Ruffy and the Riverside Review - Adorable…But Is It Actually Fun?

As someone whose love of gaming started with 3D platformers like Sonic, Ratchet, and Sly, my joy for the modern revival of the genre is offset only by my frustration around how long it seems to be taking.  The AAA and indie scenes have delivered a small handful of absolute bangers in the form of Astro Bot, Shadow Generations, and Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom in 2024 alone, but genre enthusiasts like myself still await the day when we’ll be spoiled for jumpy, bouncy, mascot collectathon options.  For the record, if I had one high-quality 3D platformer for every high-quality 2D platformer we get in a year, I would be busy enough to shut up about this forever.  For now, I gobble up whatever I’m given and eagerly demand more, and this perhaps places undue burden on a game like Ruffy and the Riverside.  With its cute assortment of 2D characters placed in a colorful retro-styled 3D world, my fellow nostalgia-starved platforming simps and I see a game like this and care only to know how soon we can play it.  So, does Ruffy and the Riverside meet the expectations placed by its mascot platforming forebears, or am I going to have to figure out a bunch of puns about how Ruffy it feels to play?  Let’s find out!

Most platformers invent some unique idea to stake their claim in the genre, and Ruffy’s is an ambitious one – as described in the early moments of the game’s very dialogue-heavy story, Ruffy has the ability to SWAP – swap textures, that is – a video gamey-sounding power as I’ve ever heard, but one with unique practical implications in the game’s world of Riverside.  What if you could texture-swap to replace a waterfall with climbable vines so you can reach the top of it?  What if you could switch out metal boxes for wooden ones so they can be broken apart to clear a path through them?  And what if you could swap ocean water for lava to burn that hungry shark to a crisp?  Yeah, sure, that’s not very nice, but to be fair, he started it and I just ended it!

In theory, this is a mechanic with nearly limitless possibilities on how to interact with and manipulate Ruffy’s world.  In practice, it’s stiflingly limited to exactly the small set of possibilities the developers considered and not much else.  It also works as an unfortunate but appropriate metaphor for nearly every piece of Ruffy and the Riverside – there’s a decently fun game here if you’re willing to play by its rules, but its lack of polish and misguided emphasis on its own weakest elements can make even its best moments feel like two hops forward and a hefty stumble back.

I swear that I have quite a few positive things to say about Ruffy and the Riverside, but I’d like to get its most baffling aspect out of the way first.  Consuming Ruffy’s story feels like winning a year’s supply of Pop-Tarts with the filling sucked out, or going to a meal at a Brazilian steakhouse only to find out everything is vegan.  There is SO much story here and it’s trying SO hard to give you something worth being excited about, but just never manages to meet the expectations set by the colorful visuals and genuinely great soundtrack.  Even the most basic communications with its characters are line after line after line of bland, humorless dialogue that’s clearly trying to be charming and cute but succeeded only in making my eyes glaze over.  All for a very standard “You are the chosen one and must use your powers to collect X number of super special thingies to save the world” plotline.  

This plot was never going to keep me on the edge of my seat, obviously – it gives us an excuse to traverse a variety of biomes and that’s all that’s really necessary in this genre.  Where it could’ve been elevated by some witty writing and maybe an ounce of edge to its characters, it settles on a saccharine wholesomeness that lacks any sort of bite.  This leaves the tedious details of this very simple story in central focus and leaves me wanting to just skip through the lines of dialogue and not doing so because a character might say something important about my objective.  

You’re forgiven for thinking I’m silly for harping on a platformer’s story so much because I feel a tad silly about it, but it actively hurts the game when the sheer volume of dialogue to be clicked through at every interaction interrupts the pace so much. It’s partially for this reason that the first couple of hours in Ruffy and the Riverside left enough of a sour impression to make me think I was in for a stinker. I was painfully bored as the game dragged me from one expository set piece to another with little more than a few hops and some handhold-y puzzles to break it up. I really hope the developers can take a page from The Plucky Squire and release an update to optionally minimize the dialogue into something more concise.

Thankfully, though, once its characters decide to shut the hell up for more than a few minutes at a time, Ruffy starts to find his stride. The open world of Riverside may not have the depth and intrigue of Breath of the Wild, nor would anyone expect it to, but there’s a surprising density to its content that makes every corner spark with a new puzzle to solve, area to explore, or collectible to pick up. Many of these are optional, like the cutely-dubbed Pattern Potatoes, where you’ll have to swap a bunch of directional lines to match a particular image. Or there are the 2D levels you’ll often find grafted onto cliffsides, where you may have to texture-swap elements within the levels to collect an item or defeat an enemy.

