Epic Chef Reviews

Absolutely hilarious!

I got this game because a review mentioned the hilarious dialogue, and I'm so glad it did! This game pokes fun at itself, at whole genres, at life as well. It's worth playing for that alone. I like the graphics, its cute and fun. Sure, there are a few little glitches, but nothing that's really an issue. This game got me back into gaming after a long stretch of being bored of my game library. I've been having a blast playing it.

This game was released awhile ago but having gotten about 60% of the way through I can say if it looks interesting it's absolutely worth getting, especially during sales where it's literally 2.50. It's a cooking/farming sim, themed around a world that revolves around cooking, or at least the area of the world this game takes place in. You basically do chef battles and improve your prestige as a chef/restaurant owner while improving your home and the lives of those in town. It's a common overarching theme in that sense but beyond that it stands well enough on its own. There's a day/night cycle. Most stuff does not begin until 9 AM, it mostly all ends at 6 PM. I haven't seen time progress past 2a but I haven't pushed it. Crops grow rapidly so you can get approximately 2 harvests a day. Farming - Must do, must farm everything, must keep everything on hand. The cooking battles are all BYOI. So the more you have on your farm the more options you have in cooking battles. As you grow and get space you can get overwhelmed with crops until you get to the point you have a larger storage option. My advice is to just keep churning. Cook some of it, turn enough into seeds to replant, craft the rest. The seasons do not appear to change and the crops appear to only be limited by amount of harvests (quite a lot honestly, more than enough to reseed the whole crop and have plenty to cook/craft with before running out of a plant.) Cooking - It's a unique take on the limited genre. I like it but I feel like it could be expanded upon further. Basically every meal is a three ingredient affair. There's a solid amount of ingredients considering the amount of combinations and what have you. It's all based on timing, aroma, vigor, spirit, sophistication. Ingredients (and sauces) affect all of these (other than aroma, that's done by sacrificing a couple of points so that your dish "smells better" and is eaten first.) There is strategy to all of this from sauces that affect a judges perception of flavors of the following dish, to adding "pengun" meat to an empty pan for a bonus, throwing in some unicorn poop that doubles my spirit score if there's something with the elements of the pengun meat already in the pan, so on and so forth. The humor is quite good, it hits for me in a lot of ways. Sort of a satirical take on this style of "own a farm on the outskirts of town" games. It's well written and I've enjoyed it. If I had complaints: Storage is annoying. Things DO NOT stack. You will fill up a crate of potatoes in no time. You also don't know what a cooking challenge is going to entail until you start it, so you end up filling your pack with ingredients out of anticipation of a double score on tomatoes or a negative score on spirit. It's a huge hassle and you are constantly rearranging inventory, organizing crates etc. Their version of farm expansion is over time you unlock chunks as you progress the story and throw down some coin. Given the nature of storage, the size commitment of each ingredient to have sufficient amounts for making everything so you're not constantly out of stuff this creates a problem where every time you can expand your farm, you get the pleasure of basically entirely reworking it from the ground up to make space more efficient/add more animals/crops/etc. It's the one time I'd have preferred the "here's your farm, but it's trashed, clean it up." method. Most of the time you end up cheesing fights because you really have all the time in the world, no negative consequences for losing and there's nothing stopping you from waking up, starting a battle, seeing the challenges, resetting then coming super prepared. In many ways it's absolutely necessary if you expect to win without always losing first to see the challenges since your opponent will always be prepared of course. Overall I really enjoy the game. It's not that hard, or even really that grindy. My chief complaint again is storage and inventory. The rest is aces. Good characters, an interesting enough story, humor is on the nose in the best way, and the mechanics are all satisfying. Whether it's leading a Pengen to it's spring released into a wood chipper style doom for meat or making a meal out of logs to feed your mount so can keep carting your ass around because you're slow as fuck, it's been a great time.