No doubt inspired by the likes of Stardew Valley and a host of other cozy-ish life sims out there that have you engaging in a variety of activities, Space Chef will have you cooking, crafting, and flying to a handful of planets in search of exotic ingredients. With those in hand you’ll continue to prepare a wider variety of unusual cuisines, then being sure to rush them to customers who are eagerly waiting for their orders. Of course, the issue is that I think that description is more ideally where the game should have ended up being, more so than where it actually lands.

One real challenge here, and I get that it’s meant to be more casual-friendly than intense, is that it really gets off to a slow start in many ways. One part of that is that it has to roughly walk you through how you’ll need to perform a variety of tasks, telling you where to go, what to do, and getting you up to speed. But another is that outside of providing you with the raw skills to do things, it feels like you’re just sort of left to your own devices, unsure of what you should really be doing. Sure, you can complete some orders for the one thing you know how to make using bugs you can kill in your basement with the limited tools you have, but to really kick things into at least a moderate gear you obviously need to do more.

You could try to explore and find planets, looking for ingredients, but without new equipment that may be a waste. In order to get the materials to make such equipment you’ll need to fly around picking up different types of scrap, go find out where to take it, breaking it down into the raw stuff you’ll need. But to do that you’ll also need money for the machine, so you’ll need to tackle more orders. But all of this flying around and trying to get scrap can lead to some collisions so you’ll need repairs. Early on it just feels like a bit of a vicious cycle, needing to waste time flying around to do things you’d typically get done much more efficiently in other games. 

Then throw in some frustrations here or there with the controls, like how it’s easy to burn your food on the grill because you hit the wrong button at some point so you’re no longer controlling your spatula (though that would seem to be the only thing you’d want to use at the grill anyway), and it just feels like a collection of smaller complaints end up snowballing to make the game less enjoyable than it could be. Considering it has a fair number of competitors out there that may not be precisely the same, but feel better implemented, and this is more of a middling affair.