Debbie’s Diner Derby sees you trying to get food to the right customers. Trouble is, you’re on roller skates that make it a little bit hard to stop or steer.

The game answers my burning questions about those restaurants where the wait staff are on roller skates. The big one, of course, is how you manage to get food to people without spilling it when you’re on roller skates. The answer, naturally, is that you don’t (most of the time). Mixing a roller derby with a sit-down restaurant is a weird idea, and one that will have you rolling around the place trying to get the right food to your customers without plowing into a wall, slipping on garbage, or clobbering a customer.

Any impact will make you drop what you’re carrying, so you’ll need to be careful. Of course, the game doesn’t REALLY want you to play carefully, though. You’re rewarded for quick deliveries, so you need to go as fast as possible while somehow dealing with your dangerous momentum and steering difficulties. Plus, you don’t just know what people want. You have to go to the table, get the order, deliver it to the kitchen, and THEN bring the food over. This results in a lot of messes while you scramble to get food to your cute animal clientele, and a fair amount of laughs as you struggle to do your job while moving just a bit too fast.

Debbie’s Diner Derby is a silly, fun game that adds a bit of chaos and mess to restaurant work. I don’t have a lot of interest in playing games that let me pretend to work at a job, but by adding some mess and high-speed impacts, the developers have convinced me to take on this digital part-time job.

Debbie’s Diner Derby is available now on itch.io.

Joel Couture

Joel has been covering indie games for various sites including IndieGames.com, Siliconera, Gamasutra, Warp Door, CG Magazine, and more over the past seven years, and has written book-length studies on Undertale and P.T.. Joel is constantly on the lookout for digital experiences that push the boundaries of what games can be, and seeks to delve into the creative process, meanings, and emotion labor that goes into the work of artists worldwide.