Ruffy and the Riverside was an immediate standout when it was first announced with a gameplay trailer. The game uses a vibrant palette of colours, hand-drawn sprites, and a novel gameplay mechanic that lets you copy and paste textures to change the world around you. The trailer filled me with the spark of imagination – what strange, funny, unforeseen possibilities awaited in a game where you can copy and paste textures?
Having played the game in full, I’m disappointed to say that the possibilities are most certainly foreseen and that they barely go beyond what was already shown in the trailers.
A Whimsical Time by the Riverside
Ruffy, the bear with the green hood, is using his unexplainably unique ‘SWAP’ ability to make copies of paintings in the village of Riverside. One day, he is thrust away from this menial job and into the grand responsibility of saving Riverside from the corruption caused by a rubik’s cube-shaped villain named Groll.
Ruffy’s adventure takes him from tropical islands to snowy mountains to confusing forests and even the realm of the undead, amongst several other fantastical locations. He is assisted in his quest by his all-timer buddy Pip the bee, mentored by Sir Eddler the mole, and guided by Minna the owl. It’s a whimsical and rambunctious story that took me 10 hours to beat, although some developments near the end left me dissatisfied and even a bit annoyed.
But that’s just the ending. Is the journey greater than the destination here? The answer is – not especially.
Copy and Paste, Copy and Paste
Ruffy’s ability is termed ‘SWAP’ despite it not involving any swapping – you copy and paste textures, but you don’t actually swap them. Minor nitpick aside, the real problem with Ruffy’s ability is that it works in very limited contexts.
So you can copy and paste water and lava on each other, for example, but you can’t turn a wooden barrel into water, or a rock into lava. Those materials function on their own, arbitrarily designed rules, where you can copy and paste between wood, stone, metal, and hay.
Did you see Ruffy copy-and-paste ivy onto waterfalls? Well, that’s about the only thing you can do with waterfalls short of freezing them for a few puzzles. You’ll do this paste-ivy-and-climb-it routine so many times in the game that it stops feeling like a eureka moment and more as just another routine obstacle.
This disappointment never left me through my playthrough, but it’s perhaps unfair to harp on about mismatched expectations when the rest of the game is such a childlike and joyful affair.
A Small, But Open World
There’s a wide variety of side-activities that make use of the ‘SWAP’ ability, and the game moves along at a brisk pace, with none of the levels overstaying their welcome. Even the game’s open world is just the right size, compact and quick to navigate – whether by foot or on a hay bale.
There’s a few moments of true inspiration – manipulating a scoreboard to win at a mini-game for example, or transforming a race track to your advantage. However, every solution is suggested explicitly, so that it never feels like you’ve used your own creativity so much as done what the game told you to do.
Ultimately, Ruffy and the Riverside is a bouncy adventure with an interesting but severely underbaked gimmick. It’s a fun and colourful enough game if you go in knowing what to expect, but it certainly isn’t the open-ended sandbox you might expect from the premise – for that kind of stuff, you might have better luck with Noita.
Developer: Zockrates Laboratories
Country of Origin: Germany
Publisher: Phiphen Games
Release Date: June 26, 2025 (PC, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch)
The PC version of the game was played for this review of Ruffy and the Riverside.
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