Fruitbus Review (PS5)

While you pay based on your satisfaction, I do take a cooking fee in the form of taking a little bite or sip of each dish I make.

I’m so happy that Fruitbus finally released on console! I’ve been interested in this game ever since it was announced and I remember playing the demo on PC to get a little taste (even though I knew I couldn’t run it). I was so excited when the console release date was announced, but I actually didn’t realize it was only for PS5 until June 16 (I was originally wanting to play this on Switch). Now it’s here and I get to finally play it! So, did Fruitbus end up living up to my expectations?

In the world of Fruitbus, instead of humans everyone are cute anthropomorphic animals. The character you jump into the shoes of is, in particular, a member of a family full of bears and while you never get to see what you look like, it’s easy to assume you’re a bear too. Anyway, you play as a young bear who doesn’t get a name but is referred to by various nicknames, with the most prominent one you’ll hear being “Pumpkin” as it was your Grandma’s nickname for you. The game starts with a prologue as you’re a little cub hanging out with your Grandma, playing, and even cooking. Well, cooking in the terms of only handling a knife. Plus this prologue doubles as your tutorial! Though, the moment of hanging out with Grandma is short lived as we are soon sent 10 years into the future. Don’t worry, this isn’t the type of situation where you move away and have a long distance relationship with your Grandma. You do soon learn that your character spent a lot of time with her during the timeskip.

Anyway, as we get back in after the timeskip we find out that Grandma recently died. She left you a letter where she goes to comfort you, gives you one last adventure of putting together a Farewell Feast, and leaves you her food truck which shares its name with the game’s title. After all, it seemed that you shared the same love for cooking and the Fruitbus with your Grandma. She wanted to leave it in good hands before she passed and, spoiler alert, she was right. After picking up the Fruitbus from the junkyard, and fixing it back up as it got stripped for parts before you got there, you start your last adventure with your Grandma. But this time, she has shotgun and you’re taking the lead.

As you progress through the game, you’ll be visiting all three islands where you’ll be meeting new and colorful characters, helping them out with the help of your culinary skills (and perhaps you just have that certain aura about you that also helps), remembering your Grandma and the adventures you had with her, finding out what happened during the timeskip that some characters allude to (on the player side as it wouldn’t be a surprise for the character in-universe), upgrading your truck, catering the big events that happens on each island, and bringing people that Grandma knew together for her Farewell Feast. Some are going to take a bit more extra work, especially Grandma’s close friends, but I’m sure they’ll come around to it. And all this happens with Grandma’s ashes by your side in the passenger seat.

I really enjoyed the story here. I liked the writing style, the story was interesting, and it’s told in a pretty interesting way. Aside from the letter you get after the prologue, the story is told to you through dialogue. You’re told as much as you need and it feels pretty satisfying by the end as everything that the games bring forth gets resolved. It also has reverse dramatic irony as you’re going in learning everything while the character you play has experienced it themselves. It was honestly pretty interesting learning about Grandma through the various memory cutscenes, her journal writings, commenting after certain milestones that you can hear when you interact with her urn, and what you’re told by your customers. You get a lot of different perspectives, on top of being able to hear their storylines. Some have longer storylines than others, but they all are interesting enough to get you to want to help them out and find out what the end of their storyline is. Not to mention the small mystery that gets alluded to just enough to where you get reminded of it, but not too much where it’s the focus. After all, the focus is getting everyone together for the Farewell Feast and hearing everyone’s stories. The jokes were also a hit for me. I think the fact that most of the jokes being food and cooking related really helped. I also absolutely loved how the Grandma described her dishes, as that’s what I do for my own, and the way her jokes were written (which were unique to her).

Also, most importantly of all, this game does a good job with having a silent protagonist. One thing I absolutely hate is when other characters act like you responded to them even though you didn’t (and like, just add dialogue choices at that point), but Fruitbus did a good job with handling it. There are some points where the characters allude to you responding to them mid-conversation, but it only happens at most a couple times. Other than that, the script was written with a silent protagonist in mind. I know I’m weirdly putting focus on this aspect, but trust me I’ve played other games with silent protagonists that does what I personally hate and Fruitbus could have easily fallen into that. But it doesn’t and it’s wonderful!

