TL;DR - Chefy-Chef is a simple platformer with a very limited amount of challenges that often make the 60 levels feel fairly repetitive, and there's little motivation to continue, since the rewards aren't exciting. Simple is fine, but do you want 60 levels of mostly the exact same thing?
The game is built around collecting 3 ingredients scattered around each level, which involves having to recover your tools and the abilities they grant, again in each level, as you lose these abilities between levels. This results in some variety in challenges and progression through the levels - in some cases, you might have to deal with not being able to kill any enemies, or having to find alternate approaches to obstacles.
Your core moveset is only the ability to jump and double jump. However, you can collect varying combinations of three different tools through the course of each level. The knife grants you projectile attacks to the side or above you to kill enemies, hit buttons, and break rock walls. It also allows you to climb up and cling to walls. The tenderizer hammer lets you perform a high jump, kill enemies, break rock floors, and safely pogo off of spike floors. The frying pan can be thrown in an arc to the side or above you, and can be teleported to by pressing the button again. All three of these tools have a cooldown after their use, which is more often annoying rather than challenging, especially when several levels require you to use the hammer's high jump twice in a row.
I feel like not enough mechanics are introduced across the 60 levels, and the themes of jungle, snowy mountains, and swamp don't really do much of anything to make the levels feel different either. There wasn't really any kind of ramping up in difficulty, with only a single level that was difficult if you wanted to collect the level's secret burger. Some levels didn't feel like they were given enough consideration, and towards the end, I began to feel like half were made with some kind of automatic level-generation tool, because so many of the challenges were alike. In some cases, collecting all three ingredients will cause the exit to spawn in an area you can't bypass, so if you didn't already collect the optional secret burger, you will have to restart the entire level to collect it. There was also one instance close to the end of the game where it's possible to get trapped in a pit without any tools, forcing you to die or restart the level.
There is a secret burger to collect in each level, found by rustling plants or vines in the level which shake unnaturally on their own. Collecting certain thresholds of these will unlock character customization in the form of palette swaps for the apron, clothes, and hair color of your character. Nothing more elaborate, and even then, the last one unlocks at 60 secret burgers collected, so the game is over. As a result, there's no opportunity left to actually view it, unless you choose to play through the levels again, and I don't know why you would.
There are achievements only for the first 20 levels, so there's not even that motivation to continue to the end. And the ending is basically non-existent - a 7-second scene where the chef returns to his business, and holds up a bowl of the 3 ingredients. There is no completion bonus or changes to the ending for getting all of the secret burgers either.
The music is unmemorable chiptunes that get kind of repetitive, but in all likelihood, you'll be putting on some video or podcast to the side while you play this, so whatever. All of the visuals are similarly repetitive, with half of the screen occupied by black, a third occupied by more or less monochrome colors tuned to the world's theme to be repeated across 20 levels, and the remainder of the screen filled with a few accent colors. There's no plot or justification for visiting the places you do, other than "just because." That means it's not even about what would be fun to see or experience, like you would find in a 90s platformer - you're going to trudge through a jungle, the snow, and a swamp, and that's it.
All of this makes me wish the game had been shorter, perhaps 30 or 40 levels while playing with more of the mechanics in a more focused and condensed package. I kind of wish I had the time back. If you're going to pick up the game, make sure it's because you're looking for some unchallenging background activity to do while watching videos or something.
