What immediately pulls you into a giant bear hug is Ruffy and the Riverside’s visual style. Character models heavily resemble the Paper Mario series, their flatness and white outlines making them look like they’re animated stickers running around the world. In contrast, the environment has a chunky 3D style that harkens back to stuff like Banjo Kazooie and Crash Bandicoot. Which makes sense because this is also a simple platformer with a cutesy lead character. But Ruffy has a cool little twist that makes it more than just copy-bear.
Available On: PS4, PS5, Xbox Series S/X, Xbox One, PC, Switch, Switch 2
Reviewed On: PS5
Developed By: Zockrates Laboratories UG
Published By: Phiphen GamesReview code provided by the publisher
Ruffy is your bog-standard kind young bear: he wears a cape, works a job for his surrogate father figure where he plies his unique skill, hangs out with a talking bee and only talks in speech bubbles because his excitable noises are incomprehensible to the human ear. You know, the usual mascot platformer kind of things.
One day, though, things go a bit crazy and Ruffy finds out that he is The Chosen One, because only his unique gift (we’ll get to that, don’t worry) can help defend against the return of Gnoll, a giant floating ancient evil cube thing that’s going to hoover up ancient marbles and use them to take over the world. Or something like that.
Like the classic platformers Ruffy and The Riverside emulates, the story is wacky nonsense for the most part, although this one delivers an interesting twist toward the end that might annoy or delight in equal measure. There are some hiccups in the writing and the humour is rather hit or miss, which might be because Zockrates Laboratories (this is their debut game) is based in Germany, so some things could have been lost in translation.
Ruffy has a party trick up his sleeves, and it isn’t just his God-given right to bear arms: he can swap textures using magical mumbo-jumbo. For example, a pond full of water can be turned into lava, while a tree can be changed into stone. There are some limitations – not every texture can be swapped around, so you can’t go turning another bear’s face into wood, for example, although that does sound like an excellent premise for a spin-off called Ruffy And The Mass Murdering Psychopath. Hmm, spiritual sequel to Naughty Bear, anyone?
Ruffy’s unexplained ability to swap textures around – as if he had access to the game’s development tools – is the basis for most of the puzzles. Don’t fret, though, this is not a game designed to challenge the ‘ol grey matter. No, the puzzles tend to be simple, enjoyable things that combine texture swapping and basic platforming. For example, a waterfall becomes a ladder if you texture swap the water with some nearby vines, or some concrete bricks in your way can be smashed if you swap them to wood. Maybe you’re in a tournament and need to do some…creative alterations of the scoreboard to ensure victory? Although the game struggles toward the end with finding new ways to use the swap ability, for the most part, the puzzles and platforming mixture is fun and well-balanced.
Ruffy also has the totally unique power of punching things in the face, but combat in Ruffy and the Riverside is about as important as the side-salad option at a McDonalds. He can perform a butt-slam too, a move so incredibly useful that I used it roughly three times throughout the game, and even briefly forgot about it entirely while trying to solve an optional puzzle where buttock smashing was the answer.
It wouldn’t be an old-school inspired platformer without a metric butt-load of stuff to collect, and yes, that it a real unit of measurement – it’s exactly one half of a bear butt less than a metric ass-load. Not to be confused with an imperial ass-load, which is a unit of measurement only found in Star Wars.
The point is, outside of battling Gnoll and saving the world, there’s the far more important job of doing everything else, leading to a pretty fun Platinum trophy, in my case. There a few dozen tiny cute critters to be found hiding inside trees, in barrels and every other place they shouldn’t be. There are the special stone monument where you have to discover a pattern in the environment and then replicate it on the monument. There are butterflies hidden everywhere to find. Hell, there are even a couple of Mario-esque sections where you jump into a wall painting and the game briefly turns into a 2D platformer.
While you’re doing all of this, you’re also listening to an absurdly bouncy soundtrack. One track in particular is stuck in my head, bouncing around and refusing to leave. I do have a small nitpick: the game doesn’t always smoothly transition from song to song. Otherwise, though, this is a killer soundtrack that sounds both modern, and old-school.
One aspect of the game’s presentation did leave me unsure whether it was a deliberate homage to the classics, or an actual development issue. You see, Ruffy and the Riverside is not a completely open world. It has a couple of areas, and the way it divides those areas is…interesting. For example, there’s a section that links the main town to the first major hub, and it’s very obviously a transitional zone, similar to what you might find in the old games, designed to allow the game to load everything in. Other times, you’ll simply walk into a big black void before the next chunk of map pops into existence. And in one area, there’s a massive, flat image of the next section of the map that you walk into to trigger the loading. Part of me wonders if this is all a nod to how the old platformers handled loading screens, but another part of me thinks this is an actual technical limitation.
In Conclusion…
Ruffy and the Riverside cleverly ape classic platformers while delivering a gimmick that makes it feel fresh and modern. In fact, its whimsical nature, built around an intriguing gameplay mechanic, gives it classical Nintendo vibes. The story sets up for future adventures, and considering this is the developer’s debut title, they are future adventures I would love to see made.