I have to give a special shoutout to how much I liked how Grandma was written. They could have taken the easy way, but they went that extra mile to make her character feel more real. It’s really easy to see why your character and everyone on the three islands loved Grandma and held her in high regard, but you see that she is flawed as you progress, whether it’s in the memory cutscenes or accounts from others, that put her in a not so pleasant light. I also liked how the bad aspects of Grandma’s character is handled kind of like you’re dipping your toes into it, as you do always hear how great she was throughout, which avoids the problem of starting out a story only telling the good about the character and then only hearing about the bad. You still will most likely come out of the game still loving Grandma, I know I did, but you’ll understand that she was a normal anthropomorphic being with her own flaws. You’ll also come to an understanding on why she did what she did (well, except one thing that is just hinted at being her doing), understand why those around her felt the way that they did. As well as the others that you interacted with will reflect on the past and come to an understanding.

Even though it doesn’t entirely make sense for the character you play, I did also like how the game starts off with endearing you to Grandma and then slowly drip feeding you all of her flaws. It really plays on how you put an adult on a pedestal and it isn’t until you grow up that you realize that they’re just like any other human being. Though this does work when you bring in the character too considering that the things that Grandma did can easily be categorized as tough love or just not entirely getting it, but you come to realize that it had bad effects on those that it happened to. They weren’t able to move on or improve until you came along, helped fix their problems, and they were finally able to realize what Grandma was trying to teach them. Makes you wonder if she actually talked to them instead of going straight to her tough love strategy of stealing and burying things.

So, yeah, long yapping shortened, I really liked the writing, how the story was told, and how everyone was written (especially Grandma).

Gameplay here is simple, but engaging thanks to the subtle way it builds complexity. Fruitbus is an open world game where you’ll be visiting three islands. All three islands basically act as the game’s three different acts as they have a big event that you’re helping the characters there put on and you’ll also end up catering for. But before that, there is a lot you’ll be doing. First of all, exploration! Whether it’s on foot or in the truck, you’ll be exploring all around the three islands. You’ll use the truck to traverse the routes between the different landmarks (which are usually towns, gas stations, and other important buildings) and be on foot to explore what and who is at those landmarks. Each landmark will have their own set of ingredients that you can forage for (yep, you gather everything that you serve!) as well as a set of customers. You do quickly get access to the backpack, which will let you store foraged ingredients so you can cut down on how much you return to the truck to unload, a quick menu for tools you stored inside it, and a way to quickly put and toss out foraged ingredients or miscellaneous items (and as you progress you’ll be able to buy upgrades that increase how much you can store in your backpack). The customers will mostly be regular ‘ole NPCs, but there are unique story-related characters which are the friends and old customers that Grandma had and she wants to invite to her Farewell Feast. Those story-related characters in particular has their own mini-stories/arcs in the form of a questline where you’ll be able to converse with them, they’ll ask for a dish they want which will progress their storyline, and they will sometimes also change their location. There are also some quests that don’t have you cooking, but for the most part you’ll be cooking and talking to them (and don’t get me wrong, it’s still fun and they are interesting to talk to). Once you read the end of their questline, they’ll accept the invitation. However, the VIPs are the ones with the more involved questlines with some of their quests moving them to the next island alongside you. The game does keep track of the quests, so if you forgot where they’ll be or what they want you can look back at that tab, and you can easily see who already accepted the invitation, how far along you are in their questline, and how long their questline is at a glance.

Ok I better get into the driving and other aspects now. The driving here is pretty good and it feels nice to drive the truck. You will get stuck a lot and it does struggle against steep hills and certain terrain, but it doesn’t feel bad to drive and you can access the “unstuck me” option pretty quickly. The truck also goes at a good speed where it’s fast enough that you won’t feel like you need to go faster but also slow enough so you can take in the scenery or look at your map. The driving mechanics does lean towards the realistic side, but keeps it simple. You do manually turn on the car so you can move and use the hand break so you can also move and keep your car from rolling away. The truck also does interact with objects and terrain realistically; and thankfully the truck doesn’t have a health bar cause oh man I would have had to fix it up a lot. I did stop being careful after a while, but I did unintentionally hit things that I didn’t think I was close enough to hit. Also you can drive into people without worry as no one has a health bar and they act like nothing is happening. Which does open up to acting like you ran them over if they annoyed you haha.

