Flash from the Past: Papa’s Pancakeria
One day, while I was just driving around with my cat, Cookie, I saw Papa’s Pizzeria. So I decided to stop and head in to order a pizza, however, when I came back, Cookie was gone. Luckily in the middle of my search, I got a call from Papa Louie himself, saying he found Cookie at his Pancakeria in Maple City. I of course headed there right away but when I got there, Papa Louie was nowhere to be found. The only thing there was Cookie and a note from Papa Louie asking me to look after the Pancakeria while he was gone and of course I did just that, how long could he possibly be gone plus I did owe him for finding my cat.
Papa’s Pancakeria is the fifth game in the Papa’s restaurant management series and was released in 2012. In the game, you play as either Cooper or Prudence and run the Pancakeria. In the game, there are 4 different aspects to worry about, the order, grill, build, and drink stations. The order station is where you take orders. The grill station is where you cook the pancakes, waffles, and toast. The build station is where you put together the food you made to match the order for the customer. And the drink station might as well not exist because it takes a while to get there and you can easily obtain an upgrade that automatically does it for you by the time you unlock it. Your score for each order is based upon how well you cooked it, how well you built it, along with how long it took you.
The Good:
The game was honestly a lot of fun at first. With all the amazingly detailed and complex games always coming out, it can be really enjoyable to sit down with a simple flash game and it’s really easy to sit down for around 10 minutes and go through an ingame day.
I also like the little minigames you can play at the end of each day in order to get furniture, they’re all pretty simple but there are enough of them that it doesn’t get too repetitive. And speaking of furniture, while not a complex system, it is nice to see how the restaurant changes overtime as you collect and place more decorations.
The Bad:
Simply put, the game does not change much as you progress. While you are given more and more ingredients to manage and cook, they all start getting stale as you stop unlocking new types and instead only get different variants. Along with this, one mechanic that the game dangles above you for hours is the drink machine. You unlock this at rank 16 which takes longer than you would expect it to be. In my playthrough, which I would not describe as particularly fast or slow took around 3 to 4 hours which while not much in most games, in a simple flash game is honestly a lot of time. And all that time was spent doing the same thing over and over again.
The worst part about this was that I was excited to unlock this in the beginning though by the time I actually got there, I could barely bother to care about it and so it did not make the impact I was hoping it would have made.
As you progress in the game, you can spend the tips you’ve earned on upgrades. Some of these upgrades ended up worsening my experience rather than enhancing it. For example, you can purchase upgrades that let you know whenever a pancake needs to be flipped or is ready to be used in the build phase. These seem like helpful upgrades at first but quickly I realized that they would stress me while playing. It is not fun to be in the middle of getting an order or building one when you suddenly start hearing three alarms going off right after each other. I ended up muting the game while playing because of this as the small exclamation points on the hud are enough of a sign.
You might be wondering what the point of this review was with flash being discontinued in a few months from now (December 2020). Luckily, these games will still be playable after this. This game and many of the other Papa’s games have mobile versions that should still be available. Along with this, if you would rather play on a computer, a handful of the Papa’s games are available on Newgrounds which has developed a flash player to preserve the games on their website. Additionally, Flipline Studios is currently developing a new Papa’s game that won’t be dependent on flash. If you are interested in playing one of these games, I would recommend looking for a newer entry which may have fixed some of the issues I presented in this specific entry.
