The Chef’s Shift is basically a fusion of Diner Dash and Typing of the Dead, with some obvious influence from Cook, Serve, Delicious as well. Levels follow the Diner Dash formula of needing to run around your restaurant and get meals to customers before they lose patience, but all actions are performed by typing random words and some recipes are made by playing minigames straight out of CSD. No individual piece of this game is very original, but the way they’re combined is unique and generally works out to be satisfying. I would highly recommend setting the difficulty to Very Hard if you’re able to type at even an average speed, however. The difficulty takes a long time to ramp up, and even if you end up dropping it later, the early levels won’t be very satisfying on lower difficulties if three and four letter words are trivial for you.
The Chef’s Shift features a series of restaurants that each have 10 levels, each of which in turn can earn you up to 3 stars for performance and a bonus star for completing the level challenge. The restaurants all have a similar progression where each level introduces either a new recipe or a new variation on an existing recipe, and several of the early levels will introduce new customer types that have their own gimmicks. Most customers have special rules for the types of word you use to interact with them, such as only using emoji or numbers, and the recipe progression typically builds towards unlocking recipes with multiple cook steps and different combinations of ingredients. It never gets as complicated or as stressful as CSD, but you will need to plan around the bonus challenge and customer types on the harder levels of each restaurant.
Surprisingly, the story is actually a decent selling point for TCS. Typically cooking games don’t bother with a story at all, but this has a plot that starts out silly and eventually builds to be quite elaborate and heavy. It definitely has some soap opera vibes with how complicated the relationships are, but it’s well written and builds to a strong conclusion. That said, it probably could have used a clearer mature content warning – this looks like a kid’s game, but it absolutely isn’t unless a mafia story with multiple murders and plenty of drug use fits your definition. It’s also unavoidable that, although the game seems to have been written in English originally since no translator is credited, nearly every sentence has some kind of basic grammar error. I don’t think this is simply the way English is used in the dev’s area from my experience with other Indonesian games and the prevalence of things like capitalization errors and word omissions. It’s always clear what the game is trying to say, but it’s impossible not to be distracted by the errors when the game is trying to be deadly serious and the characters have words in the wrong order or can’t get their tenses right. Still, as long as you can look past this and some melodrama, it’s an entertaining and well crafted story.
I normally wrap up with the graphics and music, but there’s not much to say here. The art basically looks like a bunch of clip art that’s animated chiefly by bouncing it around. It gets the job done, but it’s nothing special to look at. Similarly, the music is mostly free public domain pieces if the amount of Kevin MacLeod in the credits is anything to go by. It works, it fits the scenes, but you’re not going to remember it.
Conclusion
Overall, The Chef’s Shift is an easy game to recommend. It has a satisfying gameplay loop and an engaging story, and while there are plenty of things to criticize about the slow difficulty curve and number of typos, they don’t stop the game from being enjoyable. Give it a go if you’re looking for a typing game that isn’t just another Typing of the Dead clone or you want a restaurant sim that sits between the difficulties of Diner Dash and CSD.
Rating: 85%
Time to beat: 9 hours to get perfect stars on every level. The last few achievements are a little grindy and might take another hour or two if you want true 100%.
Price: $13
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