A classic franchise from the heyday of Flash games is given new life in Papa’s Freezeria Deluxe – a fantastic remake that maintains all the charm of the original whilst deeply enhancing it with a countless array of new features; easily making it one of the best restaurant management games on the market.

As a child with little in the way of money, many of my early experiences with videogames came from browser-based titles that ran through Adobe’s Flash Player, including various entries in the long-running Papa Louie restaurant series from Flipline Studios. When that service closed down at the end of 2020, those games and countless others were lost to time, and given my aversion to mobile gaming I wasn’t in any rush to check out the ports that had been released for Apple and Android devices. Nevertheless, almost half a decade since I’d given up with Papa’s Scooperia, I was elated to discover that Flipline were broadening their horizons with Papa’s Freezeria Deluxe; a PC remake of the fourth game in the series that was set to release on Steam, and with the child in me crying out in joy, I couldn’t resist giving it a go – especially for such a low price on release.

As with the original, the premise is simple; through another one of his highly unethical schemes, Papa Louie has placed your character in charge of his new restaurant, the titular Freezeria – although given that you’re forced to work seven days a week the whole year round, it’d be more accurate to say you’ve been enslaved. You’re now faced with the challenge of whipping up ice cream sundaes for the residents of Calypso Island (most of whom are Papa Louie’s sycophantic customers from previous games) and keeping the restaurant afloat. You’re presented with four different stations inside the restaurant: Ordering, Building, Mixing and Topping, with each one testing a variety of skills from time-management to hand-eye coordination through the otherwise simplistic point-and-click gameplay. As the days go by, and your accumulated points kick up your rank, you’ll not only unlock new customers and new ingredients, but the game will begin to up the ante as you’re faced with a higher volume of customers and increasingly complex orders. However, this also proves to be my largest gripe with the game when you hit the difficulty ceiling so early on; being capped at a meagre seven orders a day means that Freezeria Deluxe starts to become a drag as you near full completion of the campaign. Between purchasing every upgrade and having long-since mastered the intricacies of its gameplay loop with no additional level of challenge brought to bear, the bulk of the game feels like a long stretch as opposed to an uphill climb, and I don’t doubt that this will turn away many players who don’t have the temperament to endure it. Nevertheless, I personally managed to wrap up a 100% completion playthrough just as it started to feel tedious, leaving me with the otherwise fond memories of the satisfyingly addictive road to get there, and proving that it certainly hasn’t lost any of the magic of the original game.

However, that’s not to say that Freezeria Deluxe is just a cobbled-together rehash of the original – far from it, in fact. The remake boasts a wealth of features brought forwards from each iteration of the series that followed the original; giving it a much needed breath of fresh air whilst not at all undermining the blueprint provided by the classic game. Dozens upon dozens of new customers have been added to the game, as well as a bounty of new ingredients; many of which are delivered through the Holiday system’s twelve themed events, and the Food Truck free-play mode gives you the perfect avenue to put your unlocked ingredients to use by serving up the sundaes of your dreams whilst making a little extra money on the side to put towards a variety of upgrades that’ll make your kitchen a little less hectic. Special Recipes provide unlockable orders that you can assign to your menu, with rewards for filling out a meter based on how many times a certain Recipe has been served, and the Foodini mini-games at the end of each day serve a similar purpose whilst breaking up the monotony of dishing out sundae after sundae. Customisation also sees a massive overhaul from the original with the ability to create your own character, as well as dress them up from a vast range of clothing options between special unlocks and the in-game store. It’s worth noting that keeping your style in line with the current holiday will net you some bonuses, and with your pick of furnishings, flooring and walls for the Freezeria’s interior, the same applies to your restaurant’s decor. With all these new bells and whistles to consider, Freezeria Deluxe feels like a much richer experience with plenty there to supplement the core gameplay whilst feeling on-par with, if not surpassing the latest mobile titles from a content perspective, and ultimately more than justifying its own existence as a remake.

With that said, I can’t stress enough that if you ever had the fortune of playing any of the original Papa Louie games back in the day, you honestly owe it to yourself to have a crack at this remake for an experience that manages to be both incredibly nostalgic and sufficiently refreshing all at once. Equally, if you’ve never once heard of any of the Flipline Studios titles, Papa’s Freezeria Deluxe still offers a top-of-the-range restaurant management game despite its outwards simplicity, and even where it becomes a bit of a slog it’s perfectly suited for chipping away at bit by bit for when you’re looking to pick up something casual. Either way, it gets my full-hearted recommendation, and I certainly hope Deluxe versions of some of my personal favourites from the Papa Louie series (namely Burgeria, Pastaria and Hot-Doggeria) aren’t far behind for Steam releases.

8/10