A game focused on Mexican baked goods? That’s a quick “yes” from me, to be certain. PancitoMerge is a fairly small, simple arcade game focused around dropping baked goods into a bag in order to get as high of a score as possible. At first, you’ll have just one of three levels unlocked, each being a different bakery with 12 items to unlock and five or six customers to serve. Once you do enough in one level, the next one will unlock. There are leaderboards to fight to the top of, so this game will likely only be of interest to anyone who wants to chase high scores. It’s fun, but it could have done with a bit more player agency.
You start each level in PancitoMerge with just a single baked good to drop into the bag. Once you drop a second one and the two touch, they merge into another, larger baked good. While this is obviously incredibly simple, once you have a bag filled with different foodstuffs, it can become challenging to actually merge them, so it can take a mix of strategy and luck. If the food rises too high, you lose, and it’s game over.
All the different food items are lovingly drawn. They look delicious, and the art does a great job of conveying the shape and texture of the different breads and cookies. What’s more, the right side of the screen shows what you’ve unlocked on that particular run, which will give you a name and a detailed description of each one. If you’re familiar with Mexican baking, you’ll see a lot of very recognisable treats. If you’re not, you can actually learn quite a bit from PancitoMerge, which is an appreciable detail.
Despite the inherent simplicity of the game, it’s rather enjoyable. The food has a physical presence, as you’ll often need to use an item’s shape and weight when factoring in where to drop them. Spherical objects will roll down more easily, and it’s common for various goods to get caught if they lack sufficient room to clear a gap. Customers also routinely show up to order specific items. If you don’t have what they want in stock, they’ll change to something else.
While you do get a small bit of additional score from giving them food, this feature exists more-so to clear out part of the bag. Naturally, you won’t be able to interact with any food on the lower part of the bag, so this is a great way to give yourself some more space. On the other hand, it’s important not to give away any items that you’ll need to merge larger, more valuable foods. While there are only a dozen items per level, unlocking the last couple can be fairly tricky, as the items you’ll need to merge will become more scarce and often separated from each other to a degree that you may not be able to actually combine the two.
This is where one of PancitoMerge‘s only real additional gameplay features comes into effect. On occasion, you’ll get a prompt that lets you shake the bag, which can cause items to fall further down toward the bottom or even make two nearby items merge into one another. When this happens, you can even get combos, as a freshly merged item can then touch and merge with another. This is why it’s so important to carefully place foodstuffs to set these up. But since you can only see a single move ahead and there’s no way to undo your last drop, this is easier said than done.
I wish shaking the bag was more useful, as it often only does very little. It frequently has practically no effect, and you have no control over which direction the bag gets shaken, so it’s only really beneficial on rare occasions. This is my biggest issue with PancitoMerge. It can simply feel too much like random luck, and I wish the player had considerably more control over the gameplay, as that would have added multiple layers of strategy that would have made getting high scores more competitive.
As it stands, PancitoMerge is a charming little diversion that’s an easy way to spend 15 minutes (or an hour) just trying to get high scores. One of the three bakeries is surprisingly Japanese-oriented (it’s billed as a Mexican Japanese bakery,) which breaks the theming somewhat, but the game still makes it work overall. If you want a light baking-based puzzle game and love Mexican (and Japanese) baking, this will probably hit your taste buds in the right way. I just wish there was a bit more depth and control to make the crunch more satisfying.
PancitoMerge: PancitoMerge will be a fun time for anyone who has a fondness for both Mexican baked goods and arcadey puzzle games. – Andrew Farrell
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