Sometimes I really do miss the 90s, especially for the games. While I started my gaming journey on 2D platformers, I really grew up on the 3D platformers of the N64 era. The mind-blowing explorable worlds of Super Mario 64 compared to the Game Boy levels in my hand. The daft inventiveness of Banjo Kazooie. The (supposedly) mature comedy and film references of Conker’s Bad Fur Day.
It’s these experiences that spring to mind playing Ruffy and the Riverside, a game that feels wonderfully 90s. Yes it’s got vibrant worlds and a cheery protagonist with a bee companion, who butt stomps and flaps when he runs and is some form of animal I can barely identify (he’s as close to a bear as Sonic is a hedgehog, not that it really matters – I say this lovingly). But it’s also got a soundtrack seemingly inspired by the likes of Crash Bandicoot or Parappa the Rapper, with its buoyant percussion and hip-hop cool, as well as crisp chiming sound effects, and a Taz the Tasmanian Devil-style spin attack.
Yet Ruffy and the Riverside thrives for its thoroughly modern gimmick: the power to swap textures. That might sound like boring dev chat, but it’s used in the game for puzzle solving as Ruffy explores the world in search of stars – these are used to unlock doors to new worlds, in suitable genre fashion. With a click of a bumper, Ruffy will aim at a texture to copy it and then, with a trigger, can aim to paste it somewhere else. Turn water into vines to climb a waterfall! Turn stone blocks into wood to smash them! Turn the sea into ice for easy crossing!
It’s one of those genius yet simple ideas that makes a game truly stand out. Its use is for both environmental puzzles and standalone puzzles too, both of which can lead to those precious stars. For instance, levels have little cryptic moments dotted around like Zelda’s Korok puzzles, where Ruffy must match pillars of stone to graffiti on the wall, or match dice numbers based on a riddle. And then there are broader puzzles for getting around: one particular moment had me switching rocks for wood and then turning water to lava to burn them away and make a suitable series of platforms to leap up. As fun as the smaller puzzles are, it’s these larger, thought-provoking moments that will likely make or break Ruffy and the Riverside when it releases in full.
The swap powers are limited, though, for good and for bad. On the positive side, once a texture has been copied, there’s a time limit for how long it can be used for. This not only stops the ability becoming overpowered, but it also leads to interesting waypoints as you need to get from A to C, but must find a B in between. If a puzzle and the necessary textural solution are far apart, what can be swapped in between to replenish your power? I can imagine puzzles growing swiftly in complexity with multiple textures needing to be swapped around.
On the more negative side, though, not everything can be swapped. Of course, swapping the whole world around would be entirely too much, but I quickly found the options available to Ruffy were quite limited. There may be multiple solutions to a puzzle, but I’m not convinced yet it will allow for more fanciful modes of experimentation. More often than not there’s a specific texture and a specific solution to be found – in Zelda terms, it’s more Ocarina of Time than Breath of the Wild. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the world design allows for enough diversity over time, but in this demo at least the puzzle solving was a little too simplistic for my tastes.
Still, with such a smart idea, there’s potential here for some properly clever puzzle solving. If the developer can get that balance right, then together with the game’s charmingly nostalgic aesthetic, full of Paper Mario-style expressive characters, Ruffy and the Riverside could be a winning 90s throwback.
