The Indie Informer

Platformers usually ask players “How can you overcome this obstacle?”. Ruffy and the Riverside changes the question by asking “What if you could change the obstacle itself?” Its unique texture-swapping mechanic offers an eyebrow-raising answer. After sitting down with the game’s Steam demo, I walked away largely impressed with this promising twist on the 3D platformers of yesteryear.

Ruffy is a cheery bear plastered with a smile wide enough for a plane to fly through. His real talent is the magical power to copy textures – grass, water, or sand, for example – and paste them onto a different surface. Copying and pasting climbing vines onto a waterfall turns it into a climbable surface. Toying with this feature becomes fun in an instant. I once copied sand and pasted it onto a river, turning it into a flowing path of quicksand. I know it’s quicksand because I eagerly jumped in and sank to my death.

While good for platforming, clever traversal puzzles use texture-swapping to its fullest. To scale a series of tall stone columns standing in the middle of an ocean, I needed to make them lower to jump atop them. First, I copied a wood texture and applied it to the columns’ bottom stacks. Next, I copied a lava texture from a nearby erupting volcano and slapped it on the water. With the ocean now a molten sea, the columns’ now wooden foundations burned into ashes, causing them to sink low enough for me to leap on. 

The game shines brightest when it encourages this type of out-of-the-box thinking. Whether it’s changing a wall painting’s pattern to unlock a key or rearranging tiles to solve a riddle, I’m impressed with the different puzzle variations presented so far. However, my enthusiasm to swap anything and everything was dampened by the fact that only certain textures can be applied to specific objects. The game told me “no” more often than I expected or wanted, which was a bit of a bummer.

Ruffy falls into the collect-a-thon genre of 3D platformers ala Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie. A main overworld features small challenges that reward stars; collecting enough unlocks platforming levels laden with them. The platforming stages are pretty textbook; texture swapping spices up the otherwise routine jumping around. That doesn’t mean that’s all players will do. I had a good time in one stage that ditched platforming in favor of what’s essentially a skateboard competition, except Ruffy rides atop a giant ball of hay. 

Developer Zockrates Labs has something special in Ruffy and the Riverside‘s main hook. It’s a novel way to interact with the world, and I’m excited to see how puzzle-solving evolves throughout the full adventure. The platforming feels good, and I dig the Paper Mario-esque art direction; every character looks like a vibrant marker drawing cut out of a notebook. If all goes well, we may be pasting Ruffy and the Riverside on the list of indie gems for 2025.