have a theme, or a particular problem to solve. They gently nudge at different parts of the brain.
All of the above makes me slightly ashamed that, having reached the end of all four ‘seasons’ in Sushi For Robots, the first word that pops into my head when thinking about Sushi for Robots is “exhausting”. I can recognise the lovely Japanese brushwork in the art style. I can acknowledge the craft and innovation in the puzzles. But I still found myself groaning a little when picking up the pad.
Don’t Maki Me Play Any More
There are just so, so many different permutations for where you can place your gates. There’s no brute-forcing anything – everything needs to be meticulously planned and executed. You can investigate an entire line of thinking (what if I need a sequence of alternating portals?”) only to find that, after fifteen minutes of investigating, that you were on the wrong track.
With the inclusion of Swap Gates and Break Gates, the permutations rise astronomically. Suddenly you are thinking about how gates alternate with every turn. And Sushi for Robots has no interest in helping. There’s no Hint System, and it keeps playing at the fringes of its own rules. You have to very quickly learn that a Swap Gate can move a Colour Gate on top of a robot, for example, when that placement wasn’t allowed before (and there’s a host of other examples). All these exceptions take a while to learn.
A Proper Brain Tickler
My inkling is that Sushi for Robots will be polarising. Players who have been yearning for – finally! – a Mensa-tickling puzzler on the Xbox will be well into this. I suspect that players who think like programmers – methodical, one-step-at-a-time, with an emphasis on logic flows – will embrace it. But I’m a games journalist who thinks in sentences and I’ve got a different take on rationality. I could only play a couple of puzzles at a time before the patience wore down.
If you want to know why programmers always have a pained expression, then play Sushi for Robots. It takes sequencing problems and repackages them exquisitely. But it’s not going to be for everyone: those with a taste for logic flows will have full bellies, while I found myself cursing its intricacy and difficulty levels.
Important Links
Buy Sushi for Robots on Xbox – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/sushi-for-robots/9plh16rdvhzl
