Back when I was younger and had free time on my computer, the Papa Louie games would be one of those games I would play to pass the time. To my shock, Flipline Studios released Papa’s Freezeria on Steam and of course, I just had to buy the game to relive my childhood. So, I will be doing an in-depth review on one of the most casual games that I have played.
Pros and Cons
Pros
Incredibly fun casual gameplay for all to enjoy
Character creator to make your own characters
Lots of fun recipes for you to make and acquire
Interesting and fun holiday season for you to witness
Customizable options for your restaurant
Fun minigames
Classic Papa Louie art style
Cons
The gameplay can get a little stale
Papa’s Raceway has cheating AI sometimes
Gameplay
The gameplay for Papa’s Freezeria is very simple, you mainly use your mouse for the entire game but there is an option to use the keyboard for certain features in the game. Your job in the game is to serve delicious sundaes to the customers in the game. Luckily for you, you don’t have to deal with any Karens, Kevins, or any of those bad customers you see on YouTube as everyone lives in this world peacefully. Except for this one guy but he is not in this game and Hank, who is a police officer would have kicked him off the island the second he stepped on.
Anyway, before you start the game, you have the option of picking one out of the two characters to play as you can either play as Alberto or Penny, or you can create your own character, which is new to this version of the game. In the original, you could not make your own custom worker, so I took this opportunity to make my two original characters Tyknighter and Soulknighter. They put their demon hunting weapons down and make some ice cream on a tropical island.
There are four main stations for you to go to, there is the Order Station, where you take customers' orders. The Build Station is where you will build sundaes and put different ingredients in them, like a certain fruit or candy, and syrups. The Mix Station is where you will mix/blend the sundaes, there are three different types of blends, smooth, regular, and chunky. Finally, there is the toppings station where you will put a variety of toppings on the sundaes to meet the customer's needs. You will be praying to the Papa Louie Greek gods for you to get a 100% toppings score. As, it’s exceedingly difficult to do so in general terms, unless you happen to be good at the game and can do that, I salute you.
You are graded on all of these stations and your score will depend on what the customer thinks and that will also determine how much experience you get at the end of the day. When you level up, you can unlock more customers and ingredients for you to use in your sundaes. There are also seasonal toppings for you to receive as well but I will explain these things in a bit.
You can even get some recipes for different sundaes you can make, there are a total of 40 different sundaes you can make. These special sundaes also have bonuses that you can acquire, like getting extra tips, an extra star when grading, more scores, or an extra minigame ticket. Getting extra tips and an extra star on a customer are the two best bonuses that you can get in the game. When you get five stars on a customer, they will earn a badge, where they will then give you extra tips and will order their food faster. So, when a customer orders the special, they can level up faster, the only time you won’t get two stars on a customer is when you are rewarded a badge.
Getting 200% grading score can be useful under some circumstances but if you are a bit experienced in the game then it won’t really matter. It does make you level up faster though so there is that, it’s not totally useless, although this is just my opinion. The extra minigame ticket is the least impactful bonus you can get, especially when you have completed some of the minigames. At that point, it starts to become a useless bonus and does not help you in anyway. You can get up to three tickets a day but with the special sundae, you can get five tickets if it’s enabled.
Closers are customers you will get who will be the last person to show up, they will be picky on what you do with their order so make sure to get everything right. There is a certain closer you should watch out for called Jojo. Jojo is a food critic who will always order something different every time he shows up. If you get a good order from him, he will reward you with a blue ribbon, and for the next three days, customers will give you extra tips.
You can also use a delivery truck to make sundaes, with this, you can use your creativity to your heart's content and attract customers. You won’t get any money for these, however, but it is a little side thing you can do. You need money to buy upgrades in the game or decorations and clothing for the holidays if you want to wait for bonuses.
There are also a lot of customizable options for your restaurant, if you have these things up, you can get bonuses on customers waiting while you make their sundaes. However, you will also get bonuses for matching the current holiday. You can also get some clothing to match the season for your two characters to wear. So there is a lot of options to customize for your restaurant that you can utilize, which is something I love.
While you are playing, you will also be going through certain holidays for the season, which is a new feature for this game, as it was not in the original version. These holidays will have unique syrups, mixes, and toppings for that season. I should note that there are no special sundae recipes that you can get that utilize these unique ingredients. My favorite holiday is Halloween as you to see some people dress up in Halloween costumes. All customers in the game have a favorite holiday but they all have a chance to show up. Santa Claus is the only customer unique to a certain holiday, as he only appears at Christmas. The only holiday to not appear in this game is Summer Luau, replaced with Volcano Gala.
At the end of the day, you will have the option to play a minigame, these minigames can reward you with decorations for your restaurant but if you fail them, you will be rewarded with a small tip. All of the minigames are fun but Papa’s Raceway has cheating AI sometimes that will screw you over, Blender Ball is also an issue as the power moves very fast but that’s it for issues with the minigames. The only other issue I have with Papa’s Freezier is that the gameplay can get a little stale at times.
Graphics and Performance
The art style that the Papa Louie games have returned, and it feels classic now that I am older, I appreciate the designs on the characters much more than I did as a kid. My favorite customers are Willow, Caption Cori and Scooter, I have others and could list them all, but we would be here for a bit. I tested the game on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, AMD Ryzen 5 1500X Quad-Core Processor 3.50, and 16 GB of RAM. The game should be able to run on low-end computers as it was a flash game.
Final Verdict
If you want to relive your childhood memories with a Papa Louie game, then this is the perfect game for you to play. With the death of Flash, this is the ideal way to play these and I hope more Papa Louie games come to Steam in the future, or Cactus Mccoy, or Jacksmith, I loved those games too.
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