Ruffy and the Riverside Review – 3D Platforming Meets Texture-Swapping in a Hand-Drawn Adventure
Ruffy and the Riverside is a hand-drawn 3D platformer with a unique texture-swapping mechanic and rich world design. Explore and puzzle-solve, in this indie gem available on all platforms.
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Game: Ruffy and the Riverside
Studio: Zockrates Laboratories UG
Publisher: Phiphen Games
Platforms: Steam
Completion Time: 5-7 Hours Main Game (10-15 with extra content)
Price: $19.99
Genre: 3D Platformer, Collectathon, Action
✅ Steam Deck Verified
Hello everyone and welcome to the Good Game Lobby Review of Ruffy and the Riverside, developed by Zockrates Laboratories—an open-world 3D platformer with a unique texture-swapping game mechanic. Let’s see why this nostalgic influence is great in its style, and how it slightly misses on a deeper story connection. Thanks to Pirate PR for the review key.
The Story So Far
Everything begins like all 3D platformers, where a bad entity steals the world's life force, creating a dynamic of Ruffy becoming the chosen one and bringing life back to the world. It’s simple enough and straightforward, but the story, for me, missed a bit. Where the premise makes sense and the characters fit well, the amount of sheer dialogue for a small indie platformer became a skipping routine by the end of the game. Where the demo felt tight and clear on the goals, the main game was missed on me. This is not a fault of the whole game, but something I just wanted to get out of the way early to begin talking about what really sells Ruffy to me—and that's its unique gameplay and visuals.
Swappy Paste
Swapping is the main mechanic you will use to solve puzzles in Ruffy. It starts out pretty simple: using a climbing vine that you copy and paste onto a waterfall. This gives you the ability to now climb said waterfall. Though it starts easy, you will find it increases in complexity for certain puzzles the deeper you get into the main story.
If you have a bunch of metal boxes in your way, then copy wood and paste it on the boxes so you can break them and find a hidden item. Sometimes these metal boxes will be set up in a way that you need to break certain patterns to then ultimately climb them. You hold the triggers to copy and press them again to paste, and you use the triggers to also paste on multiple objects like the aforementioned metal boxes.
Changing water to lava to kill sharks, water to ice to platform over, and tons of puzzles involving making items heavier, changing the subject to be lighter, and more—all to get to your goal. At times, the game will set up a typical platforming puzzle, and I would even forget that I should be using the swap EVERY chance I can get.
The coins reset whenever you enter and exit a room or area. So, coins are plentiful—so much that I was able to buy the maximum amount of hearts only an hour or so into the game, making the game far too easy by the end. I only died by falling off a platform edge versus losing all my hearts. I get that this could cater to a family friendly audience, but the difficulty was non existent.
The Riverside sign in the open world has lost its letters, so you have to go around exploring and solving puzzles to get them back. I honestly wish we had more boss fights for each section because you have so much to play with using the swap ability, but more often than not, the main letter collection was just puzzles.
600+ Hand Drawn Images! 👀
Ruffy and the Riverside is one of the best looking in terms of visual design. It’s all hand-drawn images—from the flat paper style of characters to all of the textures and patterns you see on objects and things you can swap. Rightfully so, the game has 600+ images and took 7 years to make. They look great and have nice repeating animations from Ruffy, Pip, and all the oddballs you meet. I kind of want to animate Ruffy myself; they just look great. I mean just look at Ruffy. The hand drawn style and coloring is slightly rough around the edges truly giving the visuals character.
Ruffy Rap
The intro song that played from the moment I tried the demo back during Steam Next Fest is a great start of what's to come. Each biome has its own theme song, as it rightfully should, but when the jams come into play, it makes the game so much more fun. The soundtrack is only on Steam. Since starting game reviews, one thing I can tell you that is a bit annoying is not releasing the soundtracks on other services and keeping them on Steam. I understand fully that it's a way to drive more sales and get a better payment, considering how awful streaming services are, but I can’t preview it on Steam, so I have no idea what I am getting. Just release it to Bandcamp, please!
Okay, thanks for showing up to my mini TED Talk on the state of gaming soundtracks. Since it's not on streaming or Bandcamp, I can’t give you a preview, but thanks to another fan who saw a demand for the soundtrack we have one of the songs on YouTube. Enjoy and let me know what you think in the comments.
Recommended For 3D Platforming Fans
Ruffy and the Riverside is one that will be loved by 3D platforming fans for its similarities to the games that inspired it. The unique texture swapping is inventive and gives it legs to stand on. The soundtrack is DK Rap-inspired by jams that pop in and out at just the right times. 600+ pictures made for the game over 7 years is no easy feat, and I love the character designs and quirky back-and-forth. I felt like the demo left a certain style of gameplay impression on me, where the main game slightly differed. The only place I feel it falls flat is when the dialogue runs rampant and you need to go through the story so in-depth, it takes away from the action of the gameplay. The open world of the game makes it fun to explore, and when traveling between different areas for the main story, you have lots of fun mini-games and puzzles to continue to unlock—distracting you from the main goal in the best way possible.
I am seeing the main game running between 5–7 hours for many people, but oddly enough, Steam says it took me roughly 14 hours to complete the main game. I really don’t understand how Steam counts this, because from the game's capture I am at 9+. That being said, for collectathon fans, they have TONs and tons of places to explore and unlock for a longer playthrough. It’s $19.99, which I feel is the sweet spot for a great indie game. It may be too high for just a 3D platformer, but considering the amount of detail in illustrations and lots of extra content, I think it's worth it. I played on PC through Steam, and it's available on Epic, Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation. It’s Steam Deck-verified and worked great with decent settings, only dropping in frames rarely through my playthrough.
Thanks to Pirate PR for the review key on behalf of the developers, Zockrates Laboratories UG.
I did not like this game at first glance (not a big fan of the art style) but this review convinced me to play it immediately. Great review for what seems to be a great game!
This looks so fun!