Fruitbus

Fruitbus was provided by Krillbite Studio for review. Thank you!

Fruitbus is an interesting one. Borne from the plethora of "cozy" games that have flooded the market recently, Fruitbus is worthy of this moniker. It's an unapologetically laid-back and relaxing experience, with almost no pressure to do anything. So it's right up my street, and it's the kind of game I like to play, especially on the colder nights as we approach winter.

Fruitbus is basically about, well, running a Fruitbus. Although it's more of a Fruitvan...Regardless of semantics, this is the premise of the entire game. You've arrived on the Banamas islands after your grandma (the previous owner of the Fruitbus) passed away, so you're carrying on her legacy in the Fruitbus, delivering salads and joy to the island's residents in preparation for Grandma's farewell party.

The main gameplay loop of the game is collecting fruit from the trees and bushes around the island, storing them in containers on your Fruitbus, and then preparing them and delivering them to the island's residents based on what dish they request. These can range from simple Apple and Banana salads to more complex Smoothies containing other ingredients like Mango, Chilis, and Carrots.

Even if you can't fulfill a resident's request, you can always ask for a simpler recipe to make or just reject their request with no consequence, which plays into the relaxing nature of the game. Sure, rejecting a request might mean you can't advance the plot immediately, but there's no penalty for delaying progress. You can return later with the right ingredients and/or equipment and make their desired dish.

But let's talk about the actual Fruitbus! This little machine gets you around the island and stores all your delicious fruit and vegetables. As you progress through the game, you can purchase upgrades and furniture through the profits you make selling your dishes. These include functional items like extra containers for fruit, a blender for making smoothies, an oven for cooking, or even a fruit grabber for getting that hard-to-reach fruit on tall trees. You can also buy countertops to fit in your Fruitbus for additional work surface area, which is useful when storing all the bowls and glasses for your delicious dishes.

You can also get more decorative furniture, like stools or painting your bus, which serves little purpose other than to make your Fruitbus look more homely and cozy. You'll also need to fuel your little workhorse but don't worry, fuel is dead cheap, and you don't need to fill it that often. Eventually, you'll be able to upgrade the engine and wheels of your Fruitbus so it can take you places faster and traverse different terrain better.

As you explore the villages on the islands, you'll meet new residents. Some are just tourists who exist to give you money, and permanent residents of the islands who often have specific quests for you to fulfill, such as finding something that's been lost or preparing a specific (often hard to make) dish for them to advance their quest line.

While the quests to make specific dishes are fairly straightforward (as long as you have or know where to find the ingredients), some of the quests do seem to be a bit vague and slightly frustrating. For example, one of the residents wants you to find their lucky coin. I was told by the game that feeding them their desired recipe would give me a hint, but all I was told was that my grandma hid the coin from them, there is a "show on map" button in the menu for the quest, but I went to that location there was nothing there from what I could tell, stopping me from progressing.

Once you earn enough money, you can pay for a ferry to progress to the next map, which unlocks additional fruit/vegetables for you to make recipes with and new methods of creating dishes, such as using an oven. There are three maps in total for you to explore.

Visually, the game is OK. The developer has adopted a low-poly style with basic shading. Unfortunately, the shadows seem to struggle in this game, and there are frequent flickering and low-quality shadows, even on higher-quality settings. The visuals could use some work, especially to fix the odd shading and a couple of other visual glitches I encountered, such as the volcano lava/smoke not appearing if you save and reload a game at the volcano. Still, overall, the game's graphics are serviceable.

The music in the game is also quite pleasant and fits in with the relaxing atmosphere that the game is going for. While in your Fruitbus, there are various radio stations that you can choose from, which mostly have laidback tunes playing on them. You don't even have to be driving to have the tunes playing, so you nearly always have a background accompaniment of some island tunes. The footstep sounds incredibly irritating, though; they play too frequently, especially when sprinting.

Another downside I found is that some fruits and vegetables are quite rare, and they can take a long time to respawn, so if you get some rarer fruits/vegetables like Chili Peppers, ensure you don't waste them on unnecessary recipes. I did so and waited over 30 minutes in real time, hoping they would respawn, but they didn't. They respawn after several in-game days, and there's no way to speed up time. This is by far the most frustrating part of the game, and I can't tell if my game was bugged or if the respawn timer is that long.

