In the late ’90s going into the early 2000s, your studio just wasn’t cool unless you had a mascot platformer. It wasn’t just all about Mario and Sonic. In addition to your Crash Bandicoots, you had your Banjos, your Gexes, your Glovers, your Jak and Daxters, and so many more. Forget if they were good — they just had to have style to be memorable, and that’s something Ruffy and the Riverside has a lot of. Whether that style is enough is the real question.
Ruffy and the Riverside was a game that immediately caught my eye as soon as I opened my first email from the PR company promoting it. The game featured hand-drawn art reminiscent to that of Paper Mario, but it had a certain rough style to it that set it apart (pun intended). Maybe it isn’t as vibrant as Paper Mario, but it was definitely more lively, and the fact that it was actually a 3D platformer definitely made it something to keep an eye on.
The game puts you in the paws of Ruffy, a young bear who has the ability to swap textures. While investigating some mysterious marbles with his mole mentor, Sir Eddler, they accidentally release an evil onto the world named Groll, who steals the marbles and attempts to destroy the World Core. So what’s there to do? You guessed it: It’s all up to Ruffy and his unique swapping ability to restore the World Core and save the world from the evil Rubik’s Cube-looking Groll.
As you’d expect from a 3D platformer, the story is absolutely nothing to write home about. It’s laughably bad, and the unspoken dialog doesn’t do it much favors either as it also fails to tickle in the humor department. The main reason why people will enjoy the game, aside from its cool visuals, lies solely in its gameplay, which unfortunately comes in a mixed bag.
Ruffy and the Riverside is oozing with style, boasting cool 2D segments that require you to manipulate them from the outside.
If you’re looking for straight, honest 3D platforming, Ruffy might also disappoint in that department. In this roughly eight-hour adventure, I can only really think of one instance where the game featured a platforming segment that was remotely challenging. The meat of the game comes from Ruffy’s swap ability, which makes the gameplay more like a puzzle game than a 3D platformer, if anything. Heck, one of the reasons why this review was published a little later than planned was because I got stumped with more than a few puzzles, and there were no guides available prior to the game’s release.
Ruffy’s swap ability does exactly what it says it does: he can swap textures, and it pretty much works like copying and pasting. If you see a tree, you can take your cursor to make Ruffy copy the wood texture and throw it on to a stone block to turn it into a wooden crate, which can either be destroyed when punching them or float when underwater, creating a platform to cross on since Ruffy can’t swim. See an item atop a high hill with a waterfall that you can’t get to the summit of because there’s no way to climb it? You might have seen some vines, so if you copied those vines and pasted them onto the waterfall, the waterfall will become vines for you to climb.
It’s a pretty nifty mechanic that the game does a fairly good job of explaining, but once you get past the initial tutorial, a lot of these puzzles really become tough brainteasers. I’ll spoil one for you: in one of the first levels, you’ll come across an island that’s inaccessible because of a broken bridge. You can’t turn the ocean into ice because there isn’t any near you, and you can’t dry up the ocean with sand because it just turns it into deadly quicksand. But also in that general vicinity is a TV that has a volcano on the screen. So when you copy the TV, you end up copying lava that you can turn the ocean into, and once you do that, you’ll melt what’s keeping the bridge standing. When the lava turns back into water, the makeshift bridge will float again, allowing you to walk over to that island.
Solving puzzles in the game is all about experimentation and knowing what’s around you, but it also can be really frustrating because not every texture you copy can be swapped to whatever you want, and it just makes it seem like you have to follow all sorts of unnecessary rules, and you feel like it gets in the way of your own creativity.
The main thing to do in this game is recover letters to restore this knockoff Hollywood sign.
Once you understand the limitations, Ruffy’s design really begins to shine especially as levels start to show some variety, but it also feels a little disjointed. At around the halfway point, you’ll unlock the ability to roll around on a bail of hay that you can use to participate in races and grind on rails, but it feels more like something you can do versus something you should do, and that’s a pretty common problem the game has throughout.
At its core, the game is a collect-a-thon, much in the same vein of games like Banjo-Kazooie. Your main task will be finding a bunch of golden letters to bring back the World Core, but you’ll also find coins as well as collectibles like butterflies, dreamstones, Etoi creatures, and a whole bunch of other items that contribute to gameplay in various ways. The problem is that aside from achievement hunting, the game doesn’t do a good job of convincing you that these items are important. At least in Banjo, you knew you needed Jiggies, you knew music notes would open doors, you knew eggs were weapons, and you knew finding five Jinjos in every level would net you a Jiggy. In Ruffy, everything except golden letters were optional. Maybe the developers at Zockrates were hoping certain puzzles would have that “ooo, shiny” effect that the shrines in the modern Zelda games did, but it’s far from that.
For everything that Ruffy and the Riverside tries to do, especially when compared to other 3D platformers, the game’s style and gameplay really stand out to give it a nice bit of charm. It’s got a fun and catchy soundtrack to boot. At the same time, if you’re not into solving puzzles and don’t like looking around for items, Ruffy might not be your cup of tea.
Still, while it definitely could’ve spent more time in the lab for polish, you can do a whole lot worse than Ruffy and the Riverside for $20.
