Epic Chef

by Aethyna Nov 12, 2021 | 1 Votes | 48 Played | 0 Reviews

10 rate

Genres:

Simulation , RPG

Graphics:

Labels:

Cooking , Life Sim

Platforms:

Publishers:

Team 17 In this game, you play as Zest, someone who happens to come to own a haunted mansion located in the land of Ambrosia where chefs and critics rule supreme. Deciding that cooking is as good a career as any, you’ll embark on a culinary adventure, battling master chefs and whipping up delicious food along the way! Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Plotline Gameplay Community Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

Epic Chef is a blend of life simulation and cooking simulation in a game that’s presented in a way that’s full of humor, whether it’s from the dialogue or the expression on your character’s face. In this game, you play as Zest, someone who happens to come to own a haunted mansion located in the land of Ambrosia where chefs and critics rule supreme. Deciding that cooking is as good a career as any, you’ll embark on a culinary adventure, battling master chefs and whipping up delicious food along the way!

Plotline

Spending what meager life savings you have on a gamble, you (playing as the protagonist named Zest) found yourself winning a deed to an expansive mansion located just outside the town of Concordia in the land of Ambrosia. The thing is though, the mansion was not only purportedly haunted, the land itself is also so filled with Magicka, to the point where the crops you grow matures a whole lot faster than you’d expect.

Considering that culinary skills are like fetch quests are to RPGs here, and that you can pretty easily get your hands on fresh ingredients thanks to your magical farm, you’ve decided to make cooking your career so you could earn enough money to live comfortably in your mansion. Of course, there are challenges along the way, such as the Culinarim which prevents you from engaging in any forms of “unlicensed cooking”.

Gameplay

Epic Chef plays out like a typical life simulation. If you’re familiar with games like My Time at Portis, you should be good here. The game revolves around farming, crafting, cooking, and completing quests given by the many residents of the town of Concordia. The game has some sandbox elements here, providing you with an expansive piece of land to cultivate. You can even build facilities that will help you convert your raw materials into other more useful items like the sawmill.

In terms of farming, there’s a nice variety of crops here that you can grow and harvest. Thanks to the magical nature of your land, crops grow a lot faster here. Unlike typical farming games, there’s no need to replant a crop every time you harvest. Instead, you can usually harvest up to 10 pieces of a specific crop before you’ll have to plant a new seed. There’s also no need to water the crops which is a bonus in my book!

The highlight of the game is definitely the cooking system, and by extension, the cooking contests. Each dish you make will require 3 ingredients and what ingredients you add will affect the dish score of the dish. Dish score is made up of 3 different flavors, namely Vigor, Spirit, and Sophistication, and each ingredient will contribute some amount of each flavor.

To get a higher dish score, there’s this thing called synergy bonus. Different ingredients will offer different synergy bonuses as well as synergy requirements. Some ingredients may require a specific type or class of ingredient to be present in the pan before releasing its synergy bonus; while others, like the carrot, may require the pan to be completely empty. Making sure you

Be careful though! You can’t be lax when cooking lest you burn your dish. As your dish gets burned, the dish score will gradually be reduced. If all flavor scores dropped to zero, well, you can just throw away the food by that point. The only way to counter this is to lightly toss your ingredients in your pan from time to time.

Zest is determined to become the best chef there is in Ambrosia and to prove his skills, he will need to embark on a culinary adventure and battle all sorts of master chefs in cooking battles. Each battle is different since the ingredient requirements and the tastes of the judges will vary.

There are also other factors that you’ll need to take into consideration when it comes to cooking contests such as the Aroma. Aroma is obtained when the flavor globules you get from adding ingredients remain in the pan. This is tricky though since you’ll need to stir to break the globules and hence, collect the flavor points, and that these globules will disappear if left in the pan for too long, resulting in some lost flavor points. Thus, to get a high Aroma score, you’ll need to master the art of only stirring just before the globules will disappear, and that is easier said than done!

Let’s not forget about the abundance of humor in this game. The best one – the one that made me tickled pink is the carpenter. His jokes are just perfect for his character. Of course, at the very start of the game, it already shows you the kind of humor you’ll be getting throughout the game so if you’re not really into that kind of humor, you’ll probably be cringing most of the time.

With that said, I’ve greatly enjoyed my time playing as Zest in Ambrosia but I’ve got two bones to pick with the game. Firstly, it’s a bit bothersome to have to go to bed to sleep in order to save and exit the game. I had to stop the game while in town doing something and this forced me to run all the way back to my home, wait until nightfall, before heading to bed to get that save file so I could exit the game.

Another issue with the game is more of an annoyance than an actual issue. I find it weird that I need to use Tab to open my inventory but I need to press Esc to close it. I think this is an issue in games that fully support controllers, though it would have been nice if us “keyboard and mouse” users could remap this so that pressing the same Tab key would open and close the inventory.

Community

Epic Chef is a single-player game so there isn’t any multiplayer aspect to it. However, if you would like to discuss about the game or interact with your fellow players, the game’s Steam page is the best place to head to.

Graphics/ Sound

The mix of hand-painted and low poly-style graphics here look amazing. The best part though is definitely the facial expressions and animation. Just by looking at Zest’s expression alone is enough to tickle my funny bone many times within the first 2 hours of the game.

The music is another plus point for the game. It’s pleasant to listen to while you work the land or complete quests. The sounds used in the cooking battles give the battles a sense of grandeur and urgency too, which is funny considering the context of most of these battles. The characters don’t “talk” in this game either but instead “beeps”

Conclusion

In a nutshell, Epic Chef is a funny and entertaining game that puts you on a culinary adventure in the land of Ambrosia. Besides the humor and the quirky characters you meet along the way, the game has some really interesting and unique cooking mechanics and gameplay, though if you’re going in expecting a true-to-life cooking simulator, well, you’d be disappointed.

New Game Added: Epic Chef

by Aethyna Nov 12, 2021

In this game, you play as Zest, someone who happens to come to own a haunted mansion located in the land of Ambrosia where chefs and critics rule supreme. Deciding that cooking is as good a career as any, you’ll embark on a culinary adventure, battling master chefs and whipping up delicious food along the way!

by Aethyna Nov 11, 2021

Infinigon Games’ narrative driven cooking adventure is perfectly cooked and on the menu for PC, Nintendo Switch™, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One from today.