Space Chef Review

A delicious idea, buried under a confusing menu

Space Chef is a cooking-and-exploration sim from Blue Goo Games, published by Kwalee, that's been in public development for an unusually long time: a Kickstarter campaign that funded back in 2019, followed by six years of demo updates, festival appearances, and community-facing development blogs, including a well-received Next Fest showing in mid-2025. Players explore the alien worlds of the Horseshoe Nebula, gathering ingredients, cooking increasingly elaborate cosmic cuisine, and building up a restaurant while fending off space pirates and hostile wildlife along the way. It launched, confirmed by an unambiguous original release date, on 28 October 2025 at NZ$18.49, and its review sample -- 104 reviews at the time of writing -- lands at Mostly Positive, a rating that reads, on close inspection, as reviewers genuinely loving the concept while being consistently frustrated by its execution.

The praise across the sample is specific and enthusiastic about the game's core identity. One reviewer who'd followed the project since its Kickstarter writes that they hoped for "a mix of Starbound with No Man's Sky and a little Stardew mixed in topped off with some brilliant animation" and feels that's largely what shipped. Another calls it "cozy chaos in space -- part Overcooked, part Stardew Valley," praising the "fun art, chill humor, and tons of customization." The comparisons aren't glib -- reviewers repeatedly single out specific systems, like the cooking minigames (described by multiple reviewers as "not annoying at all, and short") and the exploration loop, for genuinely holding their attention across dozens of hours, with several reviewers self-reporting they played compulsively late into the night. The art direction and soundtrack draw unusually unanimous praise across both positive and negative reviews alike, suggesting the presentation itself isn't in dispute even among reviewers who otherwise struggled with the game.

Where the sample turns sharply more critical is progression, and the complaint here is remarkably consistent across dozens of independent reviews. One detailed negative review lists "missing information in Tooltips, fluffy written texts without meaningful information, non visible progression milestones, unclear quest descriptions" as the game's central problem, a description echoed almost word-for-word by other reviewers describing needing to consult community guides just to figure out which item unlocks which blueprint or story area. One reviewer states plainly that "without this specific single item you cannot proceed the next quest and without reading a guide you wouldn't even know where to find it," while another, 14-plus hours in, describes still being unable to open their own restaurant -- ostensibly the game's central goal -- because of an opaque prerequisite chain. This isn't a fringe complaint: it recurs across reviewers with wildly different overall playtimes and overall recommendations, from those giving up after a few hours to those with 40-plus hours still describing progression as "ALL guessing."

Beyond the progression complaints, a specific and equally consistent grind thread runs through the sample. Multiple reviewers describe tool and equipment durability degrading unrealistically fast relative to how much time it takes to gather replacement materials, food spoiling before it can reasonably be used, and a punishing cost structure around spaceship repair and fuel that actively discourages the exploration the game is ostensibly built to reward. Several reviewers frame this as a direct contradiction of the game's own cozy-game marketing -- one writes bluntly that "one thing this game isn't is a 'cozy' game," citing "intense pirate chases," dangerous-creature combat, and a spatula serving as the player's only weapon for a frustratingly long stretch of the early game. On the technical side, reviewers report real bugs, including a save system that reportedly only commits progress at the end of an in-game day (leading to lost sessions after crashes) and at least one specific, detailed account of a crafting machine becoming permanently stuck in an unremovable feedback loop. Notably, though, several of the more detailed negative-leaning reviews explicitly credit the developer's speed in responding to exactly these complaints -- one reviewer changed their own review from negative to positive specifically because the developer moved quickly to address a game-breaking bug they'd reported, and the game's news history shows a steady cadence of quality-of-life patches continuing well into 2026.

Value and the demo-first approach also shape how the sample reads overall. Multiple reviewers specifically credit the game's lengthy public demo period with setting accurate expectations, saying they knew exactly what they were buying into and don't regret the purchase even with the rough edges intact. At NZ$18.49, several reviewers with 40-to-80-plus hours logged describe the price as easily justified purely on hours-per-dollar grounds, regardless of how they feel about the pacing complaints. That divide -- between reviewers frustrated enough to bounce off within a handful of hours and reviewers who pushed through the early grind and came out the other side genuinely satisfied -- is really the defining shape of this review sample: almost nobody disputes that the core concept and presentation are strong, but a significant number of players simply never make it far enough into the game's more open, rewarding later stretches to experience what the most enthusiastic reviewers are describing.

Verdict

Space Chef has a genuinely distinctive, well-loved core concept -- exploration, cooking, and restaurant-building wrapped in a colourful cosmic setting six years in the making -- and its Mostly Positive rating reflects real affection for what it's trying to be. But that same review sample is remarkably consistent in flagging a confusing, guide-requiring progression system and a grind that undercuts the cozy experience its marketing promises. The developer's fast post-launch patch cadence is a genuine point in its favour, and reviewers who push through the rough early hours mostly report finding something worth the trouble -- but this is a game to go into with your expectations, and a wiki tab, ready.