There’s nothing like a nice cozy/wholesome game to play to unwind after a long day, and there’s no shortage of them in today’s gaming landscape. With entire Wholesome Directs chock full of low-stress, relaxing titles to look forward to, Fruitbus was on my radar from the last presentation. From Krillbite Studio, the developers behind Among the Sleep, this title sets its focus on running a food truck business on an island of critters eager to try complex dishes. Tasked with gathering the ingredients, maintaining the bus, and working the lunch rush, is Fruitbus all it’s cracked up to be from its trailers?

With a bittersweet start, you inherit the eponymous Fruitbus from your late grandmother after a charming mini-tutorial. You then learn that you must win over her old friends to entice them to come to her sendoff grand feast. Doing so will entail traveling through a dense island packed full of animals that are all hungry for your dishes. As you carry on the family business that happened to skip a generation, you’ll learn new recipes entailing all manners of fruit, add tons of useful trinkets to the bus, and accomplish all of your goals with the power of good food.

More than just a cooking simulator, Fruitbus sees all aspects of the food truck business come into play. That means you’ll have to fill up on gas, avoid damaging the bus, and tune up your engine in your travels. On top of that, every ingredient you’ll use in your meals has to be hand-picked. From the start, you can only carry two fruits at a time, meaning you’ll have to meticulously walk back and forth from the bushes to the bus before you get the necessary upgrade. For a cozy game to involve such tedious work ends up contradicting the nature of the genre.

Fruitbus is also rife with bugs that hampered the experience of many players at launch. It turns out the “save game” button in the menu actually didn’t do anything, so hundreds of hours of gameplay were lost in the 1.0 version of the game, including mine.

In a peculiar fashion, my game also randomly changed to German language, forcing me to pull up Google to translate my way back to English. The most egregious problem was that I lost even more progress when I got back into it. After getting my bus stuck and using the “unstuck” button, the bus just flat-out refused to work. You’re going to have to save often to eke out any fun in Fruitbus.

Fruitbus misses the mark as a “wholesome game” due to it feeling like a job in itself. Worse yet, it feels like it could break down at a passing glance. I wanted to like Fruitbus so badly, but between running back and forth, losing progress, and all the backtracking, it turned into a real chore. There were such high hopes for this title from its trailers, but it’s evident that Fruitbus needs more time in the oven.

A PC review copy of Fruitbus was provided by Krillbite Studio for the purposes of this review.

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Fruitbus

$24.99

5

Score

5.0/10

Pros

• Adorable Presentation
• Scenic Open World

Cons

• Too Much Busywork
• Distinct Lack of Direction
• Buggy/Unoptimized