It’s damned. Food truck games are cursed. I just want a good food truck game, but this happens all the time. Even though I’m someone who encourages people to play unspectacular games, I couldn’t finish the food truck game.
This goes back to Food truck simulator in 2022. I was very excited about this game, but when it came out, it was riddled with bugs and design issues that caused me to abandon it halfway through. Fruit bus is basically a repetition of this. Every time I sat down to play, either a bug or just an annoying design decision made me quit until I decided enough was enough. It breaks my heart, but I’m not finished Fruit bus.
Fruit bus (computer)
Developer: Krillbite Studios
Publisher: Krillbite Studios
Released: October 28, 2024
Suggested retail price: $24.99
conceptually, Fruit bus it’s fantastic. You play the role of a person who inherited a food truck from his grandmother. It’s seen better days, but it just needs up-to-date wheels and you’re off to the world. Your task is to convince her ancient regulars that they must attend a farewell feast for her.
That’s sweet. In a slightly morbid but very human detail, the grandmother’s remains – that is, the urn containing her ashes – are strapped to the passenger seat. But what really screwed up the beginning was the fact that your mother didn’t like Grandma’s goodbye at all. He doesn’t support you running a food truck, so he retreats to his house at the farthest end of the archipelago, only showing up every now and then to tell you what a disappointment you are. I’m paraphrasing it here.
No one really feels very grateful to Grandma. To get to the feast, you must solve their little problems and feed them food that will remind them what a great cook your grandmother was. These islanders are a bunch of morons.
The gameplay loop is basically acquiring ingredients, feeding customers to get money, and using that money to buy up-to-date tools and upgrades Fruit bus. Along the way, you aid the islanders, for example by starting a band or repairing a lighthouse.
Like I said, conceptually it’s a great idea. The whole thing has a lovely graphic style, although I’m not a fan of exaggerated stop-motion animations. At least I can respect them. The islands are rather petite, but the confined space is put to good employ with petite towns and long, open roads. They’re not the prettiest, but oh well, that’s okay. There are three islands and to get to each other you have to repair the radio tower and pay a fee.
I’ll repeat: run your business, complete side quests, unlock up-to-date areas, tools and ingredients. It’s a solid formula. This could work. I’m not sure where to start when describing places where this isn’t the case.
The quest design is probably the biggest problem. It’s solved in a familiar way: you enter a city, someone has an icon above their head, you talk to them, and they let you know what to do. This is placed in a journal that shows you are looking for seven people who responded to the invitation and an unknown number of side guests.
What frustrated me the most was how annoying these guys were. 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. OK, where should I look? The journal says that they must know one of Grandma’s smoothie recipes and that should jog their memory. Mango, banana, lemon. Great. I sell it to them, they drink it, they say they don’t have the courage to go to the farewell feast without their coin. Bitch, where? Give me a damn clue. The general area where you had it last. Island quadrant. Just narrow it down a bit.
And I don’t know what better to attribute to the mistakes, because they happened often. The one that really broke me was on the other island. There is wheat everywhere, an oven in the store, a baking tray, we will soon be making bread. I had a demanding time finding a wheat cutter, but it wasn’t too demanding once I stopped to think about it. I repaired the windmill, got a scythe and harvested wheat. I tried to make flour.
The fan is not intuitive. I finally discovered that eight pieces of wheat should be placed in one of the holes. I did it for the first time and there was no flour. So I checked the entrance slot and found that I could collect the wheat it had swallowed. Except there was something strange about this wheat; it was as if it had been partially removed from the world, but I was picking up what was left of it. Since I had no flour, I saved up, quit and came back. There was no flour, and now my scythe was gone.
I thought it was over, but I’m finally back. This time I managed to make flour. I went through unnecessarily annoying steps simply to learn bake bread and ended up with a loaf. The first person asking for a sandwich asked for an ingredient I had never encountered before. NO. That’s all.
This may all sound like nitpicking, but these are not isolated incidents. I ran into annoyances and bugs throughout, but it’s really demanding to demonstrate without polishing off a few huge ones. The problems ranged from petite ones that were easily ignored to larger ones that had me closing the game and coming back later, hoping to work around them. It seemed to be one thing after another and there was very little time left to really enjoy it Fruit bus does well. Every time the developer released a patch, I returned to the game, but the experience remained the same.
Creating a good food truck game in this style is harder than it seems. Just being able to create a drivable vehicle that can accommodate multiple physical objects without everything falling out, disappearing, or breaking is a feat of strength. Surprisingly, the bus itself is quite stable. There were some oddities, especially when loading the game or moving furniture, but they weren’t too annoying.
Many of the issues I’ve described and other major downtimes I’ve encountered can be resolved by taking the time to test the game thoroughly. I think a few more months and Fruit bus it would be closer to where it needs to be. But apart from pressing the brakes at the last minute, starting goes like this. I really, really wanted to love Fruit busbut I can only check how it was given to me.
