Ruffy and the Riverside (PC)
Ruffy and the Riverside is a 3D platformer that approaches that genre in two different ways. When you first set out into the opening area of Riverside, you’ll find a collect-a-thon world where you’re free to explore and collect as you follow your own curiosity. When you start to follow the main story though, you’ll instead be taken to more linear areas with more focused and defined activities. Swapping between the two playstyles feels fairly appropriate though, considering that the defining power of this game’s hero Ruffy is to swap the nature of objects in the world around him.
Ruffy and the Riverside is a fairly light-hearted first journey for its bear hero Ruffy and his bee pal Pip. One day, the large mole Sir Eddler comes to interrupt Ruffy’s pleasant life as an artist’s assistant. Ruffy’s incredible ability to swap the nature of objects is now needed, Riverside in danger now that a cluster of dark cubes known as Groll is on the loose and trying to suck up the Marbles that help create the world. To protect the most important Marble, the World Core, Ruffy must gather the scattered letters that comprise the Riverside sign, this adventure getting him to leave the vivid and colorful forested area he calls home to explore beaches, a graveyard, and even participate in a skateboard-inspired competition where he needs to pull off tricks while riding a hay bale. Besides a few flubs where the character text boxes are not matched to the right speaker, the cutscenes mostly are small amusing touches used to prop up the journey as one suitable for young players and platformer fans alike, although things do start to take an unusual turn when you reach the finale. A lot of narrative reveals feel like they’re crammed into a set of rushed scenes, culminating in an ending that can leave you with a strange feeling. The adventure’s story usually isn’t demanding too much attention before then, although that can make Groll feel like an almost absent antagonist save for a fairly well constructed middle section where you finally get to know him a bit better. Somewhat oddly though, the game can have characters you speak to who reference upcoming events as if they had already happened, but that comes from the game’s interesting mix of letting you run free from the start before giving you some narrower goals as you search for those all-important letters.
On the surface, Ruffy’s platforming powers feel fairly simple. He has a jump plus the ability to grab his bee pal to drift forward until his stamina runs out. He has a simple punch and a tornado spin for attacking, but rarely are there many enemies to worry about and even most of the bosses make dealing damage a matter of course after you’ve avoided their attacks long enough or figured out their small puzzle. As mentioned earlier though, the defining mechanic of Ruffy and the Riverside is the ability to swap the nature of almost any object you encounter in the world. This power is used for plenty of interesting problem solving no matter where you might find yourself in the game. If you want to get rid of some wood blocking a river for example, you can swap that water into lava to burn it away. If you want to get somewhere up high, you can change that nearby waterfall into a climbable set of vines. The potential can feel a bit boundless at first, but you will start to notice that while Ruffy can select most any object that’s not a character, they will only grant a specific element. If you copy the grass, you get the color green instead of the plant cover, but mud will grant you the actual material. A tree’s leaves similarly only let you swap around their colors, but the bark serves as a source of wood should you need it.
After a lot of experimenting with what you find in the world, you can start to see the boundaries of the swapping system a touch, learning there are only so many materials on offer, but that doesn’t necessarily make the puzzle solving shallow. In fact, just because you can figure out you need lava doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right there for the taking. Problem solving in Ruffy and the Riverside can just as often involve finding the source of your desired swap power, especially since copying it will only last for a short while. You can find yourself starting to concoct routes to get a material where you want it, finding rest areas to place it and renew it, and since you can’t just swap anything with anything else, it’s more of a challenge than if you could just easily transport the desired power. What’s more, Ruffy and the Riverside starts to really embrace the idea of swapping specific symbols, numbers, and arrows as you get in deeper, meaning you sometimes need to find clues on how to lay them out almost like figuring out a password. The arrows can make objects move in the direction they point as well. The context of how even standard swaps like colors will change more as you tackle story objectives too, most every letter hunt playing differently because it focuses on some new way to engage with the mechanic instead of just being new homes for platforming challenges.
Sometimes though, you can see that Ruffy and the Riverside is a bit worried you won’t figure out its systems. One moment where this stands out most clearly involves a hay bale race where to win you must sabotage the race course, but in the only moment Pip really speaks outside of cutscenes, the bee will all but give away what you need to do. Sometimes a character nearby gives the a pretty on the nose clue if you talk to them, but you can instead puzzle it out on your own provided you’ve become wary of talking to whoever might be hanging around, and sometimes even being told what needs to be done doesn’t ruin the fun of executing a plan or making the right swaps work. Ruffy and the Riverside definitely has some clever puzzles for you to figure out that aren’t going to hold your hand though, the player not getting any new abilities along the way but they can gain knowledge of special interactions they can then try back in the open collect-a-thon space. One of the most compelling offerings though are the puzzles needed to enter the short 2D sections. A crow will tell you a riddle that relates to a set of tiles that each have a different amount of dots, the player needing to interpret the wordplay to open the path into the section. You can pay your way in with some of the coins you collect out in the world if you just can’t figure it out and that feels like a nicer compromise than those moments where the answer will be blurted at you should you just want to interact with the locals.
