Hips N Noses Blends Café Brewing With Dream Combat in a World Where Nobody Sleeps

Developer PepperStones Inc. has unveiled Hips N Noses, a genre-blending indie game that stitches together two wildly different gameplay styles — café management simulation and auto-battler roguelike combat — into a single cohesive narrative experience. Set in a world where the ability to sleep has inexplicably vanished from the population, the game follows Mela, a young woman who uniquely retains the ability to dream. Her rare gift becomes central to both the game's mechanics and its quietly melancholy story about memory loss and the things people forget without rest.

By day, players run a café alongside a character named Beri — another rare sleeper — where the menu goes well beyond lattes and espressos. The pair possess magical flowers that literally bloom from their heads, and these blossoms hold the power to restore lost memories when brewed into specialty drinks. Gameplay during café hours plays out in an Overcooked-style format: customers queue up, state their orders, and players must correctly brew the requested concoctions. Some orders are straightforward, like a simple americano, but others require players to reason through abstract descriptors — a drink that is bitter but not warm, for instance — demanding attention and ingredient experimentation to keep customers satisfied.

The dream sequences, entered each night after the café closes, shift the tone entirely. Here, Hips N Noses draws heavily from Vampire Survivors, tasking players with surviving escalating enemy waves while collecting new powers and abilities. What separates it from its obvious inspiration is the introduction of support characters whose combat effectiveness is directly tied to how strong your relationship with them is in the waking world. Building rapport during café hours translates into tangible battlefield advantages at night, creating a meaningful feedback loop between the two gameplay modes.

A demo build has already been made available and received coverage from early preview attendees, who noted that while the roguelike mechanics feel somewhat familiar and lacking in truly unique power options, the support system adds enough personality to keep things interesting. The café management side also feels relatively gentle in the demo, though the developers clearly intend for both systems to grow in complexity as the game progresses and the menu expands. The integration of the two modes feels purposeful rather than gimmicky, especially given the narrative logic tying dream exploration to the ingredients needed during daylight hours.

Hips N Noses is set to launch in early access on Steam, with no specific release date confirmed as of yet. The game's cel-shaded visual style, lo-fi hip-hop-adjacent soundtrack, and modern witchy aesthetic all contribute to a distinct identity that stands out in an increasingly crowded indie market. Players interested in following its development can wishlist the game on Steam now ahead of its eventual early access debut.