While I will say that the environment between landmarks are pretty empty, I do really like how there is no need to stop as you’re traveling. It did also help that you know that the various ingredients will be at the landmarks and you can kind of zone out or rush.

There is some resource management here, which puts some difficulty into the game. The biggest is money, which you’ll need to buy things you need or anything you want that only serve as decoration. There’s also gas as the truck needs gas in its tank to be able to run. So you need to keep an eye on it and make sure you’ll be able to make it to a gas station or at least have your fuel can filled. Lastly, you have to keep an eye on your inventory and think of the future. Do you have enough dishware so you won’t run out in the middle of taking orders or, fish forbid, run out right before a story-related order? Can you buy a new backpack upgrade or that new tool that you need or do you need to serve some more customers? Did you gather enough of an ingredient? Did you gather too much and now you have no room for the other ingredients? Do you have enough of an ingredient that you don’t need to gather any more right now? And of course you gotta do the last foraging round before leaving for the next island. There’s a lot to keep in mind, but it doesn’t feel overwhelming when you’re playing the game. It feels pretty natural as the game does a good job in putting you into that state of mind.

This will depend on play style, but personally I only struggled in the very beginning (since you don’t have much) and then briefly when I first got to the second island since I did but a lot of things that were both needs and wants. You typically do earn and find enough that you won’t be struggling for the majority of the game as long as you keep an eye on your ingredient stock and I always kept my eye on the gas so I never got stranded. It also helps that I bought dishware first so I wouldn’t have to worry about running out of money.

Finally, let’s talk about the cooking in the game. I love cooking games and I’m pretty sure that the fact this game had cooking mechanics was the reason why I was interested in it back when I first heard about it. The game starts out really simple on the cooking side and then slowly increases in complexity as you progress through the game. You start with just having two different ingredients, a knife, bowls, and only being able to make sandwiches. Slicing up ingredients is pretty easy to do as well as putting it in a bowl. But, you’ll soon leave the nest that is the first town you’ll visit where you’ll find different ingredients (Fruitbus may be called Fruitbus, but you don’t only use fruits in your dishes), as well as shops that will sell you new appliances, tools, and dishware so you can satisfy the plating requirements. Don’t worry though, the game does a really good job with gradually introducing new things and increasing complexity, so much that you won’t really notice until the very end (which is mainly due to later ways of preparing ingredients taking a longer time). Anyway, you will always be slicing up ingredients, but you may need to do something to them like throwing them into a blender or into the oven. You’ll also find the need for non-foragable ingredients as well. Slicing or blending ingredients doesn’t have a way to fail, but you do need to be careful and keep an eye on them when you move to actually cooking them. If you’re not careful, you can burn them but it does seem like you can still serve it without getting penalized. I didn’t have trouble with burning food, as it is easy to keep an eye on it and it’s not like you’ll be having to juggle multiple orders anyway as you only have to worry about one order at a time.

Of course, you’ll be serving dishes. This is the main way you’ll be earning money which will allow you to pay for the various things you need or want. Every time you get to a landmark, you’ll find that there are already people there and they react so wholesomely when they see you drive up. If you choose to, you can open up the Fruitbus for orders and they’ll start lining up. Each customer, when they reach the counter, will tell you what they want and all you have to do is make it. The game does keep track of what you have and what you discovered, so for the most part regular customers will only request things you would have and would be able to do. They’ll tell you the dish they want then you’ll be told how many ingredients they want in it. What ingredients they want can be left up to you, visualized by a spinning star indicating it’s blank, or they’ll request specific ingredients they want in it. Then you just have to make it, serve it to them, watch them eat it and “grade” it by satisfaction, and then be paid. And I say “grade” because they don’t exactly grade you but more tally up the points that you earned. Each ingredient will earn you a certain amount of points based on what it is (which I think is also based on how rare they are), some ingredients do also go together, some ingredients go best when put in a specific dish (like lettuce for salads), and dish types will also have their own ingredient match-ups (so ingredients that went good together for smoothies may not for sandwiches). Then everything is added up, along with the points each dish type automatically grants you, and that is how much you’ll get paid by the customer. Which they’ll toss into your payment bowl. Personally, I liked seeing how much I earned so I waited until I close up to pick up my money. It also helps that money does combine, having the small coins combine to the bigger coins, so you can do this and don’t have to worry about a pile of coins messing up your count.

