Ruffy and the Riverside is a 3D platformer that utilizes two-dimensional, hand-drawn characters in large polygonal environments to create a mesmerizing, contrasting visual effect. I play as Ruffy, a bear who possesses the curious power to Scan one part of his environment and copy it onto another. This power makes Ruffy the local Chosen One of Riverside, a town that bustles with activity from its bear, bird, mole, and species-unidentifiable citizens. Ruffy is called to fulfill his role when a greedy mole accidentally unleashes Groll, a demon who was sealed away to prevent him from seizing a gem with magical powers. Ruffy must search all over Riverside for the lost icons to a magical sign that protects the gem before Groll can claim it for himself.
It’s impossible to see even a brief image of Ruffy and the Riverside and have it vanish from my memory. It has an iconic visual style that makes it stand out even in the most crowded of slideshows and sizzle reels. Ruffy and the dozens of non-player animal characters he interacts with are all flat, two-dimensional figures. Their shapes are created from thick lines that still bear visible marks of previous rough drafts, drawn over to create their final forms. Their bodies are colored in by inconsistent strokes from a marker, creating the impression of random light reflecting off their hair or feathers. The style is an effective balance between polish and crudity that creates a friendly and appealing cast of colorful characters.
These impressive character models are given even more personality by their animations. Every action they take is given only a few frames of animation, giving them a jerky and rudimentary sense of motion even as they move smoothly through the environment. Even their idle animations are limited, rotating through the same three or four frames hundreds of times a minute. The rough lines and inconsistent texturing in each frame adds to the sensation of hyperactive motion; if the characters were motionless, their outlines and coloring would still vibrate with constant uncontrolled energy. These effects, while distinctive, can sometimes be exhausting to look at, particularly during conversations filled with static camera angles where my eyes have nothing to look at but characters frantically looping the same few animation frames.
These flat characters are a marked contrast to the polygonal world they live in, filled with fat shapes and many conspicuous corners and edges. The contrasting visual styles creates a suggestion that Riverside’s characters were plucked from a storybook and dropped into the crude polygonal world of a 32-bit 3D platformer. A shared color palette and a familiar forest atmosphere keep these two disparate visual styles from feeling too far out of step with one another. It takes a few minutes for my eyes to adjust, but after a while Ruffy and the Riverside starts to look normal.
Despite its unique visual style, Ruffy and the Riverside plays like a typical 3D platformer. Ruffy gets to most places in the world by running and jumping. He is joined on his journey by a bee companion named Pip, who Ruffy can grab in midair to float across wide gaps or carefully maneuver onto a narrow platform. Most of Ruffy’s jumps are accompanied by a goofy “wa-hey!” exclamation that is quickly grating to hear.
Another prominent activity is bale riding. Midway through his adventure, Ruffy learns how to ride round hay bales that other bears treat like motorcycles. Riding a bale lets Ruffy grind on slim rails to otherwise unreachable locations. Except in these situations requiring one, I try to avoid riding the bales. Far from being a faster way to get around, they are so difficult to steer that it is more efficient to walk at Ruffy’s average footspeed than constantly adjust the direction his bale takes him.
Ruffy’s most magical ability is the Swap. By Scanning the environment, Ruffy can temporarily memorize a color or texture from a surface. When he directs his concentration onto another surface, he overwrites that memorized feature onto that object.
This fantastic ability has many uses. Swapping’s most mundane use is to repaint parts of the world. A grove of trees in their natural green can be turned blue, red, or purple if it suits Ruffy’s goals, or even if I feel like recoloring them. Climbable vines cover the surfaces of many walls and cliffs. By Scanning the vines to his memory, Ruffy can Swap them onto another surface, letting him climb up previously impassable obstacles like a waterfall. A pool of water where a hungry shark lurks can be made passable by Swapping the water into lava, turning the creature into a charred cartoon husk. Swapping is even used in more abstract conditions, like switching images on a broken clock to magically transform day into night. At one point, Ruffy can cheat in a competition by Swapping the numbers in his own score with ones from a better-performing opponent.
Ruffy’s Swap powers do have limits. He can only keep a color or texture in his memory for a few seconds. Carrying a particular element a long distance sometimes becomes a relay race, with Ruffy Swapping some other feature in the environment along the way he can use to refresh his Scan. This is rarely necessary. The color or texture needed to solve puzzles is nearly always available nearby, and when it isn’t, that’s a clue it isn’t part of the solution. Swapping can even be used for grand projects like freezing over the entire ocean surface. This works for a brief time, allowing Ruffy to run quickly between tiny islands, though the ocean quickly reverts back to its normal state.
Swapping is Ruffy and the Riverside’s best idea so I am saddened to find that it becomes mundane long before Ruffy reaches the end of his approximately twelve hour adventure. As fantastic as Swapping is, Riverside doesn’t contain much variety in the ways it can be applied. The first time Ruffy transforms a waterfall into vines he can clamber up, it’s an awesome delight. By the dozenth time, it’s routine. Only a few hours into Ruffy’s quest, I have already seen every way the Swap powers can be used. The surprises stop much too soon.
