HIPS N NOSES

What Is HIPS N NOSES?

HIPS N NOSES is a genre-blending indie game from Korean studio PepperStones.Inc that fuses café management simulation with action roguelike combat. In a world where the very concept of sleep has vanished, a young woman named Mela is the sole person still capable of falling asleep and dreaming.

After meeting a mysterious companion named Beri, Mela opens a café in a sleepless city. By day, she serves customers whose lost memories have eroded their identities, using conversations to piece together their tastes. By night, she enters an ever-changing dream realm, battling monsters alongside café regulars to collect "memory flower" ingredients that literally restore what her customers have forgotten.

The café half channels the dialogue-driven warmth of Coffee Talk and VA-11 Hall-A. The dream half evokes the build-driven combat of Hades. These are not parallel tracks — they are a single loop: dream ingredients feed the café, café profits fund combat upgrades, and relationships unlock allies and tools across both halves.

A free demo is available now on Steam. The full game targets Early Access with a five-week narrative structure — Weeks 1–4 at launch, Week 5 arriving during the EA period.

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Game Details

System Requirements

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Story & Setting — The Sleepless City

The premise is stark: sleep as a biological function has simply ceased to exist. Nobody rests. Over time, without the nightly reset that sleep provides, people begin forgetting — first small details, then whole histories. The sleepless city is a place of frayed identities and gap-shaped holes in personal memory.

Mela is the anomaly. She alone can dream — a fact that makes her simultaneously precious and strange. Her companion Beri helps her realize that her dreams are not random neural noise but gateways to the memories the world has lost. The café becomes the bridge: a space where the sleepless can sit, talk, and feel something close to peace.

The story unfolds through customer conversations, relationship milestones, and memory restoration. Each recovered memory is a narrative beat — a scene, a revelation. The full version promises a "hidden final storyline" with deeper nightmare exploration, suggesting the dreams themselves hold answers about why sleep vanished in the first place.

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The Café Day Loop — Service & Management

During the day, Mela runs the café. Customers arrive with unique tastes but no printed orders — they talk instead, dropping hints about preferences, moods, and memory fragments inside their dialogue. There is no service timer; the game rewards attention over speed.

Service Flow

1. Greet & listen. The customer talks. Every line may carry a hint about what they want.
2. Interpret hints. Specific ingredients, emotional states ("cold inside" = warm flavors), memory fragments ("a field of lavender" = floral notes), and personality traits all map to recipe choices.
3. Build the recipe. Open the customization screen, select a base, and add ingredients from your inventory (sourced from dreams and purchases).
4. Serve. Satisfaction uses a gradient: Perfect Match → Good → Acceptable → Poor. A perfect match can earn 2–3x the reward of an acceptable one, plus relationship progress and memory restoration.
5. Reinvest. Profits fund café upgrades (décor, equipment, layout) and combat abilities.

Cooking tools unlocked through relationships expand recipe options. Serving animations make the café feel alive. The full version promises expanded customization beyond the EA build.

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Recipe Customization — The Strategic Core

Recipe customization is the deepest café system. You modify base recipes with ingredients that carry flavor profiles, intensity, rarity, and sometimes memory-tied effects.

Ingredient Sources

• Dream runs: Monsters drop memory-flower ingredients. Different biomes yield different types.
• Shop purchases: Basic ingredients bought with café profits.
• Character gifts: Rare, character-specific ingredients from relationship milestones.
• Story rewards: Unique ingredients from major narrative beats.

Hint Types

Synergies

Some customers have ingredient synergies — combinations that work better together than apart. A customer who mentions both "chocolate" and "a hint of spice" in the same conversation is likely hinting at a synergy, not two independent preferences. Discovering these requires careful listening or deliberate experimentation.

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The Dream Combat Loop — Action Roguelike

At night, Mela sleeps and the game transforms into a procedurally generated action roguelike.