In a bit of a strange touch, most of the collectibles found in the opening area of Riverside are entirely optional. Coins will reappear any time you leave the area and are mostly used for buying a few capes and upgrading the stamina and recovery boosts they grant as well as extra health containers. You’ll need a lot of coins to fill these out, but also, if you’re spending a lot of time collecting, you’ll have more health than you really need fairly quickly, the game generally not focusing on peril outside of deadly drops meaning it at least the easily acquired rewards do not rob the game of its difficulty too much. There are small furballs called Etoi that hide in objects until you can find out an interaction to reveal them, there are Pattern Potatoes where you need to find the graffiti clue to properly swap their panels into the right shape, and perhaps most interesting of all are the Dreamstones. Dreamstones are probably the most common reward for figuring out a puzzle that is bit more substantial than a standard swap, your reward for gathering these being the ability to customize the world itself. Ruffy and the Riverside looks quite lovely much of the time. The environment is well lit and colorful despite some rough edges that you can notice on closer inspection, and the hand drawn characters, despite looking like they are made of paper, have a range of expressions and fit into the world just fine thanks to good posing and camera management. You never feel like you’re going to miss a jump thanks to the fact you’re technically 2D in a 3D world, but that 3D world’s rougher angles connect back to the Dreamstones. Once you get the Dreamstone tied to a texture, you can actually paint it yourself. While more a fun curiosity than something with a material impact, being able to customize how every rock, tree, and river will look is a rather unique reward that could captivate more artistic types.
The collect-a-thon aspect doesn’t entirely disappear when going down the main path either. There are butterflies to grab and small interactions like a few shark ponds to clear out, and while the game doesn’t track them automatically, when you do want to clear out the last few goals, you can start tracking the remaining collectables by marking them on the pause menu. The more experimental approaches to testing your swap powers also help to vary things up a touch although some of the collect-a-thon tasks boil down to doing the same thing in a few different areas, so spacing out that work with more focused puzzles helps to ensure both sides have their charm last. Some bouncy and funky music also likes to kick in at set moments to add some fun emphasis to them, and even when you are doing something like easily hopping between wooden rafts in a raging river, it’s easy to enjoy the brief shift into something unique even if it’s not very challenging.
THE VERDICT: Ruffy and the Riverside knows you want to play with its swapping mechanic, so it throws a big open space near the beginning to have fun exploring the wide potential of your power. Then, when you’re ready for adventure, it starts showing you neat new tricks you can do as it experiments with the way that swapping materials, colors, and symbols can solve problems. Some ideas are repeated a fair bit and it won’t always give you the room to puzzle things out yourself, but Ruffy and the Riverside is a bright and delightful adventure where you’re always going to be excited to see how your swaps can change the world next.
And so, I give Ruffy and the Riverside for PC…
A GOOD rating. It can feel a bit like Ruffy and the Riverside is only scratching the surface of its swapping powers at times while at others it digs in deep to reveal a creative new way you can alter the world. It does feel like some of the limits on how far it goes are realistic enough. If you could swap every material with ease it might be possible to finagle too many solutions out of unintended and unimaginative options, but by limiting how available certain swap textures are, then it can make a puzzle out of properly carrying it to where it needs to be. It doesn’t solely rely on just applying one object’s features to another either, sometimes a puzzle involves variables like how objects will be positioned after you alter them, and when the game is less overt with its clues, there is definitely a sense of satisfaction in working your way to the right solution. The almost unnecessary enemies don’t really hinder the adventure although the bosses could have likely leaned into swapping more, but perhaps the area that needs to push itself more is that opening area of Riverside. While it pulls you in with the wide inviting potential of running around and finding so many goodies at every turn so long as you can figure out how to use your powers to grab them, it also leans on a few ideas a bit too often and so much of it being optional can take some wind out of your sails. As nifty an idea as Dreamstones are, as much cash as you get from finding butterflies scattered about, the payoff doesn’t really drive you in the same way the adventure to collect the letters will, but thankfully the collect-a-thon area is also the hub that most things branch off from. You can engage with whatever puzzles you want before heading to a new place that is going to often concoct some unique mix of action and swapping. Multiple hubs with valuable finds in each could maybe better try to combine the appeals of both playstyles, but like I mentioned earlier, being able to swap between two different things is pretty much the whole idea behind this adventure.
The two 3D platforming design approaches that Ruffy and the Riverside alternates between can make it a hard game to pull yourself away from. You can get wrapped up in solving a slew of small puzzles in the hub but then, when you start to run out of tasks you can figure out, you can go find new ideas down the main road of the adventure. It’s an addictive sort of design that only has room to grow if the bear and bee at the heart of this game go on to have more adventures, the swapping mechanic heading many creative places already despite the clear room to keep expanding someday.