Ruffy and the Riverside is a Creative Puzzle Platformer with a Few Kinks

I’ve been looking forward to Ruffy and the Riverside for quite a while. The moment that you take your first look at the game’s art style you’re instantly drawn in by how gorgeous it is. Its hand drawn look is something players will fall in love with the more locations and characters they uncover. Some of its gameplay, on the other hand, isn’t always as magical as its art style. 

Ruffy and the Riverside is a 3D Action Platformer and puzzle game where you play as Ruffy, a bear who can wild the magic SWAP to Copy & Paste textures around the world. Ruffy’s boss doesn’t like Ruffy using this ability out in the world, but when the evil Groll escapes and endangers their world, Ruffy must use his fantastic ability to restore Riverside and save all of his friends.

At the start, Ruffy is pretty simple. The game starts slowly to introduce you to the mechanics. You can grab certain textures like wood, stone, metal and throw paste them elsewhere to help you solve puzzles. For example, there might be heavy stone blocks in the water that can be changed to wood to make them float allowing you to jump and glide over them to get over large bodies of water. Later, you can copy ice and throw it at water to freeze it so you can walk across it. There are many different textures that you can copy and paste around the world and, until you get the hang of it, you might find yourself doing a lot of trial-and-error to see how things work. 

What I really love about the game is that it’s not just 3D platforming involving the SWAP mechanic, there are also other unique mechanics in the game including 2D puzzles, riddles and more. The 2D puzzles are called murals and allow Ruffy to jump into a wall similar to the style of The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. You don’t have all of Ruffy’s powers when you’re inside of murals so you’ll have to change the mural in certain ways from outside before you jump inside to try to grab what’s there. 

Additionally, there are some moments in the first few hours that reminded me of Crash Bandicoot as well. Areas where you must move left to right across a level dodging spikes and flames in order to get the top of the level. It feels like Ruffy is a love story to classic platformers while also having so much that’s completely new. 

One of my very first gripes with Ruffy was how much dialogue there is. If it was only at the very start of the game when you’re being introduced to the story and characters that would be one thing, but this dialogue continues more and more as you play. There’s so much that feels as though it could be cut to allow players to get into the action a bit faster. I love these characters and some of the dialogue is very cute, but it definitely feels as though it could be spread out a bit more so you don’t feel like you’re spending the first hour of the game just chatting. 

The more I progressed in the game, I realized that I had another big complaint. The game makes it seem like there should be multiple ways to solve puzzles by experimenting with different textures in different ways, but there’s really only one solution that the game wants and I found this to be pretty frustrating. For example, there is one puzzle where you must get a TV to stop working so I turned the chords connected to the TV into water. This solution was incorrect, but seemed to me like it could have been a cool, additional way to solve the puzzle. And this happened throughout the very few hours of the game. There were many puzzles that I felt could have been solved in multiple ways, but there is only one solution that will allow you to progress. Instead, I find myself getting regularly stuck and sometimes only solving puzzles by painstakingly trying every possible solution.

Ruffy and the Riverside is a truly unique adventure unlike anything I’ve played before, though it does have some elements that feel reminiscent of classics like Crash Bandicoot or Spyro the Dragon. Its characters and world are beautifully detailed and the game mechanics make for difficult but also truly satisfying puzzles. I look forward to jumping back into the game to continue the adventure but, so far anyway, getting so regularly stuck on puzzles has kept me from wanting to play it for longer than an hour or two at a time.

Ruffy and the Riverside is available June 26th, 2025 for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch.