Fruitbus is the Adorable Food Truck Simulator My Blackened, Cynical Heart Desperately Needed

After weeks of nothing but grim shooters, horror games and more, this colorful, low-stakes adventure about making salads for sad animals felt like a goddamn spa day for my soul.

There are times when you want a game to challenge you, to push your skills to their absolute limit and leave you a sweaty, trembling mess. And then there are times when you just want to drive a brightly colored van, chop up some fruit, and serve a smoothie to a sad bear who’s having a rough day. After a long stretch of playing games that felt more like a second job in a digital salt mine, I dove into Fruitbus hoping for a simple, mindless distraction. What I got instead was one of the most genuinely charming and unexpectedly heartfelt games I’ve played all year. It's a game so relentlessly wholesome it feels like an act of rebellion in today's market, even if its adorable exterior is hiding a few bugs and some seriously questionable driving physics.

A Recipe for Redemption

The game kicks off with a simple premise: your grandmother has passed away and left you her old food truck, the titular Fruitbus. Your mission isn't just to become a culinary superstar, but to travel across the Gustum archipelago, track down all of her old, estranged friends, and convince them to come together for one last farewell feast. It's a lovely setup, but you quickly learn there's a catch. Grandma, bless her heart, was apparently kind of a jerk. Her method of "tough love" seems to have mostly involved taking people's stuff and generally being a pain in the ass, leaving a trail of broken friendships in her wake.

So, your journey becomes a posthumous apology tour. You have to mend fences the only way a food truck operator knows how: by winning people over with delicious food. This narrative core is surprisingly effective and emotional. Each character you need to win over has their own story and their own reasons for being mad at your grandma, and you slowly piece together her life through their memories. It’s a bittersweet and genuinely touching story about forgiveness and the messy reality of lifelong relationships.

The Zen of Foraging and Chopping

The daily grind in Fruitbus is anything but. The core gameplay loop is dangerously addictive in its simplicity. You drive your bus across these gorgeous, colorful islands, parking wherever you please to go foraging for ingredients. You’ll be yanking apples from bushes, climbing cliffs for bananas, and eventually saving up enough coin to buy a shovel so you can unearth some carrots.

Once you've got a decent haul, you find a spot with some cute animal locals, roll up your shutter with a satisfying clatter, and start taking orders. Making the food is a delightfully tactile and stress-free process. There are no timers, no angry customers, no Gordon Ramsay screaming at you because the fruit salad is raw. You just grab your ingredients, toss them on the cutting board, chop them up with a few simple clicks, and serve them in a bowl. It’s meditative. As you progress, you'll earn enough to buy new equipment, like a blender for smoothies or a stove for stir-fries, which opens up a whole new world of culinary possibilities.

This Bus Drives Like a Drunk Elephant

While you're not serving customers, you're on the road, and this is where the game's charming facade starts to show some cracks. Let me be clear: your Fruitbus is an absolute pig to drive. It handles with the grace of a 40-ton truck with a flat tire, possessing a turning radius that would make an oil tanker blush. I have gotten this adorable little van hopelessly stuck on pebbles that a real car wouldn't even register. The vehicle's hitbox feels ludicrously large, turning every narrow path into a high-stakes game of Operation.

The physics are equally chaotic. I spent a good twenty minutes once carefully organizing all my foraged fruit into baskets in the back, creating a beautiful, color-coded display. I saved my game, feeling proud of my work. When I loaded it back up, the interior looked like a grenade had gone off in a grocery store, with apples and bananas strewn everywhere. It’s funny the first time, but it quickly becomes a recurring frustration that undermines the game's otherwise zen-like atmosphere.

A Postcard-Perfect World (With Some Empty Patches)

Despite the vehicular mayhem, the world of Fruitbus is an absolute delight to exist in. The art style is a knockout, a vibrant, pastel-colored dream that feels like stepping into a children's storybook. The animal characters are so damn cute it should be illegal. Just driving along the coast, listening to the chill, folksy tunes on the in-game radio as the sun sets is a genuinely beautiful and relaxing experience.

The only real issue is that the islands themselves can feel a bit sparse. For every charming town or secret grotto you discover, there are long, uneventful stretches of road with not much to see or do. The world is beautiful, but it could have used a bit more density to make the exploration feel consistently rewarding.

The Verdict

Fruitbus is a heartfelt journey about connecting with people, righting old wrongs, and the simple power of a good meal. The story is surprisingly bittersweet and genuinely touching, and I'll admit, the ending got me a little misty-eyed. It’s a game that wraps you in a warm, comforting blanket and doesn’t let go for its entire 15-20 hour runtime.

Despite the occasional wonky physics and minor bugs, the core experience is so pure and so enjoyable that it’s easy to forgive its rough edges. It’s the perfect game to play when the world feels a little too loud and a little too mean. It’s a reminder that sometimes, the most revolutionary thing a game can do is just be nice.

8.4/10 Like a warm hug in video game form, but sometimes the hug is a little clumsy and knocks a lamp over.

We at NLM received a key for this game for free, this however didn't impact our review in any way.