There are many subgenres in the RPG space, but “cooking RPG” is a woefully underserved category. The world of cooking RPGs just got a little bigger, and we’ll tell you what makes this new game so special in our Chef RPG preview.
Chef RPG puts gamers in the shoes of a trained chef who has recently taken over an abandoned restaurant. You’re tasked with restoring these hallowed halls of cuisine to their former glory while also sharpening your cooking skills and helping the town get back on its feet. There’s a lot to love in this unique game, but it also has its fair share of stumbles.
Every cooking station has an associated minigame, and these minigames can get quite complex — but that’s part of the fun.
Cooking Up Something Special
The simplest way to explain Chef RPG is to compare it to Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon, but with one small change: swap out the importance of farming for cooking. Cooking is a side activity in farming RPGs; in Chef RPG, farming is the side activity and cooking is the star of the show.
Cooking’s central role should come as no surprise. It’s your main story motivation and, indeed, the best way that you can make money. No amount of foraging for wild berries or digging around in the mines can equal the kind of Credits that you can pull in by filling the stomachs of your customers.
Unfortunately, cooking ain’t easy. You’ll only have a couple of cooking stations, a few recipes, and some donated ingredients to get started. You’ll need to slowly build up your money so you can expand your operations with more tables, chairs, equipment, and ingredients.
This certainly isn’t a cozy, laid-back game. All cooking is done via minigames that require precise rhythm and timing. You’re under constant time pressure as the day wears on. Get the job done right and you’ll fill your pockets with money. Screw up too many times, however, and you’ll barely turn a profit while sullying the burgeoning reputation of your revived restaurant.
Shopkeepers carry a random assortment of limited items every day. It’s a good idea to design your menu to avoid using too much of any one ingredient.
Supply Chain Shortages
As you might expect, a big part of Chef RPG is collecting the ingredients you need to cook your recipes. The Early Access launch version, however, is a little too difficult in this respect.
Let’s start with the shopkeepers. Shopkeepers will only carry a few random ingredients every day; it’s entirely possible to find that an item you sorely need is out of stock, especially if it’s a rarer quality item. You can increase the quantity and quality of items in a shop by becoming friends with the shopkeeper, but this won’t happen overnight.
You could, of course, hunt animals and forage. This is a good way to supplement your supplies; however, it’s impractical to do this every day. Some items can’t be foraged at all and must instead be grown in your greenhouse or produced with brewing machinery (in the case of alcohol).
Eventually, you’ll be able to unlock the ability to get deliveries from shopkeepers, but these are limited, too; you can only get six types of items from each shopkeeper and no more than 20 of those item, five days a week. That sounds like a lot, but you can easily go through more than 20 Elk Rib or Asparagus in a long cooking session.
That leaves you with two options: you can either carefully craft your menu to use a wide range of ingredients so you don’t run out of any one thing too fast, or you can supplement your daily deliveries by buying items from the shops — shops that are already delivering to you every day — and foraging for what you can in the wilderness.
I understand the intent behind the design here — having a steady supply of ingredients is important for any restaurant and it’s the same in Chef RPG. The limitations of the system as it’s implemented at launch are far too unforgiving for anyone who wants to run a large menu.
Give a character too many incorrect gifts and they’ll give you some hints about what they might like instead.
Occasionally Undercooked
Chef RPG has its fair share of bugs and mistakes like any Early Access game. Some of these bugs are minor, some are severe, and some are downright comical.
Many of the silliest mistakes come down to spelling. The refrigerator in your restaurant is a main feature of the game that you’ll look at every single day, and yet somehow the developer missed that it was incorrectly spelled “refridgerator” at launch. A forgivable mistake, yes, but this was just one of many spelling and grammatical errors.
There are lots of little hiccups here and there. You’ll occasionally have to walk away from an object because you can’t interact with it. Sometimes, menus just refuse to close altogether. NPCs won’t actually leave or enter an area until you leave it and reload that area into memory.
One of the biggest bugbears in my 60+ hours of gameplay, though, was the research system. Each research facility has two cooking stations that you need to interact with and it was impossible to interact with them most of the time. A prompt appeared and I furiously tapped the interact button from every conceivable angle, but sadly, they were well and truly broken.
Bugs like these are an annoyance to be sure. To the developer’s credit, none of the bugs I encountered were show stoppers (save for the problems with research) and there have already been six hotfix patches since the game launched a week ago. I expect the game to be in much better shape overall in another week or two at most.
Mid-game mining in the volcano is downright dangerous and you’re unlikely to survive without a full health bar and specialized protective items.
Chef RPG Preview | Final Thoughts
Simply put, Chef RPG captures the wonderfully capitalistic vibe of farming RPGs while nudging farming out of the limelight and replacing it with cooking. Every cooking minigame is fun, and the controlled chaos of running your own restaurant is compelling.
Yes, it has its rough edges, but those are being smoothed out at an admirably fast pace. Chef RPG will certainly appeal to the legions of fans who love farming RPGs but are looking for something a little different; if that sounds like you, then I can wholeheartedly say that Chef RPG is worth checking out.
Chef RPG was previewed over approximately 60 hours of gameplay on PC via Steam with a key purchased by the previewer. All screenshots were taken during the preview process.
