Developer: Zockrates Laboratories UG
Publisher: Phiphen Games
Grab Ruffy And The Riverside For £13 at the time of this Review
“An Exceptionally Good Hand Drawn Adventure”
About The Game
In Ruffy and the Riverside, you wield the magic SWAP to Copy & Paste textures – turn ice into lava or waterfalls into vines! Explore, fight, skate on straw bales, and unleash your imagination in this quirky open-world action game. Dive into an adventure that lets you literally change the world!
Join Ruffy on an exciting quest to stop the mischievous villain Groll from destroying the World Core and throwing Riverside into chaos. Along the way, you’ll travel to fantastic places with helpful friends like Pip the sassy bee, Sir Eddler the adventurous mole, and Silja the wise turtle. Meet a lively cast of characters, each with their own unique stories and dialogues, as the exciting adventure unfolds with unexpected surprises for Ruffy around every corner.
Gameplay & Level Design
Ruffy And The Riverside heavily reminds us of banjo Kazooie and Mario 64 the game is colourful and fun.
The gameplay loop here is very consistent too with tons of collecting and exploring not to mention the amount of puzzle solving you will be doing.
The level design in Ruffy And The Riverside is quite frankly amazing everything you see here has been hand drawn, if you look away from the gameplay for a second and think of how long that must have taken it’s quite astounding.
The level design and secrets within the levels are well designed the game will have you looking around for things and potentially back tracking once you have learnt that you can actually do something things you initially thought you couldn’t do.
The levels are designed in such a way that you will need to use the games signature swap mechanic to traverse it. You want to cross the body of lava infront of you well then your going to have to either platform your way across or find a texture that you can swap with so your able to stand on it. It’s the little things like this that really make this game shine.
There are hidden collectables within the levels too, some of which are hidden within mini games, these mini games are very well crafted and give such a nostalgic trip to past gaming experiences.
Swap Mechanic
We wanted to touch upon the swap mechanic becauses it’s such an awesome feature within the game not only is it used for missions and progression through the game but you can actually use it to your advantage if you think outside the box.
Our favourite way to use it was copying money bushes onto other bushes allowing us to get more money because who doesn’t love a good coin collection.
There are absolutely tons of uses for this in the game, you can also swap the colour palette of the world to your own choosing too if you want the water red or another colour of your choosing that is an option too.
Character Development
Within the town of Riverside we meet tons of loveable little characters all with different art style but still hand drawn.
The main characters that shine are Ruffy, Pip and there little connection through out the game. The character development isn’t massive through the game but the development that has been implemented is meaningful and very welcomed.
Our Thoughts
We loved our time with Ruffy And The Riverside form the characters to the texture swapping to the constantly thinking what if I do this. The game is defiantly going to be hit with people that love Mario and Banjo Kazooie, that being said the game does have its moments where it fall short but they are short lived. The nostalgic vibe from Ruffy And The Riverside is what truly wins our heart though the developers have done an amazing job at capturing this so hats off to them.