In the late ’90s going into the early 2000s, your studio just wasn’t cool unless you had a mascot platformer. It wasn’t just all about Mario and Sonic. In addition to your Crash Bandicoots, you had your Banjos, your Gexes,…
In the late ’90s going into the early 2000s, your studio just wasn’t cool unless you had a mascot platformer. It wasn’t just all about Mario and Sonic. In addition to your Crash Bandicoots, you had your Banjos, your Gexes, your Glovers, your Jak and Daxters, and so many more. Forget if they were good — they just had to have style to be memorable, and that’s something Ruffy and the Riverside has a lot of. Whether that style is enough is the real question.
Ruffy and the Riverside was a game that immediately caught my eye as soon as I opened my first email from the PR company promoting it. The game featured hand-drawn art reminiscent to that of Paper Mario, but it had a certain rough style to it that set it apart (pun intended). Maybe it isn’t as vibrant as Paper Mario, but it was definitely more lively, and the fact that it was actually a 3D platformer definitely made it something to keep an eye on.
The game puts you in the paws of Ruffy, a young bear who has the ability to swap textures. While investigating some mysterious marbles with his mole mentor, Sir Eddler, they accidentally release an evil onto the world named Groll, who steals the marbles and attempts to destroy the World Core. So what’s there to do? You guessed it: It’s all up to Ruffy and his unique swapping ability to restore the World Core and save the world from the evil Rubik’s Cube-looking Groll.
As you’d expect from a 3D platformer, the story is absolutely nothing to write home about. It’s laughably bad, and the unspoken dialog doesn’t do it much favors either as it also fails to tickle in the humor department. The main reason why people will enjoy the game, aside from its cool visuals, lies solely in its gameplay, which unfortunately comes in a mixed bag.
Ruffy and the Riverside is oozing with style, boasting cool 2D segments that require you to manipulate them from the outside.
If you’re looking for straight, honest 3D platforming, Ruffy might also disappoint in that department. In this roughly eight-hour adventure, I can only really think of one instance where the game featured a platforming segment that was remotely challenging. The meat of the game comes from Ruffy’s swap ability, which makes the gameplay more like a puzzle game than a 3D platformer, if anything. Heck, one of the reasons why this review was published a little later than planned was because I got stumped with more than a few puzzles, and there were no guides available prior to the game’s release.
Ruffy’s swap ability does exactly what it says it does: he can swap textures, and it pretty much works like copying and pasting. If you see a tree, you can take your cursor to make Ruffy copy the wood texture and throw it on to a stone block to turn it into a wooden crate, which can either be destroyed when punching them or float when underwater, creating a platform to cross on since Ruffy can’t swim. See an item atop a high hill with a waterfall that you can’t get to the summit of because there’s no way to climb it? You might have seen some vines, so if you copied those vines and pasted them onto the waterfall, the waterfall will become vines for you to climb.
It’s a pretty nifty mechanic that the game does a fairly good job of explaining, but once you get past the initial tutorial, a lot of these puzzles really become tough brainteasers. I’ll spoil one for you: in one of the first levels, you’ll come across an island that’s inaccessible because of a broken bridge. You can’t turn the ocean into ice because there isn’t any near you, and you can’t dry up the ocean with sand because it just turns it into deadly quicksand. But also in that general vicinity is a TV that has a volcano on the screen. So when you copy the TV, you end up copying lava that you can turn the ocean into, and once you do that, you’ll melt what’s keeping the bridge standing. When the lava turns back into water, the makeshift bridge will float again, allowing you to walk over to that island.
Solving puzzles in the game is all about experimentation and knowing what’s around you, but it also can be really frustrating because not every texture you copy can be swapped to whatever you want, and it just makes it seem like you have to follow all sorts of unnecessary rules, and you feel like it gets in the way of your own creativity.
The main thing to do in this game is recover letters to restore this knockoff Hollywood sign.
Once you understand the limitations, Ruffy’s design really begins to shine especially as levels start to show some variety, but it also feels a little disjointed. At around the halfway point, you’ll unlock the ability to roll around on a bail of hay that you can use to participate in races and grind on rails, but it feels more like something you can do versus something you should do, and that’s a pretty common problem the game has throughout.
At its core, the game is a collect-a-thon, much in the same vein of games like Banjo-Kazooie. Your main task will be finding a bunch of golden letters to bring back the World Core, but you’ll also find coins as well as collectibles like butterflies, dreamstones, Etoi creatures, and a whole bunch of other items that contribute to gameplay in various ways. The problem is that aside from achievement hunting, the game doesn’t do a good job of convincing you that these items are important. At least in Banjo, you knew you needed Jiggies, you knew music notes would open doors, you knew eggs were weapons, and you knew finding five Jinjos in every level would net you a Jiggy. In Ruffy, everything except golden letters were optional. Maybe the developers at Zockrates were hoping certain puzzles would have that “ooo, shiny” effect that the shrines in the modern Zelda games did, but it’s far from that.
For everything that Ruffy and the Riverside tries to do, especially when compared to other 3D platformers, the game’s style and gameplay really stand out to give it a nice bit of charm. It’s got a fun and catchy soundtrack to boot. At the same time, if you’re not into solving puzzles and don’t like looking around for items, Ruffy might not be your cup of tea.
Still, while it definitely could’ve spent more time in the lab for polish, you can do a whole lot worse than Ruffy and the Riverside for $20.
by Danreb Victorio