Dream Structure

• Randomized layouts — rooms, corridors, and arenas change every night.
• Monster variety with unique attack patterns. Bosses cap each dream.
• Café allies — characters you have befriended fight alongside Mela with personality-tied abilities.
• Ingredient drops — different enemies drop different memory-flower ingredients, creating strategic targeting.
• Difficulty scaling — Week 1 dreams are tutorials; Week 4 demands optimized builds.

Combat

Real-time action with free movement, melee attacks, unlockable abilities, and dodge/evasion mechanics. Upgrades purchased with café profits improve combat stats and unlock new skills.

The Symbiotic Loop

Café Profits → Combat Upgrades → Better Dreams → Rarer Ingredients → Better Recipes → More Profits
Dream Ingredients → Perfect Recipes → Happy Customers → Relationship Progress → Dream Allies → Easier Dreams

Neglect either half and you stall. No café upgrades means brutal later dreams. No dream runs means no memory-restoration ingredients. The two halves are mechanically symbiotic, not optional.

Memory Restoration

The dream loop's ultimate purpose: collect the right ingredients, serve the right recipe, and a customer's lost memory is restored. This is the game's primary progression gate — restored memories unlock new chapters, customers, dream areas, and combat abilities.

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Characters, Relationships & Progression

Known Characters

• Mela: Protagonist. The only dreamer. Kind, curious, increasingly burdened by her unique ability.
• Beri: Mela's companion and guide to the dream world. Beri's origins are mysterious and likely tied to the central mystery.
• Customers: A rotating cast with unique designs, personalities, and memory-loss stories. Each is a puzzle to solve.
• Dream Allies: Café regulars who appear as combat allies in dreams, fighting with abilities that reflect their personalities.

Relationship Progression

Relationships advance through: (1) serving well-matched recipes, (2) restoring memories, (3) dialogue choices, and (4) consistent attention. There are no passive gains — ignored characters do not progress.

Unlockables

The cast is large enough that you cannot max every relationship at once. Early choices about whom to prioritize shape your available tools, allies, and dream access. Rotate attention, but focus enough to make progress.

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Early Access Roadmap

The developers have published a clear Early Access plan on the Steam store page:

EA Launch Build:

• Five-week narrative structure. Weeks 1–4 fully playable with unique bosses each week.
• Week 5 bosses in development at launch; arriving during EA.

During EA (~6 months):

• New café customization options.
• Additional dream battles and nightmare mechanics.
• Refined storytelling (expanded dialogue, memory scenes).
• Balance and polish driven by Discord/Steam Community Hub feedback.

Full Version (Post-EA):

• Hidden final storyline exploring why sleep vanished.
• New dream battle mechanics and deeper nightmare areas.
• One new customer character with unique memory requests.
• Expanded café customization.

Pricing: EA price TBA. 10–20% increase after Early Access, proportional to content added.

Community: Active Discord server + Steam Community Hub. Social presence on X and Instagram.

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Beginner's Guide — First 3 Hours

Hour 0–1: Café Onboarding

1. Watch the opening. The premise — no sleep, Mela dreams, Beri appears — is foundational.
2. Follow Beri's tutorial. It teaches the café UI, recipe screen, and service flow. Don't skip.
3. Serve your first customer. Hints are straightforward. Learn the recipe customization screen.
4. Explore every menu. Upgrades, customization, inventory, relationships — know where things live before your first dream.

Hour 1–2: First Dream

1. Close the café and sleep. The game transitions to the dream.
2. Learn combat basics: movement, attacks, ability use, enemy telegraphs, ingredient pickup.
3. Beat the Week 1 boss. Tutorial-level difficulty. Collect rewards and wake up.
4. Check your ingredient inventory. Start matching drops to customer needs.

Hour 2–3: The Loop Clicks

1. Open for day two. New customers, subtler hints. The real game begins.
2. Use dream ingredients in recipes. Memory flowers are the key to customer satisfaction.
3. Talk to everyone between shifts. Non-customer characters unlock tools and progress.
4. Buy your first upgrade. Prioritize cooking tools > combat abilities > café décor.
5. Enter your second dream. Harder layout, different enemies. Apply what you learned.

