Released on February 23, Cyanide Studio promises us with Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator to live the experience of a future starred chef. The French studio is particularly known for the Pro Cycling Manager series, Blood Bowl, Styx infiltration games, but also Call of Cthulhu and Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood. By choosing to engage in a management game, will the studio succeed in its challenge? The answer in this test cooked to perfection!
The art of cooking
We begin Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator with a mouth-watering cutscene. After a staging of plate presentations, each more appetizing than the other, the cutscene ends to move on to the creation of our avatar. There are four faces to choose from, whether we choose male or female. Then we can adjust the musculature, build and skin tone. Then comes the hairstyle and the color of the hair, the beard (even for women) then the design and the color of the clothes worn, which is very fast in view of the few choices available for the creation of our avatar. Once this formality is over, it’s finally time to open our restaurant! Our adventure begins with the opening of a new culinary establishment with the objective of being recognized for our gastronomic services. From the first moments, like a dish that is much too salty, we notice that the movements of our avatar are quite rigid and that the scenery around us is simplistic to say the least. We hope that the rest of the game will delight us more than its graphics.
The tutorial invites us to learn the mechanics of the game and first of all to move towards our partner, named Kassim. This one explains to us that he has finished setting up the elements of the kitchen, and that everything is ready for the opening of the restaurant, fixed in three days. The icing on the cake, he has a little surprise in store for us: a recipe book!
All the recipes we learn are displayed inside, along with their preparation methods. Our first task is to cook beef with potatoes. As soon as we select the recipe, a box appears to show us all kinds of information. Different logos under the recipe allow you to know the monetary cost, the type of food, the country of origin and the category of our recipe.
The stages of the recipe are particularly well explained, to believe that we have borrowed the cookbook of the famous Maïté, hoping that there is no dish with eels! Simply follow the step-by-step steps to make the dish a success. Here we must start by preparing the fries, mince the shallots, cut and cook the beef steak and finally move on to dressing the plate. A delicious steak with shallots with its bed of homemade fries to delight the taste buds! Well, we are getting a little carried away, because this first recipe is in the “Canteen cuisine” category…
Visually we are helped by informative bubbles located at the top left of the screen. In the opposite corner we have the recipe(s) to be made, which can be consulted in full in order to anticipate the required actions. Of course, we have the possibility of preparing a dish in advance and storing it in the refrigerator. After collecting all the ingredients, let’s move on to the preparation. It goes without saying that we don’t cut the meat on the same board as the vegetables, we’re not in grandma’s kitchen. We start by preparing a slice of steak and then change locations for the shallot and potatoes. We then grab a frying pan to cook our meat which, for the moment, only offers us the “cooked” choice: what a sacrilege… a rare steak would be more suitable! We can choose from three firepower settings as well as turn the gas stove on or off. These options are very important because we can speed up or slow down the cooking of our food. A progress bar indicates when it is appropriate to intervene for the most precise cooking. Of course, the studio hasn’t forgotten that there are two sides to cook for a steak, so we have an option that pops up to flip the meat.
We reserve our meat and immediately move on to cooking the fries. There too, the actions required are multiple. Turn on the fryer to heat the oil, throw the fries in and remove them at the right time so they don’t burn. Last step, training, which for the moment is done automatically. A technical execution score is assigned to us, representing the mastery with which the dish was cooked. With an “A” rating, Etchebest is not ready to land! This rating is influenced by our preparation technique, but also by the quality of our basic supplies. Finally to finish, know that to perfect our recipes to perfection, we must preheat the pans and incorporate the ingredients at the right time. For example, the shallots should be added to the pan just before turning the steak over to ensure perfect cooking and finally gently sprinkle with the spices. At least we learned something, tonight it’s homemade steak and fries! Kassim therefore invites us to start preparing the dish again, but this time incorporating the shallots, then the salt and pepper. To avoid making mistakes with condiments, a “Sense of the chef” action is available, guaranteeing a precise dosage of spices. Then comes the cooking of the fries and the dressing, this time with our sauce.
To do this, we have a choice of forty-five different plates in which we can arrange the preparations at our convenience. It is of course advisable to take a very nice photo of our work of art, in order to share it with our friends to make them salivate.
