Discover how to cook delicious and disgusting dishes in this cute browser game

Little Chef is free and ready to play in your browser

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Hello Erika, Julien Truebiger, Danny van Duist

News by Alice O'Connor Associate Editor

Published on Oct. 19, 2023

Flour, egg, banana, butter, salt. Given the ingredients at hand, I thought this was a decent attempt at making banana bread. The free cooking game Little Chef disagreed, and dubbed my dish 'Eggy Mess'. Everyone's a critic. But it's fun to puzzle out potential recipes, dragging ingredients into the pot, brushing my cursor against little physics-simulated spoons and plant fronds, and discovering what fresh horror I've concocted. It's free and playable in your browser, so hie thee to Itch.io and get experimenting.

Experimental cooking in a Little Chef screenshot. — It's very fun to poke at everything and figure out what you can cook with—including some things you really shouldn't | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Hello Erika, Julien Truebiger, Danny van Duist

Drag ingredients from the pretty 2D kitchen into the pot, then click the pot when you're ready to let it rip. It's not freeform simulated cooking, you're trying to puzzle out the combinations that will lead to the 40 desired dishes listed in the recipe book. Helpfully it also shows how many ingredients are in a dish, so if I was paying attention I would have noticed that banana bread requires only two ingredients. Surely that's banana and bread. Yup!

Oh, but as you mess up, you'll also uncover 17 horrible dishes. I've already told you one way to make Eggy Mess but how would you make a Painting? And what horrors can one cook with houseplants?

Little Chef is made by Hello Erika, Julien Truebiger, and Danny van Duist. The developers cite as influences the brew 'em up Potion Craft, browser-based mixologer Bartender The Right Mix, and mobile game Doodle God: Alchemy Simulator. One other game it reminded me of is splendid abiogenesis 'em up The Barnacle Goose Experiment, where you grow an entire world by combining tears, spit, wood, dreams, iron, and everything else in all creation.

It's not a huge game (I would welcome more recipes!) and I do wish it had sounds, but Little Chef is a nice little game. I enjoyed a few minutes of discovering delicious treats and horrifying mishaps this morning, and chuckling at some of the jokes. Perhaps you will too! Off you hop to Itch.

For more cute cooking, do also check out making a Lunar New Year feast in Tet. That's another cute free game, and slightly more practical.