Fruitbus preview: a comedy food truck adventure I didn’t know I wanted
As much as I enjoy cooking in real life, cooking in video games often is either so simple (i.e. combining ingredients in a menu) or so complex (i.e. Cooking Simulator) that it can struggle to truly feel fun. Maybe that’s why it was so easy for me to fall in love with Fruitbus, an upcoming first person adventure game that tasks the player with running a food truck business in a playful world. I had a blast demoing the game, and I can’t wait to spend more time exploring the game’s tropical paradise, hunting for exotic ingredients, and cooking up a storm for the locals.
Fruitbus is the latest project from Krillbite Studio, whose previous projects include horror game Among the Sleep and moody narrative adventure Mosaic. While Fruitbus is a much more whimsical experience, it also seems to have a surprising amount of depth beyond its cute surface. I chatted with Martin Kvale, a sound designer on the project, as I played through the first half hour or so of the game.
At the start of Fruitbus, the titular food truck has certainly seen better days. I strolled into a junkyard to find the mobile kitchen in a heap, relieve of all four of its tires and covered in dirt. The vehicle was previously owned by the protagonist’s grandmother, who we see briefly in the game’s prologue but has since passed; however, she left the food truck in the hands of the player to help carry on her legacy. Your main goal? To throw a feast in her name.
“However, she also had some outstanding debts. Your grandma messed up,” Kvale said with a laugh. “So she’s like, hey, could you please help out by connecting with my friends and helping them out so they’re no longer angry with me? Maybe they will come to my funeral.”
So the player sets out to make amends by, apparently, growing their food truck empire. Once the player gets the wheels physically reattached to the Fruitbus, a short ferry ride across the pond drops them on the island of Banamas (not to be confused with the Bahamas). It’s a bright and sunny place, and apparently, just one of the explorable islands in the Gustum archipelago. It’s also filled with a bunch of strange looking inhabitants – both cute and mildly unsettling to look at – who are eager for a new dining option on the island. Luckily, the customers seem okay with waiting while you go off and hunt for ingredients!
The Fruitbus can be driven all over the island, and it’s quite fun to do so – its a bit weighty, but just nimble enough that it handles just fine on the island’s twisty roads. But there’s more to driving than just holding the trigger down.
“If you’re starting a car, you have to actually turn the key around. You also have to make sure that the handbrake is off, which people sometimes forget to do, ” he joked. “The world is quite tangible in that sense.” Sure, it’s not as much to manage as something like Pacific Drive, but adds a bit of immersion to the experience which I really liked. The truck’s off-roading capabilities seem questionable, but I can imagine creative players will likely enjoy trying to get it to places where it shouldn’t.
That deeper level of physical interaction is a huge focus of Fruitbus. The player needs to physically pick up and carry things with both hands, mapped to the left and right triggers respectively. Find an ingredient? Pick it up and carry it back to your bus. Want to cut it up into a fruit salad? It’s a process: grab the knife, spam the button to chop it, put the knife back, grab a bowl, put the fruit in the bowl, open the truck’s shutters, and then finally, set the bowl down on the serving counter. While it took me a few minutes to get used to the high level of interactivity, before I knew it I was cruising through basic food preparation.
“Everything scales up in complexity,” Kvale said. “If you want to make simple stuff, you can make bread. If you make sandwiches, that’s more complex and people will like it more, which means you will get more money. When you make more interesting food, people will really respond well to that.”
Of course, don’t expect to be cooking Michelin Star meals from the start. The first barrier to growing your business is expanding your repertoire of ingredients, which can be found all over the island. Some might require a little hiking to get to; others might require tools to access, like digging up veggies that grow under the ground. I found a mountain that was ripe with banana plants, but since my demo took place early in the game, I could only hold two objects at a time, meaning it took a few treks to bring stuff back to the truck. (Although in retrospect, I wonder if I could have just tossed them off the side and retrieved them once arriving at the bottom.) I was told later in the game, there will be different solutions unlocked, like a backpack to let you carry and explore more.
“The world is full of wonder. If you’re looking, you’re going to find something interesting,” Kvale said.
The second obstacle is cooking equipment. Eventually, the player will be able to purchase appliances like ovens and blenders, opening up a wide range of new cooking options. I’m excited to see how deep the cooking system will go – I love how it feels both simple to understand, yet very freeform.
It also seems like the Fruitbus itself will have a decent degree of customization available, although I didn’t do this during my demo. You can arrange all your cooking apparatus inside the vehicle, and keep your food as organized or disorganized as you care to, hanging shelves and placing crates and such. The outside can be customized too, with various colors and decorative objects available to be unlocked through gameplay. Beyond cooking, it seems like there will be other casual activities to do out in the open world like fishing. Residents may even ask you for favors around town, and reward you for doing so.
In terms of presentation, the game looks and sounds great – while the visuals are simple, the colorful world, strange characters, and bouncy music give the game a unique identity and strong personality. The characters are animated at a lower framerate than the rest of the world, almost making them look like stop-motion puppets, yet they remain very expressive (perhaps a little too much, as some of their eyes and teeth had me a little put off!)
While I only got to play a small slice of Fruitbus, I had a great time from start to finish, and genuinely can’t wait to play more of this one. Cruising around an island, exploring and cooking up grub sounds like the type of gameplay loop I could lose a lot of time to, and I think I’d have a great time doing it. I’m looking forward to the game’s full release on Nintendo Switch sometime in 2025.
