Chopsticks

The punishment was a bowl of dry rice, an empty bowl, and chopsticks.

Chopsticks is a small, quiet game about moving rice from one bowl to another, one grain at a time. The sticks are pushed around by real forces and every grain you can touch is its own little body, so each pinch has to be earned. Knock a bowl over and everything in it, finished rice included, is back on the counter.

Five runs

The tower: one grain, set on top of a wobbly stack. A quick run, and the place to learn. 100, 1,000 and 10,000 grains: empty one bowl into the other, grain by grain. Sort 10,000: black and white rice mixed in one pile, sorted to either side of the mat.

Twenty challenges

Small set pieces on the same counter, each with a twist of its own: a claw machine that leaves you only the button, a sushi train, bowling with kokeshi dolls, a round of rice golf, a buzz wire, a sleeping baby who wakes at the third clink, and a fly to catch with your chopsticks. Finish one for bronze, beat its times for silver and gold, and earn sets you can't get any other way.

Against the clock

A clock on the wall times every run. It stops while you pause, and the game pauses by itself if you Alt+Tab away or open the Steam overlay. Your best time for every run is kept.

Leaderboards

Every run has its own Steam leaderboard: the top times, your friends' times and the times around yours, each with the player's bowls beside their name. Times are checked against your computer's clock and Steam's before they go up, so a slowed-down game doesn't count. The boards start fresh with each major update.

Either hand

Press H at any time and the sticks swing round into the other hand; Settings picks the hand every run starts in. Trainer chopsticks, clipped together like the pair a child learns with, are a gentler way in, and their times are kept apart from the leaderboards.

A counter full of things

The teacup (and its tea), the jar and its lid, the leaning cutting board and the chopstick rest can all be knocked about. Push a bowl steadily and it slides along the counter, which helps when a grain has rolled under its rim.

Things to earn

Bowls, chopsticks and placemats, from celadon and tenmoku glazes to gold-mended kintsugi, silver-tipped ebony sticks and a go board to sort on. Lifetime stats for everything: grains moved, dropped, rescued and spilled, your quickest grain, your longest streak, teacups toppled and how far the tips have travelled. Steam Cloud keeps your best times, stats and unlocks.

Eleven languages

English, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and Italian.

Drawn in ink

Flat colour, clean lines and no gloss, in a quiet room with the small dry sounds of wood, glaze and rice.