Ruffy and the Riverside Review (Xbox): Swapaganza

Despite 3D platformers no longer being the premier genre, they still hold a special place in my heart. Sure, some of that can be chalked up to growing up in the late 90s/early 2000s with games like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, but those games helped shape who I am as a gamer. Whenever I see a game that invokes even a smidgen of those feelings, I am willing to give it a try. That’s what excited me about Ruffy and the Riverside. This 3D platformer has the charm to draw someone like me in, with the added bonus of quite a neat gimmick from a gameplay standpoint, though how much the game pushes that gimmick is quite overdone. Earlier this year, I previewed the game for Steam Next Fest, and came away quite impressed, though I was hoping the full game had more surprises in store. Diving into the full adventure, that unfortunately isn’t the case.

When You Swap You Can’t Stop

Where Ruffy and the Riverside tries to stand out from the pack is with the swap mechanic. Everywhere you go, you can select a texture or a color in the environment and then apply it to a specific object. For example, I can take a climbable vine and swap it over to a waterfall area, allowing me to climb to the top of that area.

At its core, Ruffy and the Riverside is set up to be a 3D collectathon. While the demo I had a while ago was focused on players grabbing stars, the release version focuses on sign letters, butterflies, dreamstones, Korok-like creatures called Etois, and a bunch of other stuff that after reaching the end credits I haven’t found any of, not necessarily because they are well-hidden, but more so because I didn’t know they were available until viewing the collection page after I beat the game.

Two enemy types make appearances in a stack of living rocks and a human head inside a spike ball. Both go down with a simple punch, so combat amounts to a whole lot of nothing. I never felt that Ruffy, a 2D character, punching a 3D object felt off, so it doesn’t detract from the experience, but it’s not necessarily good either. There are also some side activities, including races that take place on top of a haybale you run around using, but everything here is put to the side to first focus on Ruffy’s swap ability.

While the swap mechanic is a cool idea, it outstays its welcome since it never really evolves. Every puzzle, closed door, and even races rely on you using swap to bypass it. Ruffy may be the supposed “chosen one,” but he’s not above cheating his way through a competition, like adding more mud to a racecourse to slow down the opposition. It gets rather exhausting when you know the solution to every problem as soon as you encounter it. You never unlock new abilities, so for the 5-6 hours it takes to get through the main quest, you are stuck swapping various textures to progress. While there is lite platforming, it is very much put to the side in favor of swapping.

That isn’t to say that swap is without merit. While the move is rather tiring about halfway through, there are moments where the game has you use it in rather clever situations. For example, there is a portion of the game that requires you to perform hay bale tricks on a halfpipe and outscore two other competitors to keep the story going. In my experience, I was getting rather frustrated because I felt that I was having perfect runs and still was losing. That was until I realized that you’re supposed to use swap to change not only your score, but the opponent’s to make it a cakewalk to victory. That was such an “aha!” moment that I loved. I wish there were more of those instances, but they were sadly very few and far between. Because every problem you encounter is solved by swapping something, your brain really takes a break while playing through this journey.

Ruffy and the Charmingside

Any platformer, 2D or 3D, lives or dies based on how it feels to control your character. Ruffy and the Riverside does that with how easy it is to maneuver through environments, but the second most important thing (in my opinion) is how much it can charm the player. Whether that is through a colorful world or interesting characters, the best 3D platformers have more to latch onto besides the act of jumping and exploring. In this case, Ruffy and the Riverside is a little more hit and miss.

On the positive side, I love the 2D paper character designs. Ruffy and the rest of the bears you see throughout the game are really cute characters and the hand-drawn work on them is really nice. I also love the animations. Seeing Ruffy stand still and snap his fingers is such a small thing that brings the world to life and more approachable. This kind of attention extends to all of the 2D characters; they’re very well-done and you’re likely to fall in love with at least one. I’d say the 2D character design is more charming than even Paper Mario at its peak.

On the opposite side is anytime the game introduces a 3D model character because wow do they look bad. Luckily, that only happens a few times, but with how few enemies appear, I wish they had stuck with the 2D approach. Seeing a random human head in a spiky ball as an enemy feels completely out of place and clashes with the more artful 2D designs. I really was questioning why this game even had enemies for how few times they actually appear and how trivial they are to deal with.

Throw this Story in the River

Without a doubt the story and narrative writing in Ruffy and the Riverside is the worst part of this game. Throughout the first half of my time with the game, I was teetering between “this story is so stupid, I love it” and “this story is so stupid, I hate it.” The second half solidified the latter feeling in me.

Groll is an evil entity who uses a flying rubix cube to destroy the Riverside and wants to destroy the world. The only thing that can stop him is the world core, a rock that controls the fabric of nature and keeps nature operating naturally. Also, that all-important rock is hooked up to a Hollywood-like sign and after Groll destroys it, you have to go find replacement letters that spell out Riverside to repower that sign to keep nature alive. This is the kind of premise in a video game that really calls back to when things were simpler. It’s stupid, but it’s fun stupid.

Then you hit the second half, and the game makes a hard pivot into a religious allegory that feels super weird and forces in some horribly written dialogue filled with grammatical errors and just completely off-the-track thinking. For the most part, you have this idea that you’re trying to save nature, but then Ruffy starts referring to the world core as an entity, to the point that he prays to it. Then one random conversation has the swap ability being referred to as an almighty power like the Force from Star Wars that has a good and dark side. There’s even a moment where a mole and a snake look set to begin a religious war on each other because one believes the letter D for the Riverside sign is a blessing and the other thinks a bell that was high in the sky is a special gift from the heavens.

This happens a ton in the last couple of hours and it really was laughable how poorly it was delivered at times. These conversations come out of nowhere and feel completely out of place and read horribly, considering there is no voice acting in the game. At one point, I was half-expecting the game to have some kind Jesus resurrection moment for Ruffy. It was all very off-putting.

Luckily, though, we’re talking about a colorful 3D platformer, so you can easily just ignore all the storybeats and enjoy traversing this world, which I highly suggest. If we are looking at everything the game offers, though, much of the writing here just goes beyond being so bad it’s laughable.

Final Verdict

Ruffy and the Riverside can pull you in with its colorful characters and neat swap mechanic, but it doesn’t have enough creative ideas to sustain itself for the long haul. The weird, out-of-nowhere religious writing and ham-fisted dialogue also add a lot of laughably bad conversations in the ending hours. At the end of the day, though, moving around this world, collecting shiny things, and doing swap puzzles is a good enough time that you can get enjoyment out of it, but it’s not something that will stay with you when you put it down. 

Ruffy and the Riverside was reviewed on Xbox Series X with a code provided by Zockrates Laboratories. It is also available on Nintendo Switch, PC, and PlayStation 5.

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