Fruitbus

Fruitbus is a wholesome sim that promises a charming mix of cooking and exploration, in equal parts. Like many games in the genre, it’s aimed at providing a stress-free, cozy experience. Unfortunately, in this case, the infuriating controls, many suboptimal design choices and numerous physics bugs make it far more frustrating than relaxing.

To start with the positives, the premise of the game is lovely and was the main reason I was drawn to it. After your grandmother passes away, you inherit her Fruitbus. It’s a food truck that she used to drive around the island to serve fruit smoothies and salads, soothing not only the hunger of her customers but also their hearts with a good word or a piece of advice. As such, she is fondly remembered by everyone as a kind soul. Despite this, none of her old friends seem to be eager to attend the Farewell Feast she asked you to host. Instead, they make you prove your worth through quests (which doesn’t make much sense) before reluctantly agreeing to her request. Plot inconsistencies aside, the main focus of the game becomes completing their requests. Whether it’s tracking down lost items, obtaining specific Fruitbus upgrades, or talking to a certain NPC, nearly everything boils down to serving them the meal they request, which makes them give you hints for completing their quests or triggers a memory of your grandma. Sadly, these cutscenes cannot be re-watched, and they mainly serve to show cryptic quest locations rather than build the story.

Gathering ingredients involves driving the Fruitbus between towns and exploring nearby areas on foot. The cooking mechanic is rather uncomplicated, requiring just a few clicks to dice fruit or blend it into a smoothie that you can then transfer to a bowl or, respectively, a glass (later on, more complex dishes can be made too). A small perk is the absence of tool durability, although you’ll need to keep buying new tableware items to serve your dishes, as they’re single-use. The game allows you full freedom of action, as no stamina mechanic restricts you from doing only a certain number of things during a day, no shop schedule, no seasonal ingredient spawn, and no need for you to sleep. The NPCs are always available for a chat, to turn in quests or pick up new ones, and ingredients are present in the game world no matter the time of day or how many days have passed since you became the owner of the Fruibus.

Sadly, these positives are outweighed by the negatives, most of which come from the game’s design of controlling each arm separately. While this is probably meant to add some realism, it mostly results in needless micromanagement and clunky controls. For example, before acquiring a backpack, you can gather only two ingredients at a time, because you can carry only one ingredient in each hand. This makes you go back and forth between a nearby bush or a tree and your Fruitbus to store those fruits. Even with a basic backpack that can hold 12 items (the carrying capacity can be expanded later on, after unlocking new islands), adding ingredients is clunky: each fruit must first be held in one hand, inspected, and then manually placed inside.

There’s no storage interface; thus, retrieving one specific item from the backpack requires you to take out its contents one by one until you find your desired one. Collected fruits are dumped in crates, and there’s no UI showing how many items they contain or what they are. Sometimes these crates even glitch out, causing your fruits to fall on the floor and potentially making you lose progress, as fruits that are not stored in crates immediately start to rot away.

The whole cooking flow is equally cumbersome. You pick up the knife in one hand and the fruit in the other, only to realize that you forgot to prepare a bowl first. You put down the fruit because you need a free hand to grab the bowl, and when that’s done, you pick up the fruit again, dice it, and finally place it in the bowl. This whole process takes way too many steps (even if dicing only involves holding down one mouse button), especially annoying considering that it’s something that you will have to do hundreds of times in the game, essentially for each ingredient you want to use in a salad.

The shopping process is also overly complicated. The items you want to buy must be grabbed directly from the shop’s shelves (two at a time because you can carry only one in each hand), then placed on the counter. There’s a coin machine next to the counter that has to be filled with enough coins to cover the expenses, and in the end, you have to talk to the cashier to finalize your purchase. Carrying the newly purchased item back to your Fruitbus is also done two at a time. To open the packages and install the new wares, you need to use a designated tool, which obviously occupies one of your two hands. And on top of everything, you first need to manually pick up the coins from your Fruitbus’ coin box to be able to pay the store.

Customer flow is also very poorly handled. Food orders often contain ingredients that exist on the island but which you haven’t discovered yet. While you can serve them a substitute meal, sometimes by using a mix of ingredients chosen by you, other times by fulfilling their alternate request (if you have enough ingredients to do so), this feels unsatisfying. Handing out random items as quest progress is not something acceptable in any other game. Starting with mid-game (second island and beyond), customers often request dishes that involve ingredients gathered on the first island (and they particularly like to include one rare ingredient in their mix), which will have you go back and forth between islands to gather them, without any way to fast travel between locations.

The ingredients are plenty to be found, but their spread on the map is very uneven. Some spawn rarely, only in certain zones, and take days to regrow. None are marked on the map, so you must memorize locations and periodically revisit them to replenish your stocks. Some only grow on trees, making them hard to reach unless there’s some sort of crate construction nearby that you can use as a stool. Later on, you can buy a tool that can pluck fruits from trees, which makes the whole process much easier, except the game doesn’t preemptively tell you that this tool even exists. It’s actually introduced via a quest whose purpose is quite different, and to be able to get the quest and buy this useful tool, you need to have reached a specific area of the island with the shop that sells it.

Much like ingredients not showing on the map, accepted quests also aren’t tracked on the map, thus you cannot even plan an optimal route to complete them. The quest log isn’t mouse-scrollable; you must navigate through each NPC’s entries with the arrow keys. After leaving the first island, the map always defaults back there instead of showing your current island location.

All-in-all, the game’s adorable aesthetic and cozy gameplay are buried beneath a mountain of overcomplicated mechanics of having to juggle both hands at the same time, which makes it cumbersome to play. The physics are rather clumsy and, to some extent, broken (there are many collision bugs, among others), which adds to the already huge pile of issues that this game sadly has. Fruitbus had great potential to be a heartwarming journey, but as it stands, it’s far more frustrating than fun. I can’t recommend it.