Epic Chef - a detailed review and analysis

[Psyringe]

Hi :) I just finished the game and, as I often do, wrote a review about it, which I posted here: https://steamcommunity.com/id/MyPublicProfile/recommended/1312960

However, I found that there's a lot to say about this game, which caused the review to grow beyond the character limit. So I'm posting the full review here - hope that's okay. (I try to avoid posting reviews in the discussion forum, since they already have a dedicated place elsewhere, but then I would have needed to cut several paragraphs.)

Comments are of course welcome. :)

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Epic Chef is a comedic "cozy sim" game in third-person 3D with elements of farming, questing, and cooking battles. It was released in late 2021 and has pretty much flown under the radar since then, but I believe it's definitely worth a closer look.

1. Story & Setting

You play as a new arrival in a foreign country where you've bought property. The city is very much focused on cuisine, with powerful groups of chefs and food critics, and you - having recently discovered a knack for cooking yourself - decide to make your living as a chef. You obtain ingredients by planting and harvesting crops, summoning and slaughtering livestock, or catching fish. You'll meet many characters in a fairly long and complex (though mostly linear) storyline, make friends, and run your own restaurant for which you create the dishes as well as the furniture.

The story takes place in an elaborate, imaginative fantasy world with magic, dragons, ghosts, cat people, rat people, some steampunk-ish technology as well as magical contraptions, and a history of power struggles between several nations.

I massively enjoyed the writing. The author shows a great ability for comedic dialog where the characters keep coming back and one-upping each other, and he often applies an absurdist flavor of humor that I cherish. The tone ranges from sarcastic and satirical to whimsical and playful. The lead-ups to the abundance of twists and punchlines in the dialog are excellent. I also liked that the writer did not shy away from serious topics like the conflict between immigrants of adopting the culture of their new home versus preserving their cultural heritage, or questions whether food critics should stick to talking about the food or consider a broader context. The very enjoyable jokes and humor did not prevent the writer from also introducing interesting thoughts and opinions about the topics they tackled, and since the conflicts tend to end in an atmosphere of understanding and forgiveness (the various adversaries usually provide reasons for their actions while also admitting that they went too far or lost their way), the game never felt "preachy" to me.

Not all the jokes land, and the writer did seem to run out of steam toward the end (or perhaps there wasn't enough time to edit the late-game dialog). The general irreverence of the jokes might trigger an occasional feeling of indignation among players who consider the respective topic too delicate. But personally I felt that the game never went too far, and even the brash or cheeky jokes were all in good spirit.

I think the pacing of the story is sometimes a little off. Specifically, in the beginning everything feels very linear and hand-holdy, it takes a fairly long time until the game opens up and gives you more freedom. The last act feels pretty undercooked - there isn't any new content apart from the main quest, so you don't have anything to do while having to wait a few days for certain events to progress. But these are minor nitpicks about a game whose writing I enjoyed a lot.

2. Gameplay & Mechanics

The game's most distinctive mechanics are cooking duels. For these, you'll gradually unlock 56 different ingredients, of which you always put 3 in a meal. Each ingredient has values for 3 flavors (vigor, spirit, and sophistication), which it adds to the dish. Many ingredients also provide additive or even multiplicative bonuses based on synergies with other ingredients. After preparing your dish, the judge of the duel will determine the winner by adding up each dish's total values for vigor, spirit, and sophistication - however, judges will often have special conditions like "bonus points if you use carrots", "penalty points for using seafood", "double points for spirit on the first dish", or "vigor points will be _subtracted_ from the total score, not added to it".

Optionally you can also add one of 24 different sauces, which can boost your points directly, or manipulate the judge into liking a given flavor more or less for the next two dishes. Duels take between 1 and 3 rounds, with each duelist preparing one dish per round. You have the option to wait with stirring your dish, which increases its aroma, but entails the risk of losing flavor points. The judge will taste the more aromatic dish first. These mechanics enable strategies like eg. making sure that you go first in the first round of the duel, adding a sauce that penalizes one flavor for the next two dishes, and then making sure that you go last in the next round, so that the penalty hits your opponent twice.

I found the cooking duels fairly casual but quite engaging, the mechanics aren't super-complicated but do provide enough variation and player agency to keep things interesting. Your task is basically to find the ingredients and synergies that work best with the judge's preferences, and optionally use sauces and the aroma mechanic to control bonuses and penalties in your favor. Your opponent uses ingredients and sauces in the same way, which can throw a wrench in your plans if, for example, you planned for a vigor-based dish as your grand finale, and your opponent used an anti-vigor sauce right before. This is, however, pretty easy to deal with: you can either bring ingredients for different alternative dishes so that you can adapt your strategy as needed, or you can just lose the duel and try again. Your opponent will use the exact same dishes (and the judge will have the exact same preferences) the next time you tackle this particular duel, so you can prepare a sequence of dishes that perfectly counters the ones your opponent will create. You'll probably never lose a duel more than once unless you misremembered some detail.

