Once every while, you come across a game that captures the essence of everything you love about the collect-a-ton genre you grew up with but with a spice of new flavor to keep things interesting and fresh. Well, Ruffy and the Riverside is one of those titles! Curious? Let’s dive in.
Developed by the German studio Zockrates Laboratories, Ruffy offers something new. Like most people who read our reviews, we grew up on Banjo, Spyro, and Mario. Ruffy brings that same 90s charm to the magical world of Riverside.
Story:
So, what’s this game about, you wonder? In Ruffy and the Riverside, you wield the magic SWAP to Copy & Paste textures. You are the living embodiment of the Control + C & Control + V function. You can turn ice into lava or waterfalls into vines! Not endlessly, of course, but it gives room for some very creative gameplay mechanics. You aim to explore, fight, skate on straw bales, and unleash your imagination in this quirky open-world action game. Dive into an adventure that lets you change the world!
You start from a sort of city-forest hub in Riverside, with doors towards other magical places. To open said doors, you must collect stars in the overworld by defeating monsters, solving puzzles, and finding magical butterflies. This is where your magical copy-paste SWAP power comes into play. Is a giant tree monster blocking your way? Let’s turn the water he’s standing in into lava, burning him to charcoal. Does a wall of stone blocks block your path? Turn them into wooden crates and smash them to bits. I love how Ruffy challenged me to think outside the box and typical puzzle solutions you often find in other collect-a-ton games.
Artstyle
The art style reminded me of a lot of games like Paper Mario, Born Of Bread, Bug Fables, and other 2D-drawn games. I love those, and Ruffy has some great character designs as well. The overworld looks excellent, and although significant parts of the game were ‘shut off’ with big blue dome-like with ‘Demo’ written on it, the parts I could traverse through and what I could see from the other parts, the world looked so vast. Every Door World has its theme and setting, ranging from the beach, a jungle, and a theme park with skating elements (time to boot up Tony Hawk again).
Expectations
So, what can we expect from Ruffy, next to a collect-a-ton game with lovely art style and jokes? Well, according to its developers,
- Unique gameplay: Copy and paste textures to radically transform the game world. Scan textures from the environment and throw them back into the world. The whole game world is your inventory and your canvas.
- Unique look: All characters, textures, Ui, etc., are hand-drawn. The main character, Ruffy, alone has over 600 drawings. This game is packed with thousands of hand-drawn assets that took over seven years of work. Ruffy and Riverside feel like living cartoons.
- Epic Story and scenic cutscenes: The game has a deep and twistful story with over 60.000 words of
dialogue – that’s half of Tolkien’s „The Hobbit. “ Scenic cutscenes let you dive even deeper into the hand-drawn world. - Customizing: With the in-game drawing tool, you can draw your textures and use them in-game. That way, the world looks even more like you imagine it.
- Playtime: 20 hours of main story, 5 hours of sidequests, and unlimited time to customize the game world with self-drawn textures.
You can wishlist the game right here Ruffy and the Riverside op Steam – and the demo is out today! I’ll try to cover the full game when it releases in April of this year.