Ruffy’s quest to stop Groll tasks him with using his 3D platforming and Swapping powers across six regions. Each area focuses on a unique platforming challenge or scenario. Ruffy becomes stranded on a deserted island and must find a way home, travels to a friendly underworld where rudimentary stealth mechanics help a ghost win a gardening competition, and into a familiar lost forest where he must use environmental clues to discern the correct path forward. A few events completely transform the videogame from a 3D platformer, including multiple hay bale races and a high-speed trick competition in a halfpipe.
Ruffy and the Riverside does a good job constantly changing up its activities to keep its main storyline fresh. I never feel like Ruffy is going through the motions or repeating activities while he searches for the magic letters that will protect the gem from Groll’s scheming. By that same point, I never feel like it dwells on a single idea long enough to refine it into something great.
The bale races take place on plain, circular tracks and are at first impossible to win, then next-to-impossible to lose once Ruffy learns how to use his Swapping powers to cheat. Similarly, the halfpipe competition is bewildering until I learn the timing for its tricks, then becomes trivial. There are few true 3D platforming obstacle courses. Most of the challenge in navigating the world comes from solving Swap puzzles, not from Ruffy bounding skillfully across platforms placed high above inconvenient or deadly falls. Collecting the letters and completing the main story never becomes truly interesting. Ruffy and the Riverside’s central campaign never really draws me in.
Even more uninteresting than the hunt for the magic letters is the plot that strings them all together. Of all the characters Ruffy encounters, only the greedy Eddler stands out prominently in my memory. Ruffy is the only other character to make an impact because he is the title and player character. Eddler’s prominence is not to the plot’s strength. He is a deceitful and lazy character, and not in a charming way. This sums up the main problem with the plot and characters: One of Ruffy’s closest friends is more unlikeable than the conventionally evil demon Groll.
The many dialog sequences that string the plot together are numerous and long-winded. Not a single character has a distinct or memorable voice, rendering all of the text I have to plow through into an interminable wall. Before Ruffy has reclaimed half of the magic letters, I have stopped absorbing any of the text, clicking listlessly through it all until I am given control over his avatar once again. Getting through Ruffy and the Riverside’s story, brief though it may be, is a slog.
Much more interesting than the plot, the characters, or the six regions where Ruffy searches for magical macguffins is the hub that joins them all together. This large, circular area is packed with Swap puzzles and other activities for Ruffy to solve. The density is so great that he encounters a new one each time I shift the camera’s perspective more than ninety degrees in any direction.
The variety of different collectables is almost as impressive as their quantity. Ruffy can track down five legendary gems for his mole friend Eddler. He can help a lepidopterist complete a collection of rare butterflies. Fifteen pattern potatoes are found around the world, mysterious artifacts that will only open if Ruffy can use his Swap powers to retrace a symbol, hidden somewhere nearby, onto the potato’s surface. Many walls have collectables hidden in them beyond short side-scrolling platforming sequences. The portals into these walls are sealed by picture puzzles overseen by clever Ravens. Opening these portals is the most frustrating time I have with Ruffy and the Riverside; the Ravens give vague and terribly written hints, though thankfully they may be bribed with an abundant currency to reveal the answer. In all, there are more than 130 collectables to track down around Riverside’s hub. I wish there were 130 more.
Nothing forces Ruffy to immediately look for the magic letters, or even to follow Eddler to where he accidentally revives Groll. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the densely packed playground at Riverside’s center, delaying the humdrum campaign by hours. The hub is the real heart of Ruffy and the Riverside, what immediately interests me as I begin playing, what I would rather Ruffy be doing while he searches for the letters, and the reason to come back after the credits have rolled.
One of these collectables unlocks Ruffy and the Riverside’s most magical feature. Early in the story, Ruffy encounters a bear named Pix whose curiously jagged shape and bright, simple coloring marks him as a stranger to Riverside. Pix gifts Ruffy with the Magic Tablet. Using thirty hidden Dreamstones in conjunction with the Tablet lets me redraw many of the textures around Riverside. If I want to turn all the water yellow or replace the shape of grass with rude words, Pix’s Magic Tablet lets me do so. It’s one of the most impressive player customization features I’ve encountered in a 3D platformer, and all the moreso for how it fits in beside Ruffy and the Riverside’s distinctive visual style.
There are many aspects of Ruffy and the Riverside I admire. I love the visual contrast between the flat, storybook-style characters and the polygonal, overtly videogame-y environment. I am impressed by the addition of the Magic Tablet to give me a degree of control over these distinctive visuals. A hub packed with puzzles and collectables on literally every surface keeps me enraptured for hours. Its trouble is it fails to make these strengths its centerpiece. My overwhelming memory is not of these strengths, but of a boring 3D platforming campaign guided by overwritten, bland, and unlikeable characters. Ruffy and the Riverside needs to get out of its own way so I can enjoy its strengths and overlook its weaknesses.