If you’ve ever felt the need to take your daily frustrations out on Japanese food, play Oh! Sushi, available on iTunes. Part Fruit Ninja, part Cooking Mama and part “making sushi at home with no regard for a noble craft that requires expertise,” this game will be a satisfying experience for everyone who’s felt self-loathing at their completely inept sushi-making skills. You play a chef creating what can only be called “hateful omakase” for your unsuspecting diners. It’s pretty amazing.
Fire up the game, see what your customer requests, and decide whether you’ll fill their order or simply take it as more of a loose suggestion. Choose from nigiri, gunkan (“battleship-style”) or maki sushi and have at it.
My favorite part of the game, besides disappointing my clientele, was chopping (read: mangling) octopus tentacles or fish fillets for nigiri sushi. Toss all uniformity to the wind and simply ruin that expensive seafood, because a friendly duck corrects your prep disasters before you go on to assemble anything remotely edible-looking.
In the demo video, you’ll see such masterpieces as salmon roe, natto and popcorn gunkan, lightly dolloped with caviar. Or the ever-palatable salmon-wasabi-salmon-wasabi-salmon-wasabi stack. The number of different ingredients you can fire out of the “topping bazooka,” both traditional and less so, is impressive.
In addition to sea urchin, bonito flakes, Japanese omelet and natto, you can add unlockable items like gummy bears, bananas, corn, wieners, churros, chocolate and sliced okra.
Then it’s judgment time. If the diner (a grizzled old fox, sleepy lion with dreadlocks or furious gorilla in a shirt that says “Gnomes”) likes your creation, hurray! If not, flames and ominous skulls shoot out of its mouth and it sadly trudges off the screen, presumably to wash the taste out of its mouth with copious amounts of house sake and leave you a terrible Yelp review.
Once you’ve served up some truly terrible sushi to perfectly innocent anthropomorphic beasts, not only will your frustrations (and phone battery) have dissipated entirely, you’ll also know what you’re doing for dinner tonight.