The game's second main mechanic is farming. You have a pretty spacious (and also expandable) area to plant crops, hold livestock, and build storage or workstations. The latter are used to craft seeds, sauces, building materials, and more powerful ingredients. There are only 6 crops, 2 fruits, 3 types of wood, and 5 livestock species available, I would have appreciated more variety here. Building and optimizing my farm was nevertheless fun, especially since the mechanics encourage experimentation. You can destroy anything you built and usually get the materials refunded.

There is also a fishing minigame with 6 different craftable types of bait and a large selection of 20 different fish to catch. The minigame uses the common "keep your marker on top of a moving target" mechanic. It took a bit of time to get used to this particular implementation since the target and the marker both move on their own accord, and you use one key to move the marker in either direction - but after I got the hang of it, it felt very easy and I never lost a fish.

Lastly, there are some mild RPG elements in the game. Everything you do - be it planting crops, or spending time with activities like swimming, studying, relaxing, dancing at a party, etc. - earns you points in 3 personal stats, which are named like the ingredient flavors: vigor, spirit, sophistication. Earning points in a stat gradually raises a multiplicator from 0 to 5. Once per day you can cook a dish for yourself, and the 3 flavor values of the dish will be multiplied with the respective 3 multiplicators, then the total gets added to your experience points. At certain thresholds you'll level up, which may unlock more synergies for the ingredients of your dishes. enabling you to score more points. I found this mechanic very interesting since it gives the player full control of when and how to level up.

I also very much appreciated that there were so many activities to choose from. Every day of the in-game week there's a festival in one part of the town, often with several different activities. Almost all of these are just shown as short animations with no player input, but I cherish the attention to detail here.

One important aspect specifically for games of this genre, is the flow of time. It runs pretty fast in Epic Chef, so you're limited in what you can do on a given day. That said, time stops flowing at 2am. You can't interact with NPCs or do the aforementioned activities after that, and plants will stop growing, but you can still build and edit your farm for as long as you want.

It should be noted that the game, when compared to others in its genre, does not provide much room for exploration. There aren't many different areas in the game and the ones that exist, are relatively small. There are also no dungeons or mines to explore. Finally, while the dialog was very enjoyable, the conversations do not offer any decisions, your only agency is whether or not to do some optional side quests. I would have appreciated more player agency here, but in the end it didn't matter much since I did like the story despite its linearity. Romance options (another staple of the genre) don't exist either.

3. Graphics & Presentation

Epic Chef uses a "low poly" aesthetic that looks a bit crude at times, but fits the nature of the game and generally gets the job done. I wouldn't call the graphics beautiful, but found them "good enough" and functional, at least for the environments. I disliked the character graphics though, the flat faces with drawn-on features never grew on me. I can see why this may have looked like a good idea (it offers a very economical way of showing many different facial expressions without any additional modeling work), but if the trade-off is that all characters in the game look ugly, then that cost is too high in my opinion. Oddly enough, the body animations are actually all pretty good, which makes me think that the animators probably could have handled facial expressions as well.

I really liked the game's music, which consists mostly of catchy, upbeat tunes with influences from pop, mild rock, and (especially for the parties) brass-and-piano dance music. Occasionally the sound diverges into the dramatic or ominous when the story calls for it, which also worked pretty well.

There is no voice acting in the game. Personally I didn't mind, and I believe that the writing of Epic Chef definitely benefited from not having to work within the constraints of voice-acting (which usually means less content due to a much higher cost factor per line, as well as much fewer options to edit and refine the text). That said, people who do not want to read would probably be served better by other games. Even just skipping the text wouldn't work well since the conversations are long and can only be skipped one line at a time.

4. Usability & Accessibility

While the game has many things going for it, the usability aspect is unfortunately where it falls flat on its face. Given how much care has been given to many other aspects, it's really mindboggling that core features for a good user experience are lacking.

The problems begin with the resolution selection, where my desktop resolution of 1920x1200 is not available (which makes task switching a pain). Graphics quality can only be chosen between 3 presets. Even bare basics like a brightness setting are missing, though at least an FPS cap and an FOV slider are provided. The sound volume can be set with 3 separate sliders, which is also nice.

It gets worse from there, though. This game does not even allow key rebinding. Movement is fixed to WASD, not even arrow keys work. There's an "AZERTY" keyboard setting that will help users with French keyboards, but players who are left-handed, use a different keyboard layout, have certain disabilities, or would just like to control this game in the way they are used to from other titles with more considerate developers, are all left in the rain. I find this very disappointing and can therefore not recommend the game to players from any of these groups. This is a game that can provide more than 100 hours of playtime, having to spend that much time with a control scheme that you feel uncomfortable with is not an experience to look forward to. On a more positive note, sensitivity sliders and an inversion option for both mouse axes are provided.

