Ruffy and the Riverside | Review

Ruffy-Bee or something

Győző "FairyEmpire" BakiJune 25, 2025Last Updated: June 24, 2025

0 4 minutes read

What do you get when you mix classic 3D platformers like Banjo-Kazooie, a proper open-world, a Paper Mario-inspired artstyle and a unique object-swapping mechanic that lets you change the very world around you? Ruffy and the Riverside is the answer, and our Xbox Series X review for it should hopefully clear up how all that works out. We already gave our impressions on the game’s opening back in February, but does the rest of the game hold up? Let’s find out!

Stop ‘n’ Swap

In the game’s very first playable scene, which somehow reminded me of Bayonetta’s opening falling down sequence, we meet Ruffy and few of his friends, in a risky gem-finding adventure that left them in a precarious place. That place being a falling piece of land, falling from an extremely high waterfall, about to crash down to devastating consequences for the gang. Fortunately, Ruffy has the power to “swap” things. How does that work, exactly? He can scan specific items in the world, in this case a vine, and paste it on top of another one – in this very occasion, instead of the waterfall, allowing them to climb back up on the long vine instead.

Now, this mechanic is absolutely crucial for the entire game, as we’ll be encountering several story beats, puzzles, platforming opportunities where swapping things in the world around us is the solution. Wanna swap this uncrossable piece of lava into a much more palatable ice floor? A perfectly intact wall into a damaged one that we can smash through? This and more is possible, just swap it! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet – what even is the gameplay loop in Ruffy and the Riverside? It’s a heartfelt tribute to platformers of the 90’s like Super Mario 3D, Crash Bandicoot, Banjo-Kazooie and such – with the latter, perhaps, being the main inspiration, as our main character can even perform a bit of a gliding by holding his bee buddy, Pip. Oh, and the amount of stuff to collect seems to remind me of a certain collectathon trend of the Nintendo 64 era. Now where did I see this before?

What what, with the butt

See, Ruffy’s arsenal of moves has butt-slams, side-hits and more, once again taking cues from the platformers of the era. But there’s a key difference in the presentation side, because Ruffy and the Riverside isn’t a fully 3D title. It features cartoony, low poly 3D environments, just like you’d see in a lost Nintendo 64 platformer (at a higher resolution and framerate, fortunately), but virtually all of the many characters we encounter, including Ruffy and Pip themselves, are 2D sprites – though enemies tend to be of the 3D variety. And, well, perhaps sprite is a misleading word here – they are fantastic hand-drawn animations, presented on 2D sticker-like cutouts, giving the title a very unique visual style, even though the inspiration to Paper Mario is evident.

You can find other Mario-inspired aspects as well, be it the coins to collect (okay, that one is a bit hard to avoid I guess), all the way down to parts where Ruffy can effectively enter walls and play a 2D platformer segment inside them – just like Super Mario Odyssey, for one. What really is different from the masses, however, is the swap mechanic, used for a lot of creative puzzle-solving and platforming scenarios, and one we’ll need because of the fully open world nature of the game, featuring tons of sidequests, optional objectives, the boatload of collectibles, the hidden secrets and tons more.

Or maybe there’s more

I think in 2025, that may be a bit too little to sell a convincing 3D platformer in itself, but fortunately Germany-based developer Zockrates Laboratories seem to have found tricks to keep the game a bit more fresh from time to time, by putting Ruffy in rather unusual situations. One of these is a whole level dedicated to… skating?! It’s no Tony Hawk Pro Skater, and fortunately we’ll soon get our fix of that, but it gets the job done. Alongside other texture swaps, unique side areas and more, Ruffy’s adventure does manage to stay relatively fresh throughout its 9 hours or so of story, which can easily become more if you were to aim for a 100% completion.

Unfortunately, I don’t think Ruffy and the Riverside is that outstanding of a platformer, in its execution. The coloured vistas feel way too dark and busy at times, losing some of that charming simplicity that characterizes the genre’s classics. The gameplay, too, feels a little floaty – the camera feels a bit odd, continously sliding downwards it feels, but also because the size of our flat 2D cardboard protagonist can often be tricky, due to this visual quirk. The game features a large open world, packed with things to do, but objective markers and solutions aren’t always very obvious, leading to some vain exploration in search of something to unlock. And in general, other than the cool style, the swap mechanic and the 2D platformer segments (a feature that exists in other games too, such as Super Mario Odyssey), I didn’t find the actual gameplay loop to be all that strong either, with even framerate drops and a few visual glitches to boot, on top of many of the textures on 3D models feeling too blurry for their own good.

Ruff around the edges

I still think Ruffy and the Riverside is worth your time if you’re a hardcore fan of platformers of the 90’s, especially if you’re still waiting for a proper new Banjo-Kazooie – though I’d argue that Yooka-Laylee does a better job at replicating that style. Ruffy’s adventure has enough spins on the formula to stand out, especially the creative swap mechanic and some ideas beyond the opening levels, but I feel like there’s a lot of unforced errors in this title, which made me not enjoy myself as much as I hoped I would. Maybe it’s just me, because the game definitely oozes charm a lot of the time, but I wish the actual game was as exciting as the ideas behind it.