Possibly the best VR anime adventure game thus far. Bought on Steam and Meta.

Sushi Ben is first and foremost a Virtual Novel in VR form with a variety of mini games attached to it.

The primary thing you will notice is how amazingly stylish the visuals are. They are perfect for the VR platform given how low fidelity they are while still pulling off some great decisions in terms of shape and color language.
One thing that particularly stood out to me was the flare from staring at the sun in the game, simply being a sprite that became bigger the more focus you had on it. It's efficient, impressive, and looks great.

The same can be said for the characters, where texture work is simple but solid, the models are low poly but convey the characters directly, and the lack of any real lighting allows them to color code them with the environment very nicely.

It can all be said the same for the writing, voice acting, music, and overall story... Simple, clean, and all in all efficient. Perhaps too efficient?

There are some problems that are worth pointing out, however. The game is pretty short, took me about 5 hours while fooling around a little bit between the mandatory story sequences. For the asking price I don't think it's entirely TOO short, but with the story not really meeting a definitive conclusion and setting up for some sort of sequel, the short length does leave a bittersweet taste in my mouth.

There is stuff to do after it's over, and you could probably spend 1-2 more hours on doing everything, but with how it was handled I kind of expected to at least tie a neat little bow on things before I had to wonder if the studio was even set to be able to finish the story with a sequel at all?

The other core issue is that the game, while visually refined, is pretty buggy. Sadly, I had my fair share of bugs that would put me in weird positions during cutscenes, not have NPCs spawn during certain ones while still having dialogue, and most damning the occasional soft lock. Given how long it took to port the game from Quest to PC, it makes me wonder if it's a remnant of that process in some way? Either way, the further I got into the story, the more frustrating it could turn out, especially when I had to restart from checkpoints and redo minigames.

In terms of minigames they are of varied quality. I was not a huge fan of the combat minigames involving evil spirits, while fishing and table tennis were pretty fun barring occasional control issues. Smaller story sequences were without huge issues, but could still come with some confusions. Still, they did manage to provide thematically appropriate activities for each sequence and area.

This is a game that sadly I feel is not going to convince people who's already a bit on the fence. I carried myself through it for the love of the art involved here, but I did find that the simplistic pace also made it pretty hard to get through it patiently. Luckily it's still an inexpensive game, and there is a demo to try out, so I find you'll likely have a good grasp of what you're getting into when you try that out.

It's a mixed recommend from me.