Cooking is good, earning a living is better
The second day begins and it’s the opportunity to meet a new protagonist: Max. This pretty brunette takes care of the deliveries for all the food wholesalers in town and takes the orders we give her. As a charitable soul, she gives us a gift of some surplus from another shipment. It is also an opportunity to discover a very useful tool: the Research Table. This allows us, by spending CP (knowledge points) acquired at each level, to unlock new recipes. These are classified into several ranks ranging from the most simplistic to the most sophisticated. Of course, the more complex they are to make, the higher their price on our menu. But that’s not all, the recipes we know can be upgraded to a higher rank (revisited recipes); for this it is necessary to prepare them several times. In fact, we eventually have the possibility of presenting no less than seventy-eight dishes on our menu and we quickly understand the importance of the information bubble, always present to help us not forget anything. You should also know that in order to be able to present an à la carte menu, we are obliged to carry it out at least once to practice it.
In addition to preparing these dishes, we also have to regularly place orders with our suppliers. This layer of gameplay is quite interesting because we have the choice between several qualities of ingredients ranging from simple to exceptional, which of course influence our preparations. At first, we only have access to simple market quality, but we can order local, national or international products. Of course local products are more expensive but of better quality. You should also know that depending on where we buy our food, we have an impact on our responsibility, which affects our reputation with staff and therefore their performance. Some markets give us discounts based on the number of units purchased and to earn money we have to manage orders as well as possible!
While waiting for Max to deliver to us, we can modify the locations of the kitchen units as well as the decoration of the room. A fairly substantial catalog is at our disposal to create a restaurant to our liking. The choices available to us range from floor to ceiling, furniture and everything that makes up a professional kitchen. We now understand where the majority of our investments will go.
As if all this were not enough to maintain our maximum attention, we must also monitor the expiry date of our food. It would be a shame to present damaged products on the menu… If you tell yourself that it is absolutely impossible to manage everything when customers place orders, well, the French studio has thought about it. As might happen in everyday life, we have the possibility of “preparing” certain tasks in advance and storing certain ingredients in a refrigerator. In addition, accessibility options are offered to us later so as not to turn the game into a “kitchen nightmare”. We opted, at least to start, for the activation of these “preferences”. These allow us to block the number of customers and their impatience, to activate memory aids and to ensure successful dishes every time.
A simulation with small onions
D-Day has finally arrived, the opening of our restaurant! You will understand, Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator is aptly named and to condition everything, our time is running out. As with the test days, we must work to manage the hours before the evening service. Simulation requires, the game invites us as we improve and increase the number of recipes offered. Like any professional structure, we will need to grow in order to sustain our small business. For this, we have the possibility of carrying out expansion work, which of course then allows us to hire additional staff.
We must manage absolutely everything that has to do with our restaurant, from taking orders for our stock to the cleanliness of our establishment, including the management and satisfaction of our customers. We told you, this game is a real simulation! Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator benefiting from the official support of the illustrious Michelin Guide, you can imagine that the Holy Grail is to be dubbed by the stars of the prestigious institution. Fortunately after a few days we have the possibility of receiving reinforcements to help us. At the beginning, only Kassim comes to support us to accomplish the most basic tasks like cutting the ingredients. Gradually, the mastery of our assistant cook will increase, allowing him to perform more complex tasks until he manages to create a meal on his own. It is essential to manage to improve the level of our clerks in order to have time to succeed in the challenges that are proposed to us during the day.
To talk about getting started with Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator, a few hours of play are necessary in order to properly assimilate all the mechanics, even if the tutorial helps us well and we have access to the codex. In addition, our character cannot run, which really handicaps us when we move between the different kitchen elements. Navigating the menus is also quite laborious on the controller, especially when time is our enemy.
As far as the artistic direction is concerned, it’s really the least fresh ingredient of this production; the graphics are two generations behind. Our character is very rigid, the sets are of a poverty unworthy of our era. If the studio’s work had been based as much on simulation as on graphics, we could have played with one of the most beautiful titles of this decade, this is unfortunately not the case. The soundtrack has been a little more elaborate, even if the music that accompanies us is not transcendent. On the other hand, the sound effects are of good quality, and the bells that ring when a task is completed by our clerks or when cooking proves to be optimal can be heard perfectly.
Tested on Xbox Series X (optimized version)
