Space Chef Review – Lengthy DIY Food Delivery

You are a budding space chef running a restaurant out of your home. After some help from your grandmother, you prepare dishes at home and deliver them around your local galaxy. There aren’t many ingredients in your home and you must travel to different planets to harvest more food. Develop your skills, search for new customers, and create new recipes to build the best restaurant in the galaxy.

There is a story in the background of Blue Goo Games’ Space Chef, but your main focus is developing a thriving food business. You get a quick tutorial from your grandmother about creating your first dish and delivering it to customers. As the only employee, it’s up to you to find ingredients, create dishes, and locate customers. New planets and frontiers offer dangerous enemies but also new ingredients. Along the way you try to find your grandmother on a journey that spans the entire galaxy.

It’s easy to forget about the story since you spend more time developing your business. Progression is tied to the materials you can obtain and the spaceships you use for travel. Traveling to locations is an exciting prospect as is expanding your food offerings. Customers reside in different parts of the galaxy and you deliver food by “throwing” it at their residence. It’s lots of work but it gives you a good experience of food creation and delivery.

Creating food and delivering it is hard work, especially when your customers are on the other side of the galaxy. The frantic pace of cooking and traveling is easily disrupted when you see new orders come in. It immerses you in the stress of running a food business as you try to satisfy every order, but expanding your offerings and satisfying customers feels rewarding and motivates you to keep trying.

The good news is that failure is almost non-existent. While customers won’t like their orders going unaddressed, they quickly forget about it and order from you again. Should you run out of ingredients, you can close your business early and start it as soon as you have more dishes. There’s no upkeep to pay and the game ensures you can always prepare something. It is possible to push the limits of failure tolerance but most players won’t reach it. Space Chef gives you a casual experience that lets you freely take risks without worrying about losing much.

Unfortunately, one of Space Chef’s biggest weaknesses is that everything takes a lot of time. Building your repertoire of ingredients requires traveling to planets and fighting in new locations. Developing the levels to get equipment that lets you harvest them takes a significant amount of time. While the game has little punishment for failure, tasks quickly become repetitive as you make progress towards levels. New equipment is tied to levels in a specific category and are only unlocked once you reach that level. This unfortunately means you are constantly delivering food and harvesting ingredients for a long time before something happens. The equipment you unlock may unlock new functions, but doesn’t necessarily give access to something like more powerful utensils and you may spend hours working your way up to something you can use. Materials and ingredients are also hard to come by, resulting in several trips just to harvest everything.

Traveling through the galaxy isn’t too difficult as you have a decent spaceship that runs on solar power. You start the game near a giant sun and it’s not often that you must travel without your main fuel. You can also harvest resources from certain asteroids that help you build machinery and other kitchen equipment. Asteroids sometimes block your path or spaceships fly dangerously close to you, and later on, space pirates attack your ship – you might even find empty space stations with goodies inside. You never know who or what you might encounter during your travels, making space an exciting frontier.

However, this is also tempered by the fact that everything takes time. In some cases, planets force you to travel further distances just to obtain what you need. Asteroids don’t always have the materials you need. Traveling through space eventually turns into a routine slog, removing most of the thrill until you travel elsewhere. Thankfully, customer locations rarely change, giving you some consistency that you can rely on.

Another issue is how equipping works in Space Chef. Spaceship equipment and cooking equipment use the same inventory. However, equipping something like a space drill only works when you are in a spaceship. This also unequips the item you are currently holding, creating an awkward situation where two sets of items aren’t “remembered”. You are constantly shifting equipment around and it’s frustrating when it feels like there should be a better way.

Space Chef gives you a great insight into the logistics of preparing food and delivering it to customers. Each activity is fun and building your expertise gives you great rewards. It’s a slow game that requires lots of grinding to unlock new upgrades and equipping items is frustrating because the game doesn’t separate spaceship and regular equipment. Space Chef isn’t perfect, but it shines with time. Stay for the long term and you can enjoy an immersive space food experience.

Victor reviewed Space Chef on PC with a provided review copy. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.