We don’t have chicken fillet rolls in the United States—at least, there isn’t a deli counter within 50 miles of me who’s ever heard of such a thing. Like another Irish innovation, the similarly-elusive-in-the-US spice bag, the chicken fillet roll makes an obscene amount of sense once you’ve heard about it even once: take a baguette and fill it with the fried chicken of your choice, slap on some mayo or butter, and finish it off with any number of regular sandwich toppings. It’s a sandwich I’d eat every day if I had access to it. It’s probably better for my arteries that I don’t. Anyway, for our first video game of 2026, we’re celebrating the beautiful chicken fillet roll with the aptly-named Chicken Fillet Rolls, a Twine game by Úna-Minh Kavanagh.
In the game, you play yourself, a chicken fillet roll addict who has eaten, as of the game’s start, 145 such sandwiches. Each day in the game is centered around your next subsequent chicken fillet roll order and the people you interact with on your way to your bready, fried-chicken-stuffed goal.
On Monday, it’s just your order. On Tuesday, however, you have to fight linear time on your way to the deli: go to work, talk to your coworkers (or don’t), make tea for the entire office, use the toilet (boss makes a dollar…), and so on. Naturally, you want to do anything but actual work. After five grueling hours, it’s time for lunch, and your second order. Will you get the same thing as yesterday? I sure did. I love sandwiches, and more importantly, I love the routine of ordering a sandwich like this.
Oh, since we’re here, already talking about sandwiches: have I ever told you about the greatest YouTube video ever recorded? (It’s actually a Twitch stream VOD posted to YouTube but who’s counting.) It’s Holly Hollowtones (Half-Life VR but the AI is Self-Aware; Snapcube’s Real-Time Fandub) reading the Wikipedia list of sandwiches for eight full hours. Genuinely incredible content, a video I regularly return to.
Not every day is good, even though there are chicken fillet rolls in the world. Sometimes you just feel like shit and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Chicken Fillet Rolls does a good job of expressing this, even including a moment of vertigo in your sandwich-ordering routine. By the end of the week, you’ve eaten five more sandwiches, gotten to know the people making your sandwich each day, and depending on what you do, have a chance at building out community. But I won’t spoil anything further; the game is rather short, taking anywhere from 15 minutes to a half-hour to complete one in-game week. It’s well worth checking out.