The regular customers do have a fallback option where, if you find that you don’t have an ingredient they want, you can have them accept anything. All the spots where they’re requesting specific ingredients will become blanks. You can’t make them change the dish they want if you, say, ran out of cups for smoothies (at which you’ll need to just cancel their order), but if you don’t have any oranges you can still sell them a dish. However, the orders tied to story-related quests can’t be changed (which makes sense). You also do have to be careful as, if you do something wrong, you won’t be paid thus be out both ingredients and money. It’s a good penalty, and one that I didn’t run into until halfway through the second island, but it can be a bit annoying when you lose an ingredient that’s rare or from a previous island (or both). Just be careful as ingredients you put place won’t be able to be taken out and you can taste something to see if you got the right ingredient and to see all that you put into a dish. Also, don’t forget to taste grandma’s recipes to get those memory cutscenes. The journal does keep track of the various recipes you’ll discover (or make as I’m pretty sure it also tracks what you put into the display) so you can look back if you want to serve a big money maker.

Ingredients also did float too far away from the frying pan/pot sometimes, but I honestly liked it.

Customers also seem to have a preference for dishes that get introduced in their island before branching out after a while (which I feel is after the catering event as I remember thinking how no one is ordering sandwiches after stocking up on a lot of flour and then finally getting sandwich orders afterwards). They also do have a preference for ingredients that appear on their island, with regular customers asking for non-native ingredients rarely, so you don’t have to worry about doing a lot of fallbacks. I do recommend saving ingredients that only appear on previous islands just in case story orders request for them.

Then the loop restarts as you drive around, gathering ingredients, buying things you need or want, talking to characters, opening up for orders, cooking up some food for both regular customers and story customers to progress their story, making sure you have enough of what you need and keeping your eye on your resources, repeating as much you need until you do everything and open up the catering event, and then move to the next island where you do the same thing. It may not sound that good reading it out, but trust me it is way more fun playing the game and experiencing it yourself rather than reading about it. I guess I can summarize it all by just saying that Fruitbus has a really good, engaging, and satisfying gameplay loop.

Aside from all that, there are some optional things you can find or buy. In shops, alongside the needed tools, dishes, and equipment; there will be items you can buy to then customize your Fruitbus! There are various decorations you can place or hang inside the truck, decorations you can place on your truck outside (like a window planter, toppers, or those eyes you can put on headlights), and paint so you can change the color of the various pieces of the truck on the outside as well as the walls and floor on the inside. There are also decorations that you can find when exploring or be granted whenever you find a time capsule. There are even different variations of a decoration, which is pretty cool, and you can use paint on them if you want to change their color. You can also place the various equipment you need to help you cook and prepare ingredients anywhere you want. The space is a bit tight, but your Fruitbus has a high chance of looking different from other players’ Fruitbuses.

Other than that, there are stars scattered around each island for you to find. I actually called these starfishes for some reason, but these stars give off some sound when you’re by them and all you have to do is figure out where they are and get to them. Once you do and interact with it, they’ll give you some money. Which can actually give you a good boost. I was able to afford some tools I needed in the beginning of the game earlier thanks to this. Stars vary in how well hidden they are or how tricky they are to get to them. They also all give off different money amounts, which I feel is based on how easy it is to find them but I’m not too sure. It was a nice little thing to keep an eye out for and it was fun trying to figure out how to get to the more tricky ones. The map does show how many an island has and how many you found, but these aren’t tied to any achievements (plus no one has a guide on where they’re all at). Personally, I didn’t stress over finding all of them and I did find that I found a bit more than half of them.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with Fruitbus. It does take a bit to get used to the controls, but I loved how the game played. Exploring with the bus and on foot felt really nice. Even at times when I got stuck I didn’t mind since you can easily unstuck yourself. Though, man, it’s a crazy experience if you somehow end up flipping the truck. I felt the game had a good sense of progression as well and I liked how the various quests were handled. I also liked how all the ingredients are spread around all three islands, how some are unique to an island, and are unique to specific landmarks. And even some that you have to do the shrines to have them spawn. Even though it was a bit annoying with how quickly they despawn, I really liked how you harvest the chili peppers. As you can guess, there is some backtracking here, but I didn’t really mind it. You travel fast enough with the truck, things you would stop for are only by landmarks, it fit with what the game was going for, and it did add a level of difficulty. You not only have to manage your money and make sure you have enough dishes, but also think ahead to what you possibly will need. You don’t want to get too much of one ingredient as it can really hog up all the room in crates, but you don’t want to have too little where you end up running out before a story-related dish. Plus, when you leave an island, you have to think about what future story-related orders may want and stock up before leaving. You also have to think whether you should use up the ingredients, whether it’s native to that island or not. Would the money you’ll get be worth it or would you rather use a different ingredient to save that one for a possible future order? Personally, I didn’t have to go back to a previous island aside from that one side story quest that requests fruit from the next island.

