Parisian Brasserie Simulator Review (PC)

For the crème de la crème of Parisian fine dining and eloquent cultural panoramas à la Eiffel Tower, the inner à la carte of Haussmann-style architecture and flamboyant appetizers that accommodate Parisian Brasserie Simulator are more than enough to curb your appetite. That is, of course, if you can ignore the fact that the remainder of the game is about as by-the-numbers as the other, I don’t know, thirty-six culinary sandbox games that also launched in the past two weeks or so. If you can excuse the fodder, and if you can come to terms with the fact that it isn’t the be all, end all of entrepreneurial simulation, then you might just find enough here to whet your enthusiasm for what is, unfortunately, a rather generic business affair.

To give credit where it’s due, Parisian Brasserie Simulator does paint a huge portion of its ingredients in a good light. From the initial development of the restaurant to the post-shift embellishment process, the authentic delicacies to the managerial happenings, true to its word, Parisian Brasserie Simulator has that familiar yet awfully pulpy feel of a cliche-riddled tycoon sim. This isn’t a naturally bad thing, though. It’s a comfort food, if anything, in the sense that it doesn’t do anything extraordinary to propel your taste buds in a new direction, but rather, it settles for a simple appetizer that, while not particularly beaming with flavorful elixirs, contains the carbs needed to bloat its fledgling connoisseurs. And I suppose that’s enough, despite the fact that it doesn’t overhaul the genre with an invigorating spice of life.

The Heart of Paris

Parisian Brasserie Simulator doesn’t need a proper setup or introductory passage to highlight the goal that orbits the premise. Much like your traditional culinary simulator, it more or less invites you to weave your own restaurant into a bubbling hub in the heart of Paris—a traversable zone that offers all of those usual trademark essentials (and not to mention the janky AI and clueless NPCs that tend to gravitate towards them) of a bite-sized simulation game. But that’s not important; the outside world is drab and characterless in comparison with its adjacent husk. That’s where you spend the majority of your time: in the beating heart of a booming brasserie, of which you have full creative control of the produce it sells, the staff it employs, and the Feng Shui that it strives to capture.

The early stages of the Career mode unfold in a slow and often painstaking manner, with the bulk of your jobs mostly consisting of laying the groundwork for a small brasserie that sits just on the corner of the Eiffel Tower. As you progress, mundane chore core tasks eventually transition into profitable activities and opportunities to unleash personal touches. With all of these things hanging beneath a familiar shadow that we’ve seen a thousand times before, you essentially have the basic gameplay loop before you—a rinse and repeat, clean and serve, flip and upgrade gig that, quite frankly, takes a heck of a long time to shovel through before it finally starts dishing out perks and beneficial features. But that’s a business simulator, in a nutshell, so it’s to be expected, I guess.

Parisian Panoramas

It almost feels like a pointless exercise, jumping into the visual aspects of Parisian Brasserie Simulator, not because it lacks any notable features, but because it doesn’t do anything particularly special to spice up the usual formula. Similar to other shopkeeping sims, the vast majority of the citizens are either clueless, incompetent, or a well-oiled combination of the two. The staff and other members of the public aren’t really screen-worthy, either, no thanks to their general lack of personality or palpable traits. But again, it’s a culinary experience with a harsh emphasis on the cooking and building process, so a few graphical shortcomings are irrelevant. That doesn’t make it any easier to gawp at, though.

On the bright side, Parisian Brasserie Simulator has a strong selection of decorative elements and custom components for you to experiment with. There are props available for you to unlock, troves of items to collect and customize, and, above all, a sizable menu of both French and international dishes to choose from and bring to the table. I can’t fault any of that. In fact, I find myself weirdly looking forward to the next slew of roadmap updates, more so as the creators have openly stated that the vanilla game will be onboarding more features in the near future. That’s another plus: the fact that Quark Studios has its heart and soul in the ongoing development of the IP.

To further solidify the iron foundation that Parisian Brasserie Simulator works from, the mechanics and general flow of the world also provide a competent UI and seamless access to its vast components. A slither of chaos and wonky bits and pieces are commonplace, though I wouldn’t say that it’s a broken game by any means. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of room for improvement all the same.

Verdict

Given the fact that there’s a video game adaptation of most real-world trade jobs and pulpy careers, it doesn’t come as too much of a surprise to see an iteration based around Parisian fine dining. With that, what you see is what you get: a to-the-point business simulator that doesn’t waste time by wrapping itself up as anything more than what it knows it’s capable of bringing to the table. Is it a significantly better sim than its competitors? No. In fact, it more or less sits on the same horizontal line as its kin, as do most of the business simulators that rely on the same generic trappings to entice their customers. But that’s okay, as it just works.

Parisian Brasserie Simulator is still in its infancy, and so, while we’re still able to sink our teeth into a huge portion of its world, there is still so much left for us to digest. That being said, I think that there’s a very strong game here, and I hope that, with the added support of its fans and some well-needed roadmap installments, it’ll eventually go on to surpass its initial expectations, too. But as I said, it’s early days — so only time will tell on that one.

If you’re a sucker for simple trope-heavy simulators that foster pulpy punchlines and swathes of generic gameplay mechanics with incentivized chore core elements, then you will probably enjoy taking a big ol’ bite out of Parisian Brasserie Simulator. If you’re looking for something with more of an edge, though, then you might want to consider donning the apron elsewhere, preferably in an authentic culinary setting that favors depth over canon fodder.