The Sushi Spinnery

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

.

Review:

Without a doubt the most prolific developer and publisher of Management Simulation games on Nintendo Switch is Kairosoft, who specializes in games with a retro-style isometric pixel art style, often with the word “Story” in the title. As of this writing, Kairosoft has released 55 games on Nintendo Switch, most of them Management Simulations.

After their earlier games, Kairosoft had established a few templates for their Simulation games that later games would largely follow. Game Dev Story established a Simulation-style game more focused on managing employee time and focus, while Hot Springs Story established a Simulation style in line with Theme Park Simulators where you try to cater to guests’ tastes to maximize attendance and income.

When The Sushi Spinnery was released on mobile devices in the US in 2012, with ports to Nintendo Switch in 2019, PlayStation 4 in 2020, PC in 2022, and Xbox One in 2023 it went for the latter of those two templates, being a game about plotting out the layout of everything in a conveyor belt sushi restaurant.

As I mentioned above, this game makes use of Kairosoft’s signature presentation style using simple retro-styled pixel art visuals presented in an isometric view, paired with repetitive chiptune music and sound effects. Apart from the annoying music, everything about this presentation is really endearing, although of course by this point anyone playing Kairosoft’s games will have gotten used to this visual style.

At this point, the common flaws in Kairosoft’s formula are all fairly expected – the tutorial is terrible, it’s often unclear what affect some choices have, it’s often unclear how to get more of a particular resource you need, there’s no way to adjust pricing or employee pay as these are all dictated to you by the level of the product or employee in question, no way to adjust sales hours, and many of the other elements of running a business are unavailable to you here.

In addition to these flaws, The Sushi Spinnery has a real issue with resource bottlenecks junking everything up. To attract more guests, one of the things you need to do is make new dishes. This requires that you research the ingredients, which uses “sushi coins”, a specific type of in-game currency. However, once you do this, you need to research the dish you’ll make with those ingredients (which also uses sushi coins to determine quality), and if your chef doesn’t have the experience needed to work with said ingredient you’ll need to send him off for training, which requires… you guessed it, sushi coins. Given how scarce this resource can be and how difficult it can be to deliberately earn more, tying so many steps to its use really bogs down the pace of progression in the game.

Another issue is that your restaurant is so small, it really stifles your potential for creativity in designing the layout. I quickly ran out of room in my restaurant, and felt like there was little I could do to improve things from that point.

It’s a shame that these issues with pacing, progression, and lack of freedom are so limiting here, because the game’s theme is great and it’s fun to plan out the layout of a conveyor restaurant. But with these issues present, The Sushi Spinnery is a difficult game to recommend.

tl;dr – The Sushi Spinnery is a Management Simulation where players manage a conveyor belt sushi restaurant, deciding what to build and where to place it. This game is sadly lacking a lot of options, and other gameplay elements aren’t made clear enough. Even worse, this game is really held back by resource bottlenecks and a lack of space to build. Despite the fun theme, these limiting elements make it hard to recommend this game.

Grade: C

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}