XBOX REVIEW | Ruffy and the Riverside

I’ve stumbled upon Ruffy and the Riverside on X(formerly Twitter) quite a while ago. The visuals and mechanics piqued my interest, as they looked quite charming and unique. I was looking forward to trying out the full version, and despite having a few minor issues, I was not disappointed with my experience.

Things I liked!

• Simple but great gameplay | The overall gameplay in Ruffy and the Riverside is mostly how you’d imagine a 3D platformer would play like: you can walk, run, jump, attack, “butt stomp” if you attack in the air and charge attack, this last one rarely felt needed, but it is an option. The big differential that makes the game stand out is the SWAP mechanic, where you switch textures around, meaning you can turn wood to metal, water to lava, change colours around and more. There’s also hay bale riding, where you ride circular bales around for quicker traversal and races. There are also a few instances where you enter a 2D environment on a wall to progress, much like in Mario Odyssey, a segment that felt like old-school Crash Bandicoot, where you run towards the camera from an obstacle, and boss battles that made the experience continue to feel fresh.

• Great visuals | You can’t talk about Ruffy and the Riverside without mentioning how it looks. It’s a colourful, full-of-life world that mixes 3D enemies, characters, and objects with 2D characters. You’ll see all sorts of places, and they all have their charm. It’s always a pleasure to see the 2D sticker-reminiscent characters, and there are quite a few of them, ranging from various animals like bears, birds, a bee, a snake, a fox, butterflies and others. Enemies are also pretty unique, though they didn’t look as appealing to me as other characters.

• Accessible | There are a total of nine language options available: English, Japanese, German, Spanish, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, French, and both simplified and traditional Chinese, which is a considerable number of languages for an indie title. There’s also an option to adjust both camera distance and alignment, which is not a common feature in any game.

• Groovy | The main theme is extremely catchy, bringing the right energy and setting the right tone for what the game is, despite having unintelligible lyrics. Most songs either don’t have lyrics or have unintelligible lyrics, but they fit their respective placement and complement the game quite well. Look forward to having a tune stuck on your head for a while after you play Ruffy and the Riverside.

• A fitting narrative | You start the game falling off a cliff, where you will learn the gameplay basics, then you’ll be 22 days and 7 hours back in time, where you’ll learn about the world and story. The overall plot here is a simple one: a villain named Groll, who tried to consume the whole world once before, somehow escaped his prison and started wreaking havoc. It’s up to Ruffy, the chosen one, to repair the Riverside signpost, which will fix the world core, and put a stop to Groll. There were a few surprises that I won’t spoil, but they do open up the ending for a sequel.

• Upgrades | You’ll start Ruffy and the Riverside with only three heart containers, but you’ll be able to get up to eight heart containers through vending machines located in a few different places. You also start the game with only the green cape, but once you buy the red and the blue ones, you’ll be able to upgrade them through a slot machine, which means you won’t control which cape you’re upgrading, nor which stat will be upgraded, these stats being: how fast your health regenerates and how much stamina you have.

• Collectathon | Apart from money, Ruffy and the Riverside has quite a few collectables for you to find. Butterflies for Quintus, who created the butterfly collecting society where he was the sole member before you joined him; gems for Sir Eddler, who is a fan of them; dreamstones for Pix, a pixelated bear that teaches you that you can redesign textures with dreamstones, though I did not comprehend nor use this mechanic; and Etois for Veena, fluffy creatures that were the first living creatures on earth which will also have their use later in the game.

• All challenges and enemies | Ruffy and the Riverside is far from a hard game; however, there were a few times I felt challenged, such as the Steep Games, a game where you have to do tricks on a bale in the air to get more points than your opponents, much like a skating minigame, I got stuck on them for quite a bit, but eventually got through them. Obstacles consisted of things like flaming spinning totems, wooden spikes that came up from the ground and tiki statues that could crush you; they never overstayed their welcome. As far as I can remember, regular enemies consist of sharks, moving stone pillars, a spherical animal with a spiky shell and a bomb-throwing octopus. Dealing with regular enemies is fairly simple: some of them can be defeated by jumping on them, others require you to change the material they’re on, and others require you to attack them directly. Bosses weren’t too difficult either; you can be far away from where some of them are attacking and hit them repeatedly when they’re vulnerable. Of course, the SWAP ability comes into play in boss fights as well, but they were pretty straightforward to understand.

Mixed & disliked!

• Scale issue | I had to mention this because it bothered me quite a bit, even though it’s a minor mistake, but there’s a bush with minuscule coins behind the basilica where you get your main objectives from. I assume this was not intended, as this is the only place where coins are this small in the whole game. Here are screenshots comparing regular coins and the tiny ones:

• Technical issues | I experienced a few technical problems during my playthrough, some of which have probably been fixed through updates already: a crash for leaving the game paused for a little while; a crash while I was riding a hay bale; getting ejected from ladders when reaching the top by climbing them in their corner and being unable to re-center yourself; the soundtrack was cut at one point, after I completed an objective, only showing back up when I progressed the story; I couldn’t solve a puzzle even though I did input the exact solution for it, only being able to do it after progressing the story; and I got the achievement for getting all achievements despite missing eleven of them.

• This got me puzzled | Most puzzles were fine, I understood them and didn’t mind doing them at all. Like puzzles where you use your SWAP ability, they were fun to think about and solve, some of which had hints in the environment. But there was a puzzle type that I was only able to get through without a hint or a guide on one of them, these being riddles said by a crow, where you have to try to guess which die side you put on a specific place on a wall. Even hints sometimes didn’t feel useful while I was doing these, making me search for an online guide to help me, which made me question their presence in the game.

How long did I play the game before publishing the review? 14 hours
How long to beat the story? about 8 hours
How many Achievements did I earn before publishing? 722/1000 (36/47)
How long to achieve 1000G | about 13 hours
You’ll love this game if you like these | Banjo Kazooie, Crash Bandicoot, Psychonauts 2, Mario Odyssey

CONCLUSION

Score: 83/100

Ruffy and the Riverside feels like a platformer straight from the past, in a good way. Clearly inspired by the greatest 3D platformers out there, it stands out as a varied, beautiful, and fun take on the genre, and has the potential to be remembered for years to come, only being hindered by some minor problems.