Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator (2023)

The sheer amount of recipes, Michelin endorsement, and intuitive mixture of gameplay styles are enough to satisfy gamers who are also culinary enthusiasts. Just make sure you have a controller in hand if you decide to buy it on Steam. In a scale from Pizza Hut to Gordon Ramsay, this game scores an honest Guy Fieri.

I enjoyed my time with Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator. It’s definitely a simulator, but it’s not overly complex like some in the genre tend to become. With the management aspect and how detailed some of the recipes are, it offers that depth simulators genuinely capture while simultaneously keeping the actual cooking and plating something fun and enjoyable. The story could be better, but again, something that should make or break your decision in this genre. An essential aspect of being a chef is having pride in your work and seeing the customer enjoy their experience; Chef Life captures this and does this well.

Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator is a very good simulator of what it's like to be a professional chef, while also making it fun to play.

Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator nails the minutia of cooking, with impressively detailed recipes that most people could only dream of making in real-life. Unfortunately, the gameplay loop struggles to keep you engrossed, and the experience is rigid in ways that won't be palatable for some.

I’ve had a really fun time playing Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator, with the blend of cooking and managing a restaurant feeling super rewarding. It helps that the game manages to nail all aspects of its design, with every facet of the gameplay offering enough to keep players invested but without overwhelming them with needlessly awkward mechanics. It’s just a really enjoyable experience and certainly scratches that wannabe restauranteur itch that a lot of players might have after watching their favourite chefs on TV. It does have some issues with the most notable being some of the technical bugs in the game, but they didn’t stop me from having a really good time on my quest to earn that Michelin Star.