14 DAY TRIAL // 
My potato sticks are in the hot oil and there’s no need to do anything more as they cook, so I spring to the fridge to get some already prepared ingredients. The idea is to quickly deliver a few salads to customers, and leave the most complex dishes for later.
Of course, I forgot something. I need a balsamic vinegar reduction to deliver some extra taste. I either failed to make it during the morning prep or put it somewhere to the side and lost it. I give the potatoes a quick look and run to the ingredients rack to rectify the situation.
Because a slight panic is setting in, I decide to get the potatoes out, which requires a bit of waiting for them to be fully cooked. I should be focusing on finishing one dish but I spread my efforts around. This is bad. I know it and as I become more frantic I make more mistakes. Green beans get too much salt. The steak is not cooked to perfection.
With help from my staff, I manage to end service without a massive disaster. I make decent money. But I do need to be much better prepared in the future. It’s the only way to raise my chef's level, learn to make new dishes, and keep my dinners satisfied.
Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator is developed by Cyanide and published by Nacon. I played using Steam on the PC. Gamers can also get it for the PlayStation 5, the Xbox Series X and S, the Nintendo Switch, and older devices from Microsoft and Sony. The title gives players control over aspects of running a restaurant, focusing on the actual cooking process.
Players will first choose an avatar and will then move through three days of preparation before their restaurant starts serving actual customers. There’s not a lot of story to enjoy. You start off mastering three dishes and then move through the world of casual and fine dining, trying to get that much-coveted Michelin star. Characters exist to support the player’s avatar in their quest but have no depth or interesting moments.
Chef Life’s core is the cooking gameplay. The player’s avatar has access to an ever-expanding number of recipes, which grow in complexity and fit a range of culinary traditions. To get one of the dishes on the menu, players will first have to get through all the cooking steps for the first time.
The recipes explain the required actions very well. Gamers need to pick up their ingredients and then prep them. Slabs of meat become well-portioned steaks. Fish get filleted. Vegetables get chopped up. Some get blended. Mixing is often required, on a specialized board.
Salad preparation often stops here. Quickly simmer a sauce and it’s time to serve. But it is hard to keep a restaurant running on salad. Meat needs to feel the heat. Potatoes will follow their destiny and become fries. A chef's sense will help with perfect seasoning.
To chop, players need to press specific buttons. To stir a sauce, a mouse movement is required. Button presses dispense spices. Other keys layer ingredients. It’s a series of constant quick-time events. And once all the pieces of a dish are cooked, gamers have the option to fiddle with the plating, if they want the finished product to stand out.
Chef Life has some issues with how its controls work. Sometimes you have to only press a key to do something with a pan, sometimes you have to hold the same key. Everything should be more consistent. Chopping vegetables or cheese, which one has to do a lot of, requires a few more button presses than it should. Both stirring and flipping meat feels a little unnatural.
There’s more to running a restaurant than simply cooking. In the morning, the player’s avatar needs to place an order for ingredients. Until they arrive, there’s time to browse the appliance catalog and maybe improve the kitchen or tweak the design of the dining space.
Then it’s time for prep, making things in advance to be ready for the time crunch of the evening service. Don’t forget to assign tasks to other kitchen workers. Try to learn another dish or practice a known one.
The most interesting part of Chef Life is the time management required to have a good service. There’s no clear timer on any task, so players have to guestimate. It’s easy to forget a step or an ingredient and panic only makes problems worse. There’s a real feeling of accomplishment when a day ends with no catastrophe and some extra money in the restaurant’s account.
Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator’s presentation is decent but not impressive. The kitchen, administrative and serving areas, aren’t too detailed. There are a lot of customization options to open up and buy. Plenty of players will love the option to customize but it adds little to the experience. The weirdest part when it comes to the graphics is that the finished food looks pretty bad. I would not want to eat anything I prepared while I played.
The sound design is also pretty uninspiring. The soundtrack aims for a laid-back approach, which isn’t suited to the often frantic kitchen action. The little service bell sounds weak. For longer play sessions stock up on some classic French tunes.
The Good
- Living the chef life
- Variety of dishes to master
- Hot kitchen action
The Bad
- Limited narrative
- Repetitive gameplay
- Some control issues
Conclusion
The entire experience suffers because of its highly repetitive nature and uninspired presentation. The finished dishes need to look spectacular and they do not. Cooking the same thing over and over again becomes annoying. Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator might try to capture the frantic nature of a commercial kitchen but those who like what it has to offer might be better served by cooking some fun real-world dishes that can actually satisfy their hunger.
A review key was provided by the publisher.