I also liked the cooking here. For me, I did find that I don’t want cooking to be too easy but not too realistic and Fruitbus did hit that balance. Cooking is simple enough to where it’s quick and easy, but it also has enough room for complexity to be added. I even loved how while you can just cut up the ingredients to the max amount of times you can (which is diced or halving the clean slices), you can actually add the ingredients at the various stages the ingredients are. Like, you can cut a tomato so it’s four slices if you want it to be like how you would normally cut tomatoes for sandwiches. You can leave nuts whole or dice them up. You can stop cutting the cucumber so it looks like cute flowers. Or be a bit petty and make them eat a potato that was only cut in half. Not to mention it doesn’t matter what order you drop them into the dish. The cooking here is what I like to see in games. You create so many colorful dishes that do look like they’ll be tasty.

I’m one that chomps them like candy

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that I liked how the game has you learn new mechanics naturally by doing it or pulling from how it worked with previous tools. Of course you’ll learn the basics through tutorials, you are told steps to cooking something if needed, and the journal does have a quick and easy steps if you forgot how to cook a dish type; but it does start it by having you learn by doing. After that, it trusts you to figure it out and it does work most of the time. There are still some small things that the game really should have told you, but it mostly does a good job with having you learn everything naturally and trusting you that you can apply what you already know to figure out how to use new appliances or tools. You can also notice some things that the game does, which made discovering it really satisfying. Like how there is a way to see how many customers you’ll get before parking and you can see how many you have coming in/left when you open up for orders.

Most importantly, Fruitbus had the perfect gameplay balance that I look for in cozy games. Personally, I don’t like games that are super easy as it is a bit boring for me. I like some challenge even in cozy games, on top of wanting some kind of goal. Fruitbus was able to hit that balance of not being too easy and not being too complex. It still has those cozy elements as you’re not under any stress of getting orders done quickly, there’s no time limit for quests, cooking is pretty easy, and you can have regular customers change their orders so you can do whatever ingredients you want, but at the same time there’s all this management of resources, the cooking does have some complexity to it, and you do risk overcooking ingredients. It hit that perfect balance for me and it kept me engaged all throughout with the various resource managements and quests while still being a laid back cozy game.

Oh boy, Fruitbus had more negatives than I was expecting going in. I’ll go into the smaller stuff first and then talk about the biggest bug that I encountered (Note: the biggest bug I encountered has since been patched). First of all, I do think the game needed a tutorial or two more, or at least a section of the journal that tells you this. I really love and commend the game for having players learn new things naturally by doing (with a sprinkle of outside help from other characters and the beginning tutorials), but there is one thing that really should have been explained. How your customers want an ingredient to be cooked. This isn’t a problem for a good chunk of the game as it’s tied to the type of dish they want, but it does once you get access to more ways of preparing the ingredients. You’re not told that the background icon that requested ingredients has also double as how they want it to be prepared. I found it to be really easy to overlook the background icon being different (especially if it’s the roast icon) and you may end up failing a couple orders before looking it up. I know I did and was confused why I failed until I had my PS5 record the last 15-30 seconds, saw that the background icons looked different when I looked back on the footage, looked up what it meant, and then looked up how to roast an ingredient. I did also look up the other icon that will be added during the third island. While you will learn to look closer at the background icons after a while, I still think there should be a spot that tells you what each background icon means. Whether that means the appliances/tools getting a short tutorial tab or there being a spot that tells you in the journal. Especially since at the point they get introduced the game can’t spend a long time putting those icons in your mind as “hey roast this before putting it in a salad” through just play nor does a character outright say something like “Do you mind roasting the carrot? All you gotta do is put it in the oven and wait for it to cook!”

