One day, a friend of mine introduced me to a mobile game called Kuma Sushi Bar, developed by HyperBeard. It’s a sushi-making simulation game with really cute visuals and a fun, yet simple, gameplay loop. It’s currently in an “early access” state, where the developers are looking for feedback to improve the quality of the game. If that’s something you’d like to help out with, please head over to your app stores and install the game, then tell them what you think. If you’re not convinced yet though, here’s what the game is all about.
What is Kuma Sushi Bar?
You play as a cute little bear named Kumaki, who inherits the business of his family. What’s the business? Making sushi…in case you forgot what I said earlier. The sushi bar is in rough shape though, with a lot of the furniture and parts of the building destroyed. But you can fix all that and more through fulfilling your legacy.
The goal is to create the sushi dishes that customers come in and ask for. You do this by simply combining the needed materials, giving them a tap, and clicking on the matching order. This is how you earn two types of currency in the game, coins and dollars (you can also earn them by completing tasks or watching ads). The dollars are used to repair parts of the sushi bar and unlock more areas of it. The coins are used to buy decorations for the parts of the shop you repair, as well as upgrade sushi ingredients and buy outfits.
As you play and repair other areas, you will also unlock other employees that’ll give you benefits. The first one you’ll get is a stray kitten named Nyanko, who’ll eat your failed orders and give you extra coins for them. He also cooks and earns money for you, albeit at a much slower pace. You can use your coins to buy outfits for him too, as well as any other employees you come across. That’s really the gist of the game; make sushi, earn money, use money, repeat.
There’s more to the game, such as customer tiers and NPC’s that come and give you money or unlocked items for ads, but that’s really the gist of it. Surely you’re rushing to your app stores to get your hands on this adorable game after my amazing explanation. But I’d like to explain some things that I think will be important to know going in.
A Few Important Things to Note
The first thing is, as I’ve sorta pointed out, there’s a lot of things to spend your coins on. With only a few ways to earn them (as well as one of the methods requiring you to spend them), they’re pretty scarce. You’re gonna have to play at every opportunity you can to garner a sizable amount, or commit to watching ads. This is even more so the case for dollars, as you can only consistently earn them from ads and sometimes from customers, and in both cases it’s not a lot.
The next thing is, at the moment, the game doesn’t really try to explain a lot of things outside of how to play and progress. For example, when you’re serving sushi, you get a number with a timer around it that goes down. You reset the timer by serving the right sushi multiple times in quick succession. However, the game doesn’t make it clear what the point of that is, or what the reward is. This is also the case for other customer types; if they have a purpose besides being collectible, we’re only left to guess.
Finally, this is in regards to the decorations you purchase for the repaired spots of your bar. Even if you buy something for one spot, it doesn’t unlock that same item for the other spots, so you’ll have to buy them again for the same price if you want multiple of them. There’s also the fact that more expensive items grant you more points to unlock Fame Stars (which is the alternative way to unlock other areas of the bar).
That’s all there is to say. Now, enjoy Kuma Sushi Bar, and remember to tell the developers exactly what you think of it in your feedback on the app store. And while you’re at it, tell me what you think of the game here. I’d love to hear your thoughts.