Ruffy and the Riverside was a direct standout when it was first introduced with a gameplay trailer. The sport makes use of a vibrant palette of colors, hand-drawn sprites, and a novel gameplay mechanic that allows you to copy and paste textures to vary the world round you. The trailer stuffed me with the spark of creativeness – what unusual, humorous, unexpected prospects awaited in a recreation the place you possibly can copy and paste textures?
Having performed the sport in full, I’m dissatisfied to say that the chances are most definitely foreseen and that they barely transcend what was already proven within the trailers.
A Whimsical Time by the Riverside
Ruffy, the bear with the inexperienced hood, is utilizing his unexplainably distinctive ‘SWAP’ capability to make copies of work within the village of Riverside. Sooner or later, he’s thrust away from this menial job and into the grand duty of saving Riverside from the corruption attributable to a rubik’s cube-shaped villain named Groll.
Ruffy’s journey takes him from tropical islands to snowy mountains to complicated forests and even the realm of the undead, amongst a number of different fantastical areas. He’s assisted in his quest by his all-timer buddy Pip the bee, mentored by Sir Eddler the mole, and guided by Minna the owl. It’s a whimsical and rambunctious story that took me 10 hours to beat, though some developments close to the top left me dissatisfied and even a bit aggravated.
However that’s simply the ending. Is the journey higher than the vacation spot right here? The reply is – not particularly.
Copy and Paste, Copy and Paste
Ruffy’s capability is termed ‘SWAP’ regardless of it not involving any swapping – you copy and paste textures, however you don’t truly swap them. Minor nitpick apart, the actual drawback with Ruffy’s capability is that it really works in very restricted contexts.
So you possibly can copy and paste water and lava on one another, for instance, however you possibly can’t flip a wood barrel into water, or a rock into lava. These supplies operate on their very own, arbitrarily designed guidelines, the place you possibly can copy and paste between wooden, stone, steel, and hay.
Did you see Ruffy copy-and-paste ivy onto waterfalls? Nicely, that’s about the one factor you are able to do with waterfalls wanting freezing them for a couple of puzzles. You’ll do that paste-ivy-and-climb-it routine so many occasions within the recreation that it stops feeling like a eureka second and extra as simply one other routine impediment.
This disappointment by no means left me by way of my playthrough, but it surely’s maybe unfair to harp on about mismatched expectations when the remainder of the sport is such a childlike and joyful affair.
A Small, However Open World
There’s all kinds of side-activities that make use of the ‘SWAP’ capability, and the sport strikes alongside at a brisk tempo, with not one of the ranges overstaying their welcome. Even the sport’s open world is simply the best measurement, compact and fast to navigate – whether or not by foot or on a hay bale.
There’s a couple of moments of true inspiration – manipulating a scoreboard to win at a mini-game for instance, or reworking a race monitor to your benefit. Nonetheless, each resolution is recommended explicitly, in order that it by no means feels such as you’ve used your personal creativity a lot as achieved what the sport advised you to do.
Finally, Ruffy and the Riverside is a bouncy journey with an attention-grabbing however severely underbaked gimmick. It’s a enjoyable and vibrant sufficient recreation should you go in understanding what to anticipate, but it surely definitely isn’t the open-ended sandbox you would possibly count on from the premise – for that type of stuff, you might need higher luck with Noita.
Developer: Zockrates Laboratories
Nation of Origin: Germany
Writer: Phiphen Video games
Launch Date: June 26, 2025 (PC, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Sequence X/S, Swap)
The PC model of the sport was performed for this overview of Ruffy and the Riverside.
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