• Price: $14.99 USD (currently on sale for $13.49 until November 11th)
• Developer: Blue Goo Games
• Publisher: Kwalee
• Release Date: October 28, 2025

A review code was kindly provided by Kwalee on behalf of Blue Goo Games. We thank them for allowing us to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

Content warning: Rated for everyone. Involves killing and cooking ingredients (including bugs, snakes, etc.).

Space Chef combines elements of restaurant management, “light” survival RPGs, and life simulations. Those are all things I happen to enjoy, and setting it in space in a fictional universe made it even more appealing.

When you start the game, you get to customize your character’s appearance, which includes options for your gender and body type, hair and hair color, skin color, facial features, and clothing. You also get to choose your character name and business name.

Your character has taken their grandma’s place as Chef of some sort of catering business in the area. You start out in a rundown space trailer with very limited resources. With nothing more than a spatula and a haphazardly put together grill, initially you only have some soil to plant one seed at a time as well as the ability to hunt the bugs down in your basement for free, quick, and easy ingredient sources.

Hunting for live ingredients often requires you to hit and kill them with a “weapon” such as a spatula or knife. Some players may be a bit squeamish about using bugs or snakes as cooking ingredients. When you’ve gathered enough ingredients to make several dishes you can head back to the main area of your space trailer and open for business.

Orders will appear on the top left of your screen, and you’ll see the customer, their location, and the requested number of items. For many orders you’ll play mini games of sorts by pressing buttons at the right time when food is being cooked on the kitchen equipment you’ve crafted.

Other orders may require you to first use kitchen equipment and then combine ingredients from the cooking menu, while others only use the cooking menu. Unfortunately you can’t cook with ingredients that are in storage.

As soon as you’ve finished assembling the orders you can leave your space trailer and take your spaceship out to deliver them to your hungry customers. You boost your reputation by serving dishes, and leveling up your reputation unlocks rewards such as new crafting recipes or the ability to customize your space trailer.

Besides your reputation as a chef, you also have to level up stats for combat, cooking, exploration, farming, and mining by participating in those activities. You get new crafting recipes related to those stats each time you level them up.

To level up those stats, you’re going to have to explore the nebula to find new planets, “towns,” and “dungeons” of sorts like the abandoned space stations. You’ll gain access to new customer bases, animals, plants, and other materials when you investigate each area. Gathering new ingredients unlocks new recipes.

You’re limited to the innermost zone of the nebula at first because your spaceship only comes with basic equipment; you have to gather materials and craft better equipment to make it past the inner zone and beyond. The maps were incredibly frustrating to me because they don’t seem to keep the areas you’ve filled in, both in space and on the planets.

I found it difficult to find my way to my destinations as a result, and it took me a while to memorize the set locations. The planets and asteroid belts (i.e. the Frost Belt where you mine for ice) move around in orbit, so they’re never in the same position. I guess they were trying to make it seem more like space in real life, but I just thought it was frustrating.

Maneuvering the spaceship was another source of frustration for me; it got to the point where I just wanted a fast travel option. I had a hard time keeping my ship in position while mining asteroids, but it was also hard for me to evade the asteroids and hostile ships that came after me.

I ended up bumping into quite a few non-hostile ships, which damaged my own in the process. It was rather amusing hearing those ships honk at me for getting in their way. But the hostile ships aren’t so fun.

At some point hostile ships start coming after you to try and steal your food deliveries, and I’m like, guys, you’re wasting fuel and missiles just to get some ice water! 🤣 I really did not enjoy getting shot at in addition to taking damage from getting too close to the Sun without the right level of shielding.

Because I wasn’t very good at avoiding damage (both walking around and in my ship), I was defeated quite a bit. This wouldn’t be too annoying if it wasn’t for the fact that I’d lose my character’s defensive equipment as well as any equipment that didn’t come with the ship when I first started the game. (If you don’t turn on “keep inventory” in settings, you’ll also lose items from your inventory upon defeat.)

One of my biggest issues with Space Chef was that you have to remake a lot of equipment because they break or you lose them because you were defeated. Even if I managed to level up some stats and get ahead a little bit, I felt like I was always behind because I’d have to gather even more materials and process them – often spending limited funds to do so – to remake everything. Even major kitchen equipment such as the grill require maintenance/repair.

Once you land on a planet, some of the local wildlife may be hostile towards you as well. They’ll attack you preemptively or wait until you’ve attacked them to retaliate. The combat is a weak point in my opinion because it’s very basic and there isn’t an option to dodge attacks. Some locations, such as the abandoned space stations, have hazards such as explosives or lightning that damage you as well.

I did like the variety of planets with their different biomes. I didn’t get to explore some of them to the fullest extent because I didn’t have the materials for the protective gear, but there’s a planet where you can explore underwater, a frozen planet, and some other locations where you need a spacesuit to make up for the lack of oxygen there.

I could also appreciate how they designed the planets so that players would gain access to more areas as they unlocked new tools to destroy obstacles such as rocks or vines that are in the way. And I liked that there are multiple ways to gather ingredients; you can harvest them by hand or with a shovel, hunt, or even get some by giving wildlife their preferred foods! It seems like some ingredients are only available at night, too.

There were some problems with exploring the planets as well. My inventory constantly got too full too quickly, and I still haven’t unlocked any upgrades to increase its size. There isn’t an easy way to discard items either – whether you’re on the ground, underwater, or in space.

I frequently had to return to my home too early because my inventory was full again. Also, you have HP and energy meters, and the energy meter would go down too quickly for my tastes. When your energy meter is depleted you can’t harvest ingredients or use machinery, so you have to return home to sleep and restore your energy again.

It doesn’t seem like there are any upgrades for your HP or energy meters, which is unfortunate. I wish we had something like the sleeping bags in the Rune Factory games, which allowed you to recover while remaining in the location you were exploring at the time.

When you do return home there isn’t much storage there either. You only start with one tiny refrigerator for food and a small storage box or two. It took me a long time to unlock the crafting recipe for the small refrigerator and figure out how to gather a key material to make it. Unfortunately, it seems like food you prepare in advance does go bad – and there’s the limited inventory issue – so having limited fridge space for a while is not ideal.

I liked being able to expand my space trailer, but it did feel a bit pricier to do so than I would’ve liked. With the amount of time and money I spent gathering materials to remake broken and lost equipment, I didn’t have as much time to sell food and make money.

Examining furniture items in the background of other buildings allows you to buy them to decorate your trailer. Some of the furniture was pretty cute, although money was again an issue.

Space Chef includes many of the elements I enjoy the most when playing simulation games, but some of the decisions they made made it difficult for me to enjoy the game. My Switch shows that I’ve played for more than 15 hours, and it just feels like I haven’t made any real progress.

I can’t figure out how to continue with the main quests at all. I don’t need my hand held much when playing games, but I think they could’ve made the mechanics and the objectives more clear. If you like more of a challenge though, this could still be a good game for you to try.