The game also lacks many UI features that one would expect from a title like this. For example, you can create many different dishes, but there is no way to store and keep a recipe for later use. If you find a synergy that works well, you'll have to keep it in mind, or break your immersion and drop out of the game to take notes externally. Likewise, information about a judge's preferences is only available when you're about to start the duel, not on your farm where you're selecting which ingredients to take with you. Pointing at an item often feels clunky - for example, I shake a fruit out of a tree, but I have to keep moving around and fiddling with the viewing angle to even pick it up, because the tree keeps stealing the focus from the fruit lying next to it, even when looking directly at the latter.

On the other hand, the game does provide an extensive "How to play" section in its pause menu, where all gameplay elements are explained. This makes it very easy to pick the game up after a longer break. You don't have to play the lengthy tutorial again because all information is provided in this handy reference.

Another point of contention is the save feature. The game only saves when your character goes to sleep. Depending on how much time you like to spend building, optimizing, and decorating your farm, it's very possible to spend several hours of real-time on a single in-game day. That's several hours in which you cannot save, so you'll lose several hours of gameplay if e.g. you run into a hardware problem, or need to leave your PC and don't want to keep it powered on, or if the gamestate gets corrupted (see below) and you can't get back to your bed to save. I'm aware that "sleep to save" is a genre staple, but that doesn't mean that every game needs to follow this archaic convention that doesn't respect the time of the players and unnecessarily puts them at risk of e.g losing the entire progress of a 2-hour building and decoration session.

Lastly, I have to address the bugs. While the game thankfully never crashed for me, I ran into a multitude of other problems that many players will find discouraging. Occasionally there are invisible walls randomly appearing on my farm - so I spent a good amount of time optimizing the distances between different areas of my farm, and then I need to take weird detours because the game doesn't let me take the unobstructed direct path. If such an invisible wall ever prevents me from reaching my house, I will be unable to save the game and thus lose the entire day. At another time, a maze area got corrupted and the connections between the separate screens changed randomly. When harvesting crops, I can for whichever reason no longer fill the last slot of my inventory, which is especially frustrating because I optimized all my farm plots to have exactly as many plants as I have inventory slots. During one part of the story, the text kept bugging out and sometimes I was only shown an empty dialog box. Typos can be found throughout the text, including lots of Spanish "inverted" punctuation marks that a simple find-and-replace action should have stripped away. Farm animals are supposed to be fenced in to prevent them from eating your crops, but one of the species is too large to fit through the gates, so you have to destroy the fence to lead them to the meat factory. The last floor type in the game can't currently be unlocked and thus never be crafted.

None of these issues prevented me from playing, but they certainly show that this game would have needed just a bit more development time for QA and polishing. I actually do not understand its release strategy at all. I believe that it has very high potential, but it obviously needed more time, so why was it rushed to release in November - the busiest time of the year, when triple-A products dominate the market and indies are easily overlooked - and without any noticeable marketing effort at that? This just looks like a recipe for failure to me, and I think this game deserved better.

5. Conclusion

Based on the writing and the gameplay, I would really like to recommend Epic Chef wholeheartedly to fans of cozy farming sims like Stardew Valley, My Time At Portia, or Graveyard Keeper. It provides solid gameplay for the genre, with a casual but interesting main mechanic, and it delivers a long and detailed story with interesting characters, surprising twists, and copious amounts of absurdist humor (which I haven't seen before in this genre). But given the bugs and the lack of usability features, I cannot do so in good conscience. The game still _does_ deserve a recommendation in my opinion, but as long as the issues persist, it can only be a cautious one.

If you feel that the good parts in my description outweigh the risk of running into the bad, give it a shot. Otherwise, I would suggest to wishlist it for the time being, and either wait for a sale, or check periodically for patches and bugfixes. I truly hope that the developers can bring it into a state where it can release its potential.

[76561199227394142]

Hey there! Thank you so much for your detailed review! This was great to read.

Was happy to hear you enjoyed the writing, it's one of the best parts of the game imo. I've taking notes of your feedback including your thoughts on pacing, accessibility/usability, UI, and saves. Thank you for letting us know about the bugs - we'll pass on your feedback regarding invisible walls, crops, text and farm animals. I'm sorry to hear that these affected your gameplay! We'll look into this :)

In the meantime, if you would like to directly contact the Support Team to log any of these or other bugs, feel free! You can contact them here: {LINK REMOVED}https://support.team17.com/hc/en-gb/requests/new

[SpartanChick316]

I just started playing the game recently and I can say I have many of the same sentiments. The lack of a save feature really destroys it for me. If I get interrupted and have to close things then that's it. I have to redo everything constantly. I hate this type of save feature.