Goblin Sushi is a cooking sim about a goblin who cooks sushi for other sushi-loving goblins

A new ingredient has appeared in the tray. I click to see what it is, forgetting that'll send it out onto the preparation mat. Instead of combining it with other ingredients to make a dish, I panic and click on the mat instead, which rolls up then unfurls to send a failed dish onto my conveyor belt in the form of a pile of poo. My only hope is that the customer I unlocked with the Poop Tasty upgrade appears. That goblin loves eating poo.

This is Goblin Sushi, a cooking game where you are a goblin chef with a queue of hungry dungeon dwellers to serve and ingredients including rice, seaweed, and a variety of fish and cave creatures to serve them. Looks like salmon nigiri is back on the menu, boys.

It's a simple item-combination game, like Cook, Serve, Delicious only you can use a mouse instead of the keyboard, with the tension coming from the endless stream of customers lining up like an angry Monster Manual demanding California rolls. As well as feeding them you need to clean their plates so more customers can take their place, and if you take too long to serve them, or they see piles of poo floating past on the conveyor belt, they'll get angry and tip less.

You need those tips because your goblin landlord arrives periodically, demanding your rent be served up on a platter like it's a blue-plate special. This is the source of what indie developer Old Cake Factory calls the "carpal tunnel gameplay". Pretty quickly you'll have too many hungry mouths to feed, especially when the two-headed customers arrive.

Goblin Sushi is a fairly basic cooking sim elevated by a cutesy/gross aesthetic, with customers including elderly goblin grandmas who have brought their tiny dogs, and huge dogmen who carry tiny goblin grannies. Adorable. It'll be arriving in early access on February 9, and you can play a demo on Steam now.