As someone who enjoys cooking but has never worked in a restaurant kitchen, I was eager to dive into Cyanide’s Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator. And I have to say I was not disappointed. This game honors the cycle of prep and service that goes into restaurant management while keeping things grounded for a fun gameplay experience.
In Chef Life, you take on the role of a young chef about to own and run their first restaurant. The game starts very manageably, but it becomes more challenging as you progress. Chef Life is an excellent example of restaurant management. It’s as close as you’ll get without the game losing its fun and becoming actual work. One of the things I appreciated about Chef Life is that you’re in the kitchen creating dishes as much as doing the managerial work like replenishing food stocks or arranging the front of the house. Because of the restaurant management part, the game can be pretty slow at times, but it’s an excellent balance to the hectic pace at which the cooking aspect can become.
Early on, your assistant helps explain the recipes, how the stocking works, and how to create your first menu. Everything feels balanced and within your grasp at first, but as more recipes unlock and you progress further in your career, things can get challenging. Modifiers are available to take some of the stress out of the business simulation if it becomes too much to handle. Once you open your restaurant, you’ll build that routine of the game’s gameplay loop will be. You begin every morning with a clean menu and will have to decide what dishes to serve that day. You’ll order your ingredients and wait for them to be delivered so you can stock your pantry. During this time, you’ll be able to buy new furniture for the dining area. Once you’ve completed everything you need to do managerial-wise, you head to your office to speed up any remaining time left to start your day of service.
The business aspect is but one side of the Chef Life coin; you still have to pony up to the grill and get your hands dirty. Each recipe is broken down into multiple stages, and you can pin the ingredients and steps to your user interface to help you remember specific steps or what ingredients you will need. For example, early on, one of your recipes is a simple salad that needs sliced mozzarella and tomato. By pinning the recipe, the game will show you on screen the ingredients required. When you go to your vegetable pantry, it will even highlight which ones you’ll need to pull. The actual task of slicing the veggies is quickly done with a few flicks of the stick. Similar to how many other cooking games use stick movements to replicate hand movements. So to slice on the chopping board, you pull the joystick down. Other preparation actions have similar controls, and each one was intuitive enough that, over time, it was easy to remember what you needed to do without relying on the on-screen prompts.
To help speed up your cook time, you can pre-prep ingredients and store them in the fridge to help save on a few steps when your restaurant is open. Toss a few onion slices or pre-breaded fish fillets ready to fry in that old chill chest. There are even warmers you can place pots on that can soups or boiled items warm. As the game progresses and the workload increases, you can have a sous chef assist in the preparation of food, and the more you involve them, the quicker they can do more complex things.
Like good simulators, Chef Life takes the mundane and stressful tasks of the real world and boils them down to become a repetitive kind of fun. I felt a sense of accomplishment in the dishes I was creating. Pairing that with the fact they even give you the option of crafting how your food’s plating will be, adds even more ownership over your dish. You can even save the plating design so that every order of that dish will look the same.
While the action of cooking is fun, the game’s visuals are simple but feel like they are going for a style, leaning towards a more animated aesthetic. Some of the character models don’t look all that good unfortunately and some of the character animations feel a bit awkward, but not enough to pull me out of the experience. It was just noticeable enough to mention. Conversations with other characters happen as if they are talking heads out of an RPG text box, but I don’t hold any of that against this game, as the main focus here is to cook and manage. The story is like the sprinkles on top of a sundae.
As I mentioned earlier, Chef Life does a great job balancing the calm and hectic times and even includes modifiers to assist with this. Utilizing that prep time before a shift is a tremendous wind-down period from the previous night’s fast pace nature in the kitchen. But even if that becomes too much, some of the modifiers will help keep things balanced for your playthrough. An excellent toggle will prevent the guests from getting impatient if you find that your cooking is slower than the game needs you to be. I found this helpful, especially early on.
I enjoyed my time with Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator. It’s definitely a simulator, but it’s not overly complex like some in the genre tend to become. With the management aspect and how detailed some of the recipes are, it offers that depth simulators genuinely capture while simultaneously keeping the actual cooking and plating something fun and enjoyable. The story could be better, but again, something that should make or break your decision in this genre. An essential aspect of being a chef is having pride in your work and seeing the customer enjoy their experience; Chef Life captures this and does this well.
A Steam code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
