Ruffy and the Riverside

My first few minutes with Ruffy and the Riverside felt like finding a well-worn sketchbook on a shelf, the kind where every page is bursting with ink lines that somebody cared about too much to erase. The art direction alone earns a long look: every character is a hand-drawn 2D sprite running around inside a fully rendered 3D world, a Paper Mario-meets-N64 collision that, according to the developers, took seven years of hand-drawing to build. That patience shows in every chunky texture and thick marker stroke. At its heart this is a collectathon platformer with the structural bones of Banjo-Kazooie and Mario 64. You play as Ruffy, a bear chosen to save the island of Riverside from a cube-shaped villain called Groll, and you do it by collecting six magical letters scattered across seven regions, each gated behind enough Adventure Stars to feel earned but never punishing. The hub world is compact and quick to traverse, whether on foot or by riding a round haybale like a makeshift skateboard. The loop is familiar, but the SWAP ability is where Ruffy finds its own voice. Aim at almost any surface, material, or color in the environment, absorb its texture, then paste it somewhere else. Turn a waterfall into climbable vines. Freeze a lake by copying ice from a nearby ledge. Weight down a wooden raft by swapping its planks to iron. Rig a haybale race by turning the track ahead of your rivals into mud. The puzzles start straightforward and grow steadily trickier, and the game offers a coin-buyout on any puzzle that stops you cold, which keeps the pace from stalling. The honest ceiling on the SWAP is that it operates within fixed rules. Only certain textures apply to certain surfaces, and the game says no more often than the premise suggests it should. Players who imagine an open sandbox where anything can be transmuted into anything will run into that wall early. What you get instead is a well-curated set of environmental puzzles, roughly seven to ten hours of them, where the solutions reward observation over force. There are also 2D wall-platforming sections, Zelda-flavored sub-dungeons, ghost-riddle side quests, scoreboard-manipulation mini-games, and a population of eccentric NPCs whose dialogue walks the line between charming and slightly overlong. Combat is lightweight and nearly irrelevant; the handful of boss fights are creative but thin. The checkpoint system occasionally sends you back an annoying distance when platforming goes wrong, which is the kind of friction a breezy game like this could do without. The soundtrack leans heavily on a small number of cheerful looping themes that repeat across every region. It suits the mood perfectly for the first few hours and starts to grate gently by the end. The visual noise in denser areas can make the SWAP cursor fiddly to aim, a technical note worth knowing before you sit down. None of these are reasons to walk away; they are the rough edges that come with a small studio building something genuinely ambitious, and they read as honest craft rather than negligence. For anyone who grew up with the golden era of 3D platformers and has been quietly hoping the genre would produce a new voice rather than just a tribute act, Ruffy is that voice. It is not the open-ended physics sandbox the most excited pre-release coverage implied, but it is a warm, inventive, and lovingly assembled adventure that knows when to end.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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