Chef! Kitchen Juggling': a close look, tips and whether it is worth your time

Cooking games usually make you carry ingredients between four stations and press buttons in the right order. There are no stations here: one pan, and the food flies around the kitchen by itself. The whole game is a single question — can you get the pan under it in time.

What this game is

Chef! Kitchen Juggling is an arcade on a 900×640 canvas. A dish — egg, shrimp, pancake, steak or a chicken drum — launches from either wall along a parabola, bounces off the side walls, and loses its climb at the ceiling. Your pan runs along the bottom, and every clean catch counts as a flip: the dish's doneness counter goes up by one.

The arithmetic below is what keeps people coming back for another run:

• 3 flips — the dish is done, it steams, and it can be served;
• 7 flips — it burns: grey, smoking, and not worth handing over;
• a done dish travelling rightward is guided to the pass on the right by the scene itself, and reaching that window is the serve;
• a raw dish in the window does not count — the customer is unhappy and throws it back into play;
• a burnt dish in the window costs 10 points and resets your combo;
• a dish you let hit the floor costs a life. You have three.

Points come from two places. A catch is worth 1, a dead-centre catch (the dish landing within 18% of the pan's half-width from the middle) is worth 2, and every eight in a row adds another point on top. A served dish pays 10 to 20 depending on your combo. A lost life pays nothing at all, which is what makes greed on the seventh flip expensive twice over.

Difficulty does not scale on a timer but on your own success: gravity is computed as 820 + 22 × served + 4 × catches capped at 1480, and the number of dishes in the air steps from 1 to 5 — first with catches, then with serves. Play better and the kitchen gets faster and denser; at some point slowing yourself down on purpose is the real skill.

Everything is drawn by code: the tiled wall, the counter, the pass window, the chef, the food, sparks and screen shake. There are no image files at all — the only assets are two display fonts under the SIL Open Font License (Russo One for Cyrillic, Lilita One for Latin). Sound is not a sample library either, but Web Audio synthesis: each catch raises the pitch with your combo, a serve rings a chord, a miss slides down.

How to play: briefly

1. Tap the canvas (or Space / Enter) to start — there is no separate start button to hunt for.

2. ← → or A/D drive the pan; with a mouse or a finger it simply follows the pointer.

3. Catch food while it is falling: only a downward crossing of the pan line counts, so you cannot scoop it from below.

4. On the last flip let the dish land slightly right of the pan's centre — it will bounce rightward, and the scene takes it to the window from there.

5. Space or Enter pauses, as do P and Esc; leaving the tab pauses the run by itself.

A couple of parting tips

• Catch with the centre, not the rim: a perfect catch doubles the points and tosses the dish almost straight up, so the next flip is easy; the rim throws it sideways.
• The seventh flip is not an achievement. Serving burnt food (−10, combo wiped) is cheaper than dropping it (−a life), but the best play is to hand it over somewhere between the third and the sixth flip.
• Done food only reaches the pass going right. A cooked dish moving right and past roughly the right third of the kitchen gets homed onto the window; after a bounce off the right wall it flies left and will never get there — keep the direction.
• Raw food thrown back is not wasted: the customer returns it to play with an upward kick, a free chance to finish the cooking — only it comes back fast and to the left.
• A combo is both money and difficulty: every eight in a row pays an extra point per catch, but every catch also raises gravity. Holding a twenty-chain with five dishes in the air is a different skill from the opening minute.