I actually kind of liked the texture-swapping elements of Ruffy and the Riverside, but the lack of a cohesive internal logic left them feeling half-baked.

There were so many times I came up with an idea that the developer just wouldn’t allow – like, okay, I can texture swap a pile of sand into water so it forms a pool, but then I’m not allowed to turn that water into stone to walk across it because that would apparently be ridiculous. I can turn a wooden block into a metal block to make it heavier, but I can’t turn it into a dirt block or an ice block. In a sense, I feel for the developer because this is a genuinely good idea that’s extremely difficult to pull off if you have a limited budget to consider every conceivable type of swappable asset. But those limitations need to be communicated to the player in some coherent, logical way so they know what’s allowed and what isn’t. Since that never really happens, too many of the game’s puzzles fell into the trap of being either so obvious my dog could probably figure it out or so specific and obtuse that only aimless minutes of randomly experimenting with the world would produce the result needed.

Compounding the frustration this causes is that Ruffy and the Riverside is mostly puzzles. Seriously – for a 3D platformer, there is simply not a whole lot of 3D platforming going on here. While Ruffy can jump, glide, slam, climb, and more, these abilities are rarely contextualized into any form of genuine challenge. Most of the time, it feels like Ruffy’s platforming abilities are kind of a waste – used mostly for traversing the area between puzzles and story beats and rarely for the sort of precision jump-dash-dodge-slam-gliding that I crave. I won’t judge Ruffy too harshly for being a platformer that de-emphasizes platforming much since it has plenty of other gameplay to offer, but it’s worth consideration to make sure you know what you’re getting into. The early game’s platforming elements rarely emerge as more than convenient time-fillers, but this thankfully improves a little bit as the game goes on. The haystack-rolling that unlocks after a few hours, for example, is a great time and allows you to do some fun rail-grinding between areas, even if the challenge element still doesn’t enter the picture.

Unfortunately, while the game already struggles under the weight of its design issues, there’s an overall lack of mechanical polish exacerbating that. I ran into issues like mandatory collectibles that wouldn’t actually collect until the second time I collected them, a terrible map that sometimes doesn’t even accurately show my current location, quest markers that sometimes don’t correctly reflect where you need to go, and a stamina system straight out of Breath of the Wild which… literally just makes no sense here since there’s no free climbing and you never have to glide all that far. But fine, whatever.

As the game goes on and finds its stride, it does manage to be fun enough to make me wish the entire game was like that. Sections like the one where I turned water into mud on a track in order to cheat at a haystack-rolling race, or when I had to make my way through a maze via different context clues in each room were a good time, and underline the game’s more clever ideas in a way that lets it shine.

The presentation usually shines as well, even if it, too, has some odd issues that can hold it back. Each character is brought to life with beautiful hand-drawn animation (though I can’t for the life of me tell you what Ruffy keeps doing with his hands) and the environments are appropriately varied and full of vivid colors and unique landmarks that are fun to discover. Performance is generally great, even on Steam Deck, though the way entire sections of a level like to pop in from complete darkness sometimes is as jarring the hundredth time I see it as the first. I was at first mixed on the soundtrack, which is unapologetically weird, but it’s the kind of thing that grows on you and before long was stuck in my head (and not in a bad way). As the game went on, some of the songs were genuinely great too, so I think the musical work done here is extremely solid overall and probably the most consistently quality part of the package. Transitions between songs could definitely use some work though, as there are parts of levels where bits of soundtrack fade in and out so jarringly that it kind of breaks the vibe. And while I don’t normally take issue with cartoony grunts and laughs in place of actual voice work, the overuse of incessant giggling every time I would jump or glide grated on me before long.

It's hard to sum up my feelings on Ruffy and the Riverside when I want to really like it, but it pushes back on that want in so many frustrating ways, offsetting every one of its minor gains with an equally minor wart. An extra coat of polish will definitely help it, but fundamental issues like an aggressively boring, in-your-face story and puzzle logic that works only as often as it doesn’t make for a platformer that misses the mark far too often to leave one on the genre.

COMPETENT