As much as I love the story and the mechanics, I cannot recommend the game in its current state. There are a lot of bugs, such as the coin icon on the tip jar z-fighting, audio issues, dialogue not showing when it should, etc. After I finished the story of the game, the ability to save was grayed out. I left the game after completing my final achievement, and checked to see if the game saved my progress. Unfortunately, it did not, and I lost all of my progress that I made after finishing the story.
This is honestly my biggest reason for not recommending this game. I really hope they fix all the bugs, especially the save one.

Glitches make it impossible to play.
(it just restarted the game while loading, and then all the cut scenes and triggers glitched out and made me have to reinstall)

I'm on the fence about this game. Picking whether I liked it or not was complicated as there are some good things and then...

The tedium ...
There is *way too much* tedium for a game that is supposed to be relaxing and some things that the game straight up doesn't tell you. Never tells you you can sprint (that's the least of them, at least if you played a game before you might find what to press to sprint), never tells you which container to use to get water, I had to look it up because my instinct was to use the jerrycan (which seems weird but you use gasoline to make a smoothie at some point) and then I used the jug but it didn't seem to work (you had to place it under the pump but it's finnicky so it didn't seem to work at first). It's also not very intuitive with how many items seem so be used for very specific needs, you'd think there would be a separate object/container just for water that you'd just have to refill every so often.

I've had to look up where to find a frying pan, since some items seemingly need to be cooked but I have found no way to cook them yet despite going through every shop and gas station, the game does seem to expect me to already have a way to do it though. I have the oven, I bought the tray for the bread. No frying pan. It turns out the game just expected me to know that I was supposed to just... Put the ingredient in the oven using no container. Once again counter intuitive since other cooking methods need a tool.

I also struggled to find a sickle and it turns out you had a quest to do for that (Once again, counter intuitive since every other tool is available in stores) so I'm guessing that's the case for the pan. Which quest will it be? I don't want to go back and forth in between every town only for the NPC to ask for food I can't make because I do not have the tool they ask for.

Making sandwiches is easily one of the most annoying things and it honestly made it so I dreaded having to make more later on. While having exclusive ingredients per island seem like a great idea, I feared having to come back each time I needed something specific from an island, so of course I had to stock up which is not great since that would mean having to get more crates for more clutter (tidying up isn't really as fun as I thought it could be. Too many things, too little space.)

This one is probably just a me thing but I do not like driving the bus. I much prefer just running and abandoning the fruitbus until I needed to make orders, which surely doesn't help with any of this.
I have so many mixed feelings because on the other hand, I like the cooking, I like exploring (on foot), I like the look and feel of the game... It just needs a whole lot of tidying up to be better. It needs to be more intuitive.