Epic Chef looked like a game that would tickle my fancy. It’s a cooking-focused game composed of farm sim-ing, a dash of Iron Chef cooking battles, and crafting. So imagine tossing Stardew Valley, Battle Chef Brigade, and Minecraft into a stand mixer. The resulting batter is Epic Chef. The game is quite a fun experience out of the oven, but it’s not one without some faults; it’s still a fun experience nonetheless.
To wrap everything together, Epic Chef crafts a funny and fun narrative around its mechanics. You’re placed into the apron of Zest, a stowaway aboard a ship sailing off to a new land. You’re kicked off the boat and head towards a home you’ve acquired for extremely cheap. You’re told by residents how the house you’ve purchased is haunted and is an extreme disaster. Along the way to renovation and getting back on his feet, Zest gets mixed up with zany chefs and the cooking competition way of life in this tiny town.
As mentioned, the story is quite good, with some writing that works well. It isn’t easy to do comedy in video games, and Epic Chef gives it a good go. What helps in their comedic timing is the expressions on the character’s faces. To help focus the player on that, they include a small animated portrait of the talking character next to the dialogue box. It helps sell the tone of the text being read since there is no voice acting in the game. I did come across what seemed to be a similar structure throughout the comedy here. A lot of it seems to rely on the same method of delivery. I encountered a lot of lines that were “deliver, pause…, emote in annoyance, punchline” I’m not saying I disliked this method, but it was noticeable that this was the writing team’s strong suit with how often I encountered it.
So what are you witnessing on your computer screen? The game’s camera is in the third person, and the team at Infinigon Games has created this neat aesthetic where characters are in 3D but have some geometric hard edges. Characters are big-headed, small-bodied, individuals; similar to an Eastern Asian Chibi style but with a western influence in character faces. The world you’re moving around in is very small but dense with shops to visit, people to talk to, and your farm & home to take care of. Later, you focus on running a restaurant, so there is a lot packed into this world Epic Chef places you in.
About that cooking, Epic Chef’s central mechanic. To cook dishes, you’re required to mix three ingredients in a pot to create a dish that rates highly in three categories, Vigor, Spirit, and Sophistication. Each ingredient has stats per category and elements that can create synergies between them. For example, carrots gain a synergy bonus if placed first into a pan, while blue mushrooms will earn a bonus if paired with water-based food like seaweed or crabs. As you put the ingredients into the pot, tiny flavor bubbles appear, and you’ll need to stir the dish to pop and lock them in. The push or pull here is that the longer you leave the bubbles up, the greater your aroma stat raises. Leave them for too long, and your food starts burning, creating black bubbles that will pop and subtract from your score. You have to flip your food to prevent burning, so there is a slight strategy to how long you can hold and when you need to start flipping. You may wonder what aroma does for the food? That plays a role later when you get into cooking battles. There are other things you can do to food, like adding sauce that will give some status effects to your or your competitor’s dish, so even for a simple mechanic, there is quite the amount of depth.
To get your ingredients, you’ll have to grow them outside your new home. Using seeds to plant new crops, you’ll have access to a wide variety of ingredients to source. Plants will grow throughout your day and are on a cycle. If you plant something in the evening and go to bed, you’ll find that it’s ready to harvest by morning. You can only hold so much, though, so you’ll have to craft storage sheds and additional machines to help create new resources needed for cooking or crafting. You’ll eventually even be able to raise livestock for meat.
All this work is for the game’s cooking battles. They’re necessary for progression in your story and to earn money to purchase items, ingredients, or bonuses. Some competitions reward you with said cash, while others reward you with new outfits, accessories, or ingredients. The cooking battles range from single-stage battles to multi-stage boss battles. These battles are laid out similar to the Iron Chef competitions where a specific ingredient, or in Epic Chef’s case, it could be a particular element, is chosen. From here, you create a dish, and if you use the required ingredient or element, you earn a bonus at the end. You have to bring your ingredients with you, so you can enter the competition without the needed stuff if you don’t plan accordingly. You can still compete, but you won’t get the end bonuses.
One of the first boss battles you encounter teaches you about sauces and how adding them to a dish can hurt your opponent or help you. Sauces affect a judge’s palette, lasting over a few tastings. So in the case of the first boss battle, the sauce affects the judge’s palette towards a specific category causing any points in said category to become negative. So they give you a hint that you should have the judge pick your dish first with the sauce so that the subsequent two tastings of your opponent’s dish get docked hard. How do you persuade a judge to eat your plate first, though? That’s where the aroma comes in. The more aroma you’re able to create, the more likely the judge will choose yours to taste first.
So are there any faults to be found? Yeah, I ran into a few quirks that bothered me a bit. First and foremost, saving can only be done when you sleep; you can’t save in the middle of your day, it seems. Granted, the day/night cycle moves reasonably quick, and doing some side stuff like relaxing and reading a book can make time pass faster, but I found there were points when I was ready to put the game down for a while but had to rush through the day so I could go to sleep and save. I would have liked to have been able to save and come back to what I was doing later. This leads me to my second issue; it seems that cutscenes/dialogue can’t be skipped. Because I had to quit one time early on before heading to bed, I had to restart at an earlier point in the game and couldn’t skip past dialogue I had already read; tiny in the grand scheme of things but something still a bit annoying.
Other than that, my character’s movement speed felt too slow. A run button to make him move faster would have been fantastic. You do unlock a mount early in the game that helps with movement speed and storage, but you have to hop off them when you want to collect something, talk to someone, enter a shop, or do anything. So if you end up following a quest line leaving your mount somewhere, you have to walk back to them at a snail’s pace to head back home. Again, something small, but something to take note of.
Epic Chef’s writing is quite funny, and because of that and its fun cooking gameplay, I’m willing to wave off any serious issues I have with it. Does it mean it’s a perfect experience though, no. But I enjoyed my time with it and think it’s a great game to hop into, especially if you’re into the crafting, farming, or cooking genres.
A Steam code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
