Ruffy And the Riverside Review

Video game texture artists are superhuman, as far as I’m concerned. These folks don’t just paint over a canvas, they fill in every corner of every complex environment, stitching the very seams of the world together while agonising over specular detail in the arse end of every brick and barrel. It’s an art form that’s only become more elaborate as technology has progressed and games now ship with hundreds of gigabytes of assets and mathematically obtuse rendering setups.

While it’s thematically and visually borne of the bygone 32 and 64-bit eras, whoever was responsible for textures in Ruffy and the Riverside is easily as powerful as the people painting knuckle hairs onto the Operators in Call of Duty. The grassy fields, wooden bridges and stone doors of Riverside might be made of relatively simple art, but what other game would dare to let its players copy-paste a wooden bridge texture over said stone door to make it weak enough to bust through?

Such is Ruffy’s core gimmick, the titular hero blessed with the power to capture the textures of the world around him and transpose them elsewhere. When we meet him, his talents are being used in a way that feels sickeningly prescient despite the pseudo-medieval setting the game employs – regularly replacing customers’ boring, old paintings with copies of his master’s latest pieces. But as is wont to happen in these types of adventures, the untimely unleashing of an ancient evil spurns Ruffy to learn that his destiny is much greater than running the Middle Ages equivalent of Netflix, and off he trots to rescue the very core of his world, one texture swap at a time.

Ensuing is an quest that’s best compared to the 3D adventure greats of the Nintendo 64, the Banjo-Kazooies, Ocarina of Times or even Mystical Ninja Starring Goemons of the world. Riverside is a fairly sizeable zone with a central hub and a number of key explorable areas, and there’s plenty to do and explore outside of the throughline of recovering six Sacred Letters and restoring power to the ancient Riverside Sign. Which is essentially the Hollywood Sign if it was deified by a bunch of robed crows who’ve watched far too much Wheel of Fortune.

The texture-swapping idea comes in when environments initially seem impassable or objects appear impregnable, with Ruffy’s ability to rewrite their materials creating ingenious solutions. You might copy some vines onto a waterfall to turn it into a climbable wall, or swap the surface of a shark-infested lake for lava to quickly deep fry all threats. It’s not an entirely free-form system, there are necessary limits to what you can swap and where, but the thrill of discovery in trying things out and seeing results both expected and surprising is a joy worthy of the games Ruffy aspires to.

You can tell the folks at Zockrates Laboratories, for whom this is a debut title, are also big fans of 2017’s Super Mario Odyssey. Riverside is filthy with hidden interactions and puzzles that eke out over repeat trips, which adds a lot to simply hoofing it from A to B. The game even offers its own twist on Odyssey’s 2D wall sections with Ruffy able to throw textures onto the projected level from the 3D World before jumping into the 2D one. 

Where comparisons to these cherished titles tends to fall apart for Ruffy and the Riverside is in overall game feel. There’s a level of polish that’s sorely missing from the platforming and puzzling that threatens to betray this canvas of compelling ideas. Ruffy’s movement has a slippery, frictionless cadence which makes for far too many frustrating missed jumps, and there’s a finicky nature to lifting and placing textures that can render some of the more intense solves more troublesome than they should be. This is a fairly low stakes adventure throughout its runtime, so these issues aren’t a total barrier to play, but they’re noticeable.

The 90s-era design philosophies can perhaps be felt most in how Ruffy and the Riverside looks and sounds. This is a garish and confusing game to witness, and I mean that as a compliment. Hand-drawn and animated 2D characters inhabit this otherwise 3D world made up of relatively lo-fi assets and lighting, but big and dense enough to still appear modern. It’s a colourful, scrappy and joyful canvas ready for your magic touch. The soundtrack is also a major highlight, packed with reverence for the games that inspire it woven through acapella beats and serious bops.

Remarkably, Ruffy and the Riverside also goes one step further in its texture-swapping antics, eventually giving players access to their own canvas, where they can literally redraw the base textures for dozens of in-game objects and surfaces. So, if somehow you don’t like how the waterfalls or sand or trees in the game look, you’re welcome to have a go at texturing them yourself.

Final Thoughts

I do think that Ruffy and the Riverside will, at least for a time, be the game I point to when someone laments to me the lack of a Super Mario Odyssey 2 or decries Microsoft for letting the Banjo-Kazooie IP collect dust. “Haaaaave you tried Ruffy and the Riverside?,” I’ll say, smugly advocating for the Little Guy while counting down the days until Donkey Kong Bananza. God, we’ve been on a good run for 3D platformers, haven’t we?

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

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