The Chef’s Shift Review - Nacho Average Cooking Game
There’s lots of things in this world that I love, but three of those things are as follows:
- The sound of my keyboard
- A restaurant management game
- Over-the-top, Bold & the Beautiful-esque storylines
My love for these things comes from a variety of different places; I’ve always been a sucker for a typing challenge, ever since I was in primary school and we were all weirdly competitive about how many words per minute we could type. My enjoyment of restaurant management games probably comes from the Diner Dash series being a core part of my formative years, and Bold & the Beautiful? Well, you can blame my grandmother for that one.
Whilst these three things may sound totally unrelated, they all come together in a fun little game called The Chef’s Shift, which I had the joy of playing over the last week. If you’ve ever played Diner Dash, this game is a lot like that – but instead of clicking on customers or foods, you type the random word that appears over what you want to do/use. If you’ve never played Diner Dash…. Well, first of all, fix that. But secondly, imagine yourself in a restaurant; there are customers to serve, food to cook, upgrades to earn – and you do it all by typing. Whether you want to cook food, serve food, or take payment, all you do is type the word above whatever you need to interact with. Even the main menu is navigated via typing, which is a neat little touch.
Gameplay-wise, this is simple but fun. You serve your customers, accumulate points to spend on upgrades and try to make your life around the restaurant easier. Levels slowly increase in difficulty as you go, and there were definitely parts of the game where I was just slapping my keyboard and hoping for the best, but the difficulty never gets so bad that you’re not having fun. If you’re into that, however, the difficulty can be cranked up to offer a real challenge…you know, for the people who like a side of screaming with their cosy typing games.
Every set of levels opens up a new restaurant and new type of cuisine for you to work with. At first, you start by running a pizza joint, then a dumpling house, a Mexican restaurant, and the list goes on. The variety is great to see, and by the end of every level, I was so dang hungry. Alongside new dishes, cuisines and restaurants, each new level also gives you some background into the characters and their story within the game…and honestly, that’s where it gets a little bit weird.
The graphics are vibrant, the gameplay is simplistic and fun, and the game is very ‘cosy’ looking at first glance… but there’s much more than meets the eye. Though the story starts off as an off-beat, quirky tale about a failed thief who comes to work in a pizza restaurant, it quickly becomes something you might see in a soap opera. There are drugs, death, and guns; for a cute little game, it really force-feeds you (hehe puns) some heavy-hitting issues. Unlike in most soapies, the writing and pacing of the story are very well done. Nothing drags on for too long and even though the themes are dark, you’re not left bleary-eyed, struggling to see through the tears as you type out the words needed to serve your customers.
I found The Chef’s Shift a really enjoyable little game. It’s fun, and quirky and adds just that little bit of darkness to an otherwise very cosy title. It’s a unique take on the restaurant management genre I haven’t seen before, and I had soup-er time playing it (ok I’m done, I’ll stop now).
The Chef’s Shift was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
