Review: Fruitbus

It’s cursed. Food truck games are cursed. I just want a good food truck game, but this keeps happening. Despite being someone who encourages people to play less-than-spectacular games, I haven’t been able to finish a food truck game.

This goes back to Food Truck Simulator in 2022. I was quite excited about that game, but when it arrived, it was full of bugs and design issues that caused me to drop it midway through the game. Fruitbus is essentially a repeat of that. Every time I sat down to play it, either a bug or just an annoying design decision would cause me to walk away until I just decided enough was enough. It breaks my heart, but I didn’t finish Fruitbus.

Fruitbus (PC)
Developer: Krillbite Studios
Publisher: Krillbite Studios
Released: October 28, 2024
MSRP: $24.99

Conceptually, Fruitbus is fantastic. You play as someone who has inherited their grandmother’s food truck. It’s seen better days, but all it needs are some new wheels, and you’re off into the world. Your job is to convince her old regulars that they need to attend a send-off feast for her.

It’s sweet. In a somewhat morbid but very human detail, Grandma’s remains – that is to say an urn with her ashes – are strapped into the passenger seat. What’s really screwed up about the beginning, however, is that your mother is totally not down with grandma’s send-off. She doesn’t support you running a food truck, so she retreats to her home on the farthest reaches of the archipelago, only showing up occasionally to tell you what a disappointment you are. I’m paraphrasing her here.

In fact, no one is really feeling much gratitude toward Grandma. In order to get them to the feast, you need to fix their petty problems and feed them food that will remind them of what a great chef your grandmother was. These islanders are a bunch of jerks.

The gameplay loop is essentially foraging for ingredients, feeding customers to gain money, and using that money to buy new tools and upgrade the Fruitbus. Along the way, you help the islanders with things like forming a band or fixing a lighthouse.

As I said, it’s a great idea conceptually. It’s underpinned with a charming art style, although, I’m not a fan of the exaggerated stop-motion animations. I can at least respect them. The islands are rather small, but the limited space is well used with small towns and long, open roads. They’re not the most visibly splendiferous, but, hey, that’s fine. There are three islands, and to get to each additional one, you need to repair a radio tower and pay a toll.

Again: run a business, do side quests, unlock new areas, tools, and ingredients. It’s a solid formula. It could work. I’m not sure where to begin when describing where it doesn’t.

The quest design is probably the biggest issue. It’s handled in an immediately familiar way: you drive into town, someone has an icon above their head, you talk to them, and they let you know what they need doing. This goes in a log book, which reveals you’re looking for seven RSVPs, and an unknown number of side guests.

Where I ran into frustration is that these guests are irritating. The Crafter is the worst example of this. When you talk to them, they can’t even think about going to grandma’s funeral until they find their lucky coin. Okay, where should I look? The log book says that they need to have one of Grandma’s smoothie recipes, and that should jog their memory. Mango, banana, lemon. Groovy. I sell it to them, they drink it, they say they don’t feel like they have the courage to attend the farewell feast without their coin. Bitch, where? Give me a damned hint. A general vicinity where you had it last. A quadrant of the island. Just narrow it down a smidge.

Then there’s the chilli [sic] pepper. The critic wants a salad that features a chilli pepper, which isn’t something easy to come by. I correctly assumed I’d find them at the volcano. I climbed to the caldera, and an eruption spat some out. They’d land, sit for a moment, then disappear. No problem, I got about four of them. I didn’t go straight back to the critic. I toured the island first. The inhabitants used up all my peppers. I went back to the volcano, and there were no chilli peppers. No problem, I’d wait for them to respawn. So, I wait, and I wait, and I wait. I figured that this watched pot wasn’t going to boil, so I did other things for a while. I come back much, much later, and still nothing. I never saw another chilli pepper.

And I don’t know what is better attributed to bugs, because they happened frequently. The one that really broke me was on the second island. Wheat everywhere, an oven in the shop, a bread pan, we’ll be making bread soon. I had a hard time finding a scythe for the wheat, but it wasn’t too difficult when I stopped to think about it. Fixed the windmill, got a scythe, and gathered wheat. Tried to make flour.

The windmill is anything but intuitive. What I eventually discovered was that you need to stack eight pieces of wheat in one of the openings. The first time I did this, no flour came out. So I checked the input slot and found I could pick up the wheat that it had swallowed. Except there was something weird about this wheat; it’s like it was partially removed from the world, but I was picking up a remnant of it. Since I had no flour, I saved, quit, and went back in. No flour, and now my scythe was gone.

I figured that was where I was done, but I eventually went back. This time, I was able to make flour. I went through the needlessly annoying steps just to learn to make bread, and eventually wound up with a loaf. The first person asking for a sandwich asked for an ingredient I had not yet encountered. No. That’s it.

This may all sound like nitpicking, but these aren’t isolated incidents. I ran into annoyances and bugs throughout, and it’s hard to really demonstrate that without honing in on a few big ones. Problems ranged from small ones that were easy to ignore to bigger ones that would cause me to close the game and come back later, hoping to work around them. It seemed like it was one thing after another, and it left very little time to actually enjoy the things Fruitbus does right. Every time the developer would release a patch, I’d jump back in, but the experience would remain the same.

Making a good food truck game in this style is harder than it looks. Simply being able to create a driveable vehicle that can hold multiple physics objects without everything falling out, disappearing, or breaking, is a feat of strength. Surprisingly, the bus itself is pretty stable. There were quirks, especially when loading a game or moving furniture, but nothing too vexing.

A lot of the issues I outlined and other big stoppages I ran into could be ironed out with time focused to careful playtesting. I think that another couple of months, and Fruitbus would have been closer to where it needs to be. But barring a last-minute stomp on the brakes, this is how it’s launching. I really, really wanted to love Fruitbus, but I can only review how it was served to me.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}