The Papa’s flash game series has been one of my favorites for a while. You take orders, make food, and serve food. Simple, right? Nope. You have to manage your time and make the food exactly as the customers order. Papa’s Pancakeria is more of the same, with its own methods for cooking and building orders.
As the name suggests, you do make pancakes — but you also make French toast, waffles, and drinks. Your customers demand the perfect breakfast, and have some strange orders for you to fill. Get used to making giant stacks of pancakes and French toast covered in chocolate chips, powdered sugar, honey, blueberry syrup, and raspberries. You’re going to be slaving away cooking and building until you even get the drink machine, and from there things get CUH-RAZY. At least, as crazy as a game about tending a restaurant can be.
I can’t really go into a lot of detail about the process of making the food you’re serving, since it would take more paragraphs than would normally be necessary to describe just making these foods in real life. Besides, part of the fun is seeing the new things you unlock.
Building the orders is the most interesting and time-consuming part of Papa’s Pancakeria, as you need to stack those flapjacks and their toppings just right. It’s also arguably the most fun since you need to manage your time between taking orders, flipping pancakes, and ensuring you are making exactly what the customer wants. Plus it’s just nice to see the finished product.
Decorating your restaurant is about as exciting as you might expect it to be, and (unlike real life) you need to spend the money you get from tips and your paycheck on decorations. As with the other Papa’s games there are loads of posters, and there are tons of themed decorations to invest in to spruce things up.
As with Papa’s Wingeria, there are optional mini games between each day of hard work. You can get money or decorations from these games, depending on how well you do. I found these to be an okay distraction from my restaurant’s day to day grind, but didn’t bother spending a lot of time on them because the main game is more than entertaining enough.
Papa’s Pancakeria is inevitably the longest Papa’s game so far, and getting to rank 15 to unlock the drink machine takes quite some time. Fans of the previous games can enjoy this long entry to the series, and those new to the series can jump right in and have just as much fun with it. The time management and the order building aspects are as addictive as ever, and the game knows just how to ramp things up to make things challenging later on. This type of flash game isn’t for everyone, but it is worth a try if it sounds even the least bit interesting. Chances are you’ll fall victim to Papa’s charms as well.
