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.

Hytale is finally playable after a legendary run through development hell, and it's doing pretty well for itself, considering. It's made a pretty penny already, enough to fund two years of further development, and crucially, it's actually good. PC Gamer senior editor Christopher Livingston said in his impressions that the game "has a long road ahead" but "what's here and working works well."

The Hytale Team seems keen to keep the momentum up, as just four days after release, players have already been treated to a sizable update. It kicks off with a patch note containing the two most beautiful words in the English language: "added dinosaurs." It's a good sign that the team has its priorities straight.

But that's not all. There are some new character creation options, a slew of bug fixes including several crash fixes, and some balance changes addressing some fundamental-sounding problems: "weapon attacks should now check for line of sight," for example. Some placeholder assets and animations have been traded for more polished ones, and "cautious wildlife predators" have been adjusted so that they don't attack you unless you give them a reason to.

You can find the full patch notes on the Hytale website, where all sorts of info drops have landed regarding Hytale's lore and design plans over the last several weeks. It's a little astonishing how fast the studio has been moving since Hypixel owner Simon Collins-Laflamme acquired and revived the project after Riot canceled it—gameplay footage was shared a single day after the deal went through, and here we are just two months later with a playable build and fully implemented dinosaurs.

I'm keen to see where Hytale heads from here. I used to be the sort of guy that considered Grounded the one fun survival crafting game, but now that I've enjoyed Enshrouded, Abiotic Factor, V Rising, and Vintage Story, with another potential banger on the way in Hytale, I think I'm just a full-on convert to the genre's cause.

If you're interested in Hytale as well, it's not available to purchase on Steam just yet. Hytale is available for purchase in early access on the developer's website for $20.