PSA: this game is VERY unstable; start at your own risk.

[Shipyroni]

There's been several threads already of people asking for help with this game. Since it has a low player count, there's not a lot of updated information going around in the trophy community: so, here's the deal with Chef Life, to sum everything up.

This platinum is a UR, not because it's technically hard or boringly grindy, but because the game is VERY glitchy ever since it released (Q1 2023).

Their Discord is full of players asking for refunds since Day 1 to the present day, across all platforms. Everyone that starts this game is at risk of experiencing random game breaking bugs, such as:

• Duplicate chefs that can't be deleted;
• NPCs like waiters stuck in a loop; 
• Stuck objects that can't be grabbed ever again;
• The player getting stuck and automatically crashing the game upon loading;
• Not being able to start the next day and progress through the story;
• Crashes that happen every time you try to serve and cook food, hold objects, or perform actions while cooking;
• Corrupted and deleted saves.

All of these issues, along with auto-save and a single save slot, will make you start all over again each and every single time they happen - only to risk it happening again. This is a game that would naturally take dozens (or even around a hundred) of hours to plat, and a glitch at a later stage is not only annoying, but would seriously increase how many hours (and sanity) you would need to complete it. There's also no known way to avoid developing these bugs since they happen during normal gameplay or while loading saves, and so far no one recognized any pattern that may be causing them.

One solution that is being adopted by players is to use PS Plus cloud saves and upload the progress after each in-game day, to minimize the risk of losing everything. Since the bugs are so random, though, this hasn't been a perfect method, since there's still a risk of save corruption or major crashes with a backup save that used to be fine before uploading.

The devs are aware of all the issues the game has, but they don't really have a solution for everything after all these months. There's only been a major patch so far (around June) to try and fix the issues, but the game is still in a bad state: even if saves don't get deleted as often, it's very common for the game to crash or to get "stuck". Right or wrong, the devs have no clue what's behind the problems the players experience, and they don't usually reply to players anymore. I wouldn't expect this game to be "safe to play" anytime soon, since the last update alone took months to tackle a single issue that wasn't even fully solved.

Some very few people got the plat or otherwise said their game worked fine. Some use PS Plus to backup their saves and they managed to make it to the end, and others did nothing and managed to complete the game too. This is a lucky few, best case scenario. It is not the most common situation, and you're more likely to experience glitches than not. If you really want to play this game, be open to the possibility of having to restart several times, or to be stuck waiting for a fix that might not come. Even if you backup your save with PS Plus, be prepared to deal with this risk. I wouldn't recommend this game in its current state.

 

TL;DR: The platinum is technically obtainable, but the game might break on you at random and you might lose dozens and dozens of hours of progress each time. Avoid if you don't want to deal with this.

[NewPresident]

On 1.8.2023 at 2:28 AM, Shipyroni said:

There's been several threads already of people asking for help with this game. Since it has a low player count, there's not a lot of updated information going around in the trophy community: so, here's the deal with Chef Life, to sum everything up.

This platinum is a UR, not because it's technically hard or boringly grindy, but because the game is VERY glitchy ever since it released (Q1 2023).

Their Discord is full of players asking for refunds since Day 1 to the present day, across all platforms. Everyone that starts this game is at risk of experiencing random game breaking bugs, such as:

• Duplicate chefs that can't be deleted;
• NPCs like waiters stuck in a loop; 
• Stuck objects that can't be grabbed ever again;
• The player getting stuck and automatically crashing the game upon loading;
• Not being able to start the next day and progress through the story;
• Crashes that happen every time you try to serve and cook food, hold objects, or perform actions while cooking;
• Corrupted and deleted saves.

All of these issues, along with auto-save and a single save slot, will make you start all over again each and every single time they happen - only to risk it happening again. This is a game that would naturally take dozens (or even around a hundred) of hours to plat, and a glitch at a later stage is not only annoying, but would seriously increase how many hours (and sanity) you would need to complete it. There's also no known way to avoid developing these bugs since they happen during normal gameplay or while loading saves, and so far no one recognized any pattern that may be causing them.

One solution that is being adopted by players is to use PS Plus cloud saves and upload the progress after each in-game day, to minimize the risk of losing everything. Since the bugs are so random, though, this hasn't been a perfect method, since there's still a risk of save corruption or major crashes with a backup save that used to be fine before uploading.

The devs are aware of all the issues the game has, but they don't really have a solution for everything after all these months. There's only been a major patch so far (around June) to try and fix the issues, but the game is still in a bad state: even if saves don't get deleted as often, it's very common for the game to crash or to get "stuck". Right or wrong, the devs have no clue what's behind the problems the players experience, and they don't usually reply to players anymore. I wouldn't expect this game to be "safe to play" anytime soon, since the last update alone took months to tackle a single issue that wasn't even fully solved.

Some very few people got the plat or otherwise said their game worked fine. Some use PS Plus to backup their saves and they managed to make it to the end, and others did nothing and managed to complete the game too. This is a lucky few, best case scenario. It is not the most common situation, and you're more likely to experience glitches than not. If you really want to play this game, be open to the possibility of having to restart several times, or to be stuck waiting for a fix that might not come. Even if you backup your save with PS Plus, be prepared to deal with this risk. I wouldn't recommend this game in its current state.

 

TL;DR: The platinum is technically obtainable, but the game might break on you at random and you might lose dozens and dozens of hours of progress each time. Avoid if you don't want to deal with this.

100% confirmed from my end. And even if you do backups on the pscloud, its not safe to say that this helps at all.

 

I always did a backup after each session, but on day 31 my game crashed after everything i did. I couldnt progress any further at all,so i redownloaded my savegame from the cloud, only to discover that it is getting the exact same problems on the same day.

 

Great game in general, but as long as those issues remain, better avoid it!

[PunkRocktopus]

what is UR?

[Walt the Dog]

8 hours ago, PunkRocktopus said:

what is UR?

Shorthand for Ultra Rare, the designation for trophies whose rarity falls under 5%.