Well, that ended up taking me longer than I thought, but let’s get into the small bugs that I ended up experiencing. I found the backpack quick menu sometimes stays on the screen and you have to open it again to get it to close. I felt sometimes the fruit fetcher gets brought out instead of the backpack (and sometimes part of the fruit fetcher will be visible when you have it out). I kept hearing a weird sound effect that kept playing whenever I was parking by customers and I had no idea why. Whenever I loaded back into the game, Grandma’s urn will have that visual effect like she has something to say when she doesn’t. On the second island, I kept having a bug where the interview with the character obsessed with potatoes kept playing over and over. I did also have the first island’s volcano erupting announcement be broadcasted when I wasn’t on the first island. I had three instances where payment didn’t get tossed into the payment bowl. I didn’t catch what happened the first time, but for the second and third time (which happened back to back) it looked like there’s a chance the money would be tossed too close to the counter and thus getting stuck inside the counter (with the possibility of it being pushed up enough to where it pushes through to be on top of the counter). Do not, and I mean do not, be curious enough to pour a smoothie into the pot, find out it turns it into regular water, shut off the heat cause you think “I’m not going to waste this water”, then put ingredients in it. It will not cook, but instead stay in a weird limbo state, and the only way you can fix it is either buy a new pot or reload. There was one time when after naming a custom dish, pressing “X” brought up the keyboard to edit the name (even though the buttons for that are the triggers). I found it a bit weird that the last island didn’t have many decoration items in the stores. I also had one decoration item not appear in shops on the third island.

Aside from wanting to do a paragraph break here, the next two are bugs that did annoy me enough to somewhat affect my enjoyment. I found a hard time being able to pour anything aside from smoothies and water. The game just would not register that I was pressing the button to pour it. At worst, I would sit there pressing the button until it finally worked and at best it would be a rare moment where it’s registered on the first couple presses (and I was lucky once and got it with one press). This happened to me when I was needing to make dough and I honestly thought I was doing it wrong and, when I looked it up, thought my game was bugged and that I got softlocked. Luckily the latter wasn’t the case, but I struggled so much and I was relieved when the first flour bag poured since it meant that I wasn’t softlocked. It was still annoying though, especially since I found out it wasn’t just relegated to the flour. Next, I did end up experiencing quest-related customers asking for something I could not do yet. It was the intro quest you get when you arrive on the third island that not only gives you the new cooking tools, but also segways you to getting the other tools introduced on this island. Except, I ended up having two of the customers I needed to feed asking for ingredients to be stir fried…which I couldn’t do yet. I did think maybe it was a quest I had to go back to once I get what I needed, which did happen before but for ingredients that you didn’t find yet, were just told to find and feed them by the quest giver, and ended up just looking it up what I had to do to be able to access the shop after driving around for a while not finding anything else I could do. And of course, when I did, handling the side quest at the location and going back to unblock the shop to buy the new cooking tools, I went back to those two customers to find…that they weren’t asking for stir fried ingredients anymore. And the quest giver tells you where to find the tool and mentions what you can do next. It ended up kind of ruining the way the island was supposed to happen for me.

On a lesser note, it’s really easy to mess up the catering event if you park the Fruitbus in the wrong place before starting the event. I had variations of the second catering event where the animations didn’t go as planned and characters not in their correct spots. Characters can also be clipping into one another. I wished that the map tab would open to the map of the island you’re on as it did get annoying having to press down when I was on the second and third island (especially since I mostly opened it while driving) and there were a few times where I was trying to find where I was at only to see I was on the first island map. I did also find it a bit hard to spot where I was and what direction I was facing.

The performance on the PS5 is a little bit disappointing. There were noticeable frame drops all throughout my playthrough and there were a handful of moments where there was some lag for a couple seconds. I found it strange considering the PS5 handles other open world games that I feel would be more intensive on the system better. Though, I was able to overlook it as it never ended up hindering gameplay.