Critical First-Session Habits

• Read every line. Hints are genuine — nothing is fluff or misdirection.
• Never skip a dream. Dream runs are your only source of memory ingredients.
• Spend your money. Hoarding profits is a trap; unspent coins do nothing.
• Rotate relationships. Don't fixate on one customer — spread attention to unlock tools.

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Advanced Strategies

Conversation-First Serving

Let the customer finish talking before opening the recipe screen. Note every hint mentally, then build the recipe around all of them. A perfect match requires addressing every preference mentioned — missing one means leaving money on the table.

Targeted Dream Farming

Before each night: (1) check which memory you are restoring, (2) identify the required ingredient, (3) learn which enemies drop it, (4) prioritize those enemies. Random room-clearing wastes dream time on unusable drops.

Profit Reinvestment Priority

Build for Deep Dreams

Dream difficulty scales non-linearly. By end of Week 2, ensure: 2+ combat abilities upgraded, a consistent ingredient pipeline, 3+ ally relationships, and no neglected café upgrades. A one-sided build stalls when the other half spikes.

Relationship Optimization

• Weeks 1–2: Focus 2–3 characters with complementary tool unlocks.
• Week 3: Expand to 4–5 relationships for multiple ally options.
• Week 4+: Cycle back to neglected characters before endgame — every ignored relationship is permanently locked content.

Inventory Management

Use rare ingredients — don't hoard. A rare flower in storage is a story beat you have not unlocked. Excess commons can fund experimentation or upgrades.

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FAQ

Is HIPS N NOSES released? No. Targeting Early Access. A free demo is available (Steam App ID 4925020).

What platforms? Windows (64-bit) and Linux (64-bit). No macOS.

Controller support? Full — DualShock 4, DualSense, Steam Input. Keyboard-only also supported.

Languages? 10 languages for interface + subtitles. No voice acting — text-driven.

Price? TBA. Developer states price will rise 10–20% after Early Access.

How long is EA? Approximately 6 months per the developer.

Is it just a café sim? No — it is a true hybrid. Café management by day, action roguelike combat in dreams by night. Both halves are equally weighted and mechanically linked.

Do I have to play combat? Yes. Dream runs are the only source of memory-flower ingredients required for story progression.

How hard is the combat? Scaling difficulty. Early dreams are accessible; Week 4 demands optimized builds. Roguelike structure means dying and retrying is expected.

Are there difficulty settings? No explicit difficulty options, but the demo includes accessibility features: adjustable text, custom volume, subtitles.

System requirements? Minimum: i3-6100 / FX-8350, 8 GB RAM, GTX 580 / HD 7870, 2 GB storage. Modest — most gaming PCs from the last decade will run it.

Is there a Discord? Yes. Active server for feedback and community. Links on the Steam store page.

Will EA progress carry over? Not explicitly confirmed, but single-player + Steam Cloud makes continuity likely. Check the Discord closer to launch.

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Final Tips

HIPS N NOSES rewards players who treat it as one continuous story, not two separate games. The customer who shares a childhood memory at the counter is the same person who fights beside you in the dream. The rare ingredient you risked a boss fight to collect is the key to that customer's next chapter. Every system serves one goal: restoring what was lost.

If you come from pure management sims, the combat will challenge you. If you come from pure roguelikes, the dialogue pacing may test your patience. The magic is in the tension between those modes — a tough dream makes the quiet café morning feel earned; a perfect recipe gives the night's battles purpose.

Do: read every line, talk to everyone, spend your money, use your rare ingredients, and never skip a dream.

Don't: skim dialogue, hoard resources, neglect combat, or fixate on one customer.

The demo is free on Steam. Try it. If it clicks, wishlist and join the Discord.

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Guide researched and written by the Game How To Editorial team. Sources: Steam store page (appid 3574200), demo page (appid 4925020), developer Early Access FAQ, analyzed gameplay trailers. Mechanics described are based on publicly available materials. This guide will be updated as the game enters Early Access and community knowledge deepens.