Surviving in space must be difficult. Maybe a little easier if you decide to start a restaurant/delivery service in your own house. Kwalee and Blue Goo Games present Space Chef, a game about a chef in space.

“You’re an aspiring chef with only a simple space trailer and your grandma’s old cookbook. Rebuild your home, explore the galaxy, cook up cosmic cuisine, and become the greatest Space Chef in the Horseshoe Nebula!”

After customizing your character and naming your business, the game begins proper. You live in a small, squalid trailer floating in space. You find an encoruaging letter from your ever-loving grandmother and decide to set up your own restaurant in your own home. A quick look around and after finding some scrap metal and coal, you make a rudimentary BBQ grill. Now that you have something to cook on, you need something to cook. So a quick trip into your basement and after killing some space beetles, you now have some meat. Pop them on the grill, flip them to ensure even and quality cooking, then make some space beetle skewers. Then, open for business, jump into your spaceship and deliver your tasty space beetle skewers to waiting customers. Earn money, find new ingredients, make more elaborate food, grow your business, and you have the basics of Space Chef down.

As will other games of this ilk, Space Chef is all about slow and steady progression. As you play, you’ll level up and there are five main skills: combat, cooking, exploration, farming, and mining. The more you use these skills, the more they will level up, which unlocks new items to cook and craft. Start with only a plastic spatula as a weapon, but stick with it and you’ll be crafting knifes, machetes and even guns. As you progress, you can transform your small space trailer to a massive restaurant. Go from a simplicity of a basic BBQ grill, and learn how to make bigger and better cooking equipment. You home is fully customisable too, and you can craft dozens of different decorations and upgrades to make your restaurant uniquely yours.

Taking place in the Horseshoe Nebula, there’s plenty to see and do. You can mange your own time and decide when to open and close your eatery, a mechanic I very much approve of. This means that you can close your restaurant, take a break from cooking and just explore for as long as you want. Maybe you’ll find a mysterious and abandoned space station, new planets, settlements where you can meet new customers for your space food and more. The planets are varied and each offers its own unique environment with plenty to explore, teaming with new ingredients to cook with and wildlife to befriend, or kill for rare meats to make more exotic food. You can really play your own way and the time management being down to you means that there is not rush or clock to try to stay ahead of.

There’s really quite a lot of depth here and as you build your reputation, your customers will open up. You can learn more about each individual, find out their favourite dish and cook it for them. Your customers can become friends and who knows, maybe even more than that. Upgrade your spaceship to travel and explore further. Keep your customers happy, while trying to avoid any pesky space pirates. The game loop is familiar to many other cosy, easy-to-play, life sims and it can become quite repetitive with longer play sessions. It does feel better to keep this to smaller, a couple of hour sessions at a time.

I do think that Space Chef could do with some tweaks. One annoyance I had was that you have to have the ingredients in your inventory if you want to cook. As you have limited inventory, this makes cooking a bit awkward, as you have to keep going back to storage boxes/fridges to remove the ingredients that you need. Instead, I think as long as you have the ingredients in stock in your restaurant then you should be able to cook with them. When you look at recipes, it even tell you how much of each item you have in stock. The same goes for crafting too. Again, you can only craft if you are holding the items instead of being able to craft with items that you have in stock.

Also, why can I only craft at home? Cooking, yeah that should only be done in your restaurant, but there have been times when I’m out exploring and have the items need to craft a new weapon… but I have to go back home to craft it. Discarding items is also a bit of a pain. Food can go rotten and yet, there’s no direct way to dispose of it. You can’t just throw it in the trash, you have to carry it around with you (taking up much-needed inventory space) and dump it in space or on a planet. Why can’t I just dispose of it in my restaurant? Just a simple throw away option would be great.

Space Chef is available now for PC and all the consoles. At the moment, it’s a decent game, but I think it could be far better with some updates and QOL improvements, just to make that game a bit more smoother. There is an ongoing story between all the foraging for ingredients and cooking, but it’s really more like a bit of background set-dressing over a deeply important narrative. The focus here is very much on the exploration, cooking and slow progression. I think, as with all games like this, that slow progression could be a turn off for some gamers. There are no shortcuts and the grind is very… grinding, but this is the very nature of these types of game anyway. However, I feel that the depth and variation that comes with Space Chef is more than enough to keep players engaged for a good while.