To go back to some good vibes, the visuals and sound here was wonderful and really helped set the cozy vibes. The visuals were definitely on point as everything is so colorful and cute (well aside from the junkyard). Each island has their own identity not only based on the landmarks but also based on how they look and the color palette that they use. It was nice exploring each island, discovering each landmark, spotting landmarks in the distance, and anticipating how the next island will be like. I do also appreciate how regular trees/bushes and fruit trees/bushes look different from one another. I did also like how the Fruitbus itself looked and how you were able to customize it a lot. Slowly transitioning it from Grandma’s Fruitbus to your Fruitbus. All the dishes also look so colorful and delicious. All in all, everything looks really nice here and it’s no wonder that Grandma spent her life food truckin’ on all three islands and that the customers love the dishes she and you cook up for them.

The various characters are also pretty cute. I don’t know how to really explain the style the characters are in, but I think it was a good choice as they do look good and cute. They also transfer well to their 2D artwork counterparts (you mainly see Grandma, but the others do have little 2D polaroid pictures) or the other way around depending on which one came first. The style the models had gave a lot of room to include a lot of different animal species as well as letting them be pretty expressive. The characters are all animated in a stop motion style and it looks good here as well. The only time it looks a bit weird is right at the very start since you don’t expect it and it does look a bit choppy if you’re too far away. Either way, the characters are animated wonderfully and I love how expressive they were. On another related note, I also loved the look of the memory cutscenes. They were so colorful and cute, evoking the vibe that your character drew these with crayons, and I loved it whenever they happened.

I always took a couple seconds to admire how good and delicious each dish turned out ❤

There are also so many tiny details that I really appreciated. My favorite is how the ingredients and dishes look like in the various states you can have them in. I loved how each time you cut the ingredients the state of that ingredient looks just like they would if you were preparing them in real life. I especially loved the ingredients that are sliced and spread out in a nice circle. It will even change color when you roast them and get marks when you fry them. Not to mention that the colors mix when you prepare them into smoothies and soups. I know Wanderstop released after Fruitbus, but this has what I loved about Wanderstop where the final outcome of the smoothie is a swirl of colors based on all of the ingredients that you put in. I liked seeing the various different color combinations for the smoothies as well as the soups (which doesn’t swirl like the smoothies but the secondary and tertiary will be different colors from the primary color).

Fruitbus has little ambience and it plays music in the background very rarely, so it’s a bit weird when you first start playing. Until you notice the radio, which is where you’ll get the background music when you turn it on! I didn’t pay too close attention to it, but I do feel like each island has their own playlist which did help give each island its own identity. I also did like how, despite it autoplaying the next track, the different radio stations are all on different songs so if you don’t like a specific track you can skip it. Or if you just feel like the situation calls for a slightly more upbeat track. The songs here really tied together the cozy vibes that this game was building up and I liked the majority of the tracks. There is also some voice acting through all of Grandma’s lines and the voice actor did a wonderful job. She really gave Grandma a, well, warm Grandma feel to her voice and you can really tell how much she loved her grandchild and cooking food for others. As well as having that layer where Grandma is obviously being child friendly for you, but you can tell how petty she’s being underneath that.

Verdict

I thought I would enjoy this game when it originally launched on Steam and I was right! I ended up really liking Fruitbus and I came to that conclusion pretty early on. The exploration on foot and driving the truck felt good, I liked the cooking mechanics, liked all the characters, liked the story, and most important of all it hit that perfect balance that I like where it wasn’t too easy but not too complicated. I also found the game pretty fun and it didn’t feel repetitive to me. Fruitbus is the perfect cozy game and is an easy recommendation. I even ended up doing everything (bar finding all the stars) and went to get all the achievements. However, the bugs that I encountered, does stop me from recommending it wholeheartedly. The game is still great and I think it is still worth experiencing, but I would recommend waiting a bit to give it time to stabilize and bugs to be ironed out. You can wait for a sale if you want to, but I do think Fruitbus is worth the full price even with the problems I ended up experiencing.

I would say that I also recommend not playing this when you’re hungry, but Fruitbus happened to make me hungry even though I ate right before playing.