As it is, I think any respawn timers should be minimal. It seems like there is meant to be a solid 15-20-minute respawn on a lot of the resources, and that just seems to go against the spirit of the rest of the game. There should be no need to sit and do nothing while you wait for the necessary ingredients to spawn.

Sadly, the bugs I've mentioned seem to be a bit of a theme with Fruitbus. I encountered visual glitches like shadows flickering, lava and smoke not appearing, and characters sitting in mid-air. There were also gameplay glitches, such as the jerry can I owned seemingly filling up with extra fuel each time I reloaded the game, resulting in a jerry can with 6 bars of fuel when it's supposed to only be able to hold 3, and it had been empty previously.

There is a day 1 update that may fix some of these issues, but since they were present in my playthrough, I am leaving them in. You will most likely not experience these bugs when you play.

The world design can also feel a bit unpolished, with certain objects floating above the ground, given that the worlds aren't overly large, you would kind of expect there to be more attention to detail, but the game in general seems to lack that.

Fruitbus - Steam Deck Performance

Fruitbus supports 16:10 aspect ratios and runs at 1280x800 on the Steam Deck, meaning there are no black bars around the screen. The game also has great controller support.

However, Fruitbus is quite difficult to run thanks to a strangely intensive CPU demand, so I'm just offering my recommended preset, which is a good mix of quality and battery life.

Recommended Settings - 40 FPS

We're setting the SteamOS frame rate limit to 40, and we'll have no TDP Limit here.

If you want the best quality out of Fruitbus at a 40 FPS frame rate, you can set the in-game graphics settings as follows: Post FX Enabled: On, Fog Enabled: On, V-Sync: On, Anti-Aliasing: FXAA, Graphics Quality: Medium, Resolution 1280x800 60Hz.

I checked the difference against a leaf on having the Anti-Aliasing on FXAA or the more intensive SMAA, but there was zero difference due to Fruitbus' art style, so we might as well use the easier-to-run FXAA for this game. The main strain on the Steam Deck comes from the bizarrely high CPU usage in Fruitbus, so we need to free up as much CPU power as possible.

With these settings, you can mostly hold 40 FPS, but at certain times of day, the performance seems to struggle more. In villages at those times of day, expect the FPS to drop to the low 30s. There will also be the occasional stutter, especially when driving around the island in the Fruitbus. Generally, Driving seems quite intensive, so don't expect to hold 40 while driving.

The power draw varies quite a bit depending on whether you're in a village or the countryside. For the most part, expect it to be around 13-15W in the countryside and around 16-20W in a village. I would estimate 2-2.5 Hours of battery life for a Steam Deck LCD and 2.5-3 hours for an OLED.

Temperatures can get pretty high in the villages, up to 85C on the CPU, with the fan kicking in quite hard at that point. Outside of villages in rural areas, though, temperatures tend to be around 70C, a bit higher if you're driving.

Unfortunately, even on the absolute lowest settings, the game still runs in the low-40s to mid-50s due to the high CPU usage, so there's no hope of a stable 60 FPS experience.

Accessibility:

Fruitbus has no accessibility options, although all dialogue, whether voiced or not, is subtitled.

Conclusion:

Fruitbus embodies the "cozy" game experience. Aside from the not-so-real worry of running out of fuel, there's no pressure to do anything here. Nothing can go wrong with Fruitbus, so if you're after a relaxing time to just chill out at the end of the day, Fruitbus is just for you.

There are some visual oddities here and there, a couple of vague quest lines, the issue with rare resources taking an age to respawn, and a few more bugs than I'd like there to be. There's also the fact that the performance is quite poor, considering how the game looks. I expect to play this game at 60 FPS on the Steam Deck, but that's impossible even with low settings. The game does control nicely, though, and remains perfectly playable on the Steam Deck.

If the bugs are fixed and some more polish and optimizations are made, Fruitbus could be a fantastic title for relaxing on the go. Right now, it's just a decent title for me.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.