Ruffy and the Riverside Review

Who’s everybody’s favorite cartoon bear with the colorful cape and infectious belly laugh, who took the video game world by storm in the early 2000s? That’s right, it’s your pal Ruffy!! Well, actually it’s not Ruffy, because Ruffy and the Riverside is a brand new game from developer Zockrates Laboratories UG, that just released on June 26, 2025. That said, if you tried to convince me that Ruffy was a beloved cult video game character from the early aughts, you could probably Mandela Effect that into my head pretty darn easily. Which is a testament to his immediately iconic character design and the flawlessly nostalgic vibes of the game. 

Ruffy and the Riverside is a semi-open world 3D platformer that seeks to balance fresh gameplay experiences with tried and true atmosphere and aesthetics. You play as Ruffy: an adorable, fuzzy bear with a cheeky attitude, who delights in his mostly hum-drum life in Riverside, alongside his best friend Pip the bee. Ruffy is a mostly unremarkable bear in this world, with the exception that he possesses a magical skill known as The Swap. He can take textures, colors, even physical materials, and copy/paste them onto other surfaces! This comes quite in handy for his day job, working as the apprentice of a local arts dealer. But The Swap quickly becomes indispensable to all of Riverside when the evil Groll arrives to unleash chaos and destruction on this peaceful land.

Ruffy and the Riverside in Action

Along with his rag-tag band of snarky goofballs, you help Ruffy traverse every corner of Riverside to recover the strength of the world core and save the day! Along the way, there are oodles of puzzles to solve. Many of these puzzles are optional and contribute to the many Collectathon-style side quests in the game. Nearly all the puzzles, however, make use of Ruffy’s Swap ability. Within an hour or two of playing, it became second nature to me to look for climbable vines to paste onto waterfalls, and I would almost immediately turn any stone block into wood because of course I needed to break it. 

The internal logic of Riverside

Integrating The Swap so seamlessly into the beautiful low-poly world of Riverside is one of this game’s greatest triumphs. When you copy a texture from one object or surface onto another, you don’t just copy the visual style, but also apply the properties of the original object. Under the surface, the game maintains its own internal logic about how all of these properties and materials interact. 

From very early on, I was impressed by how intuitive it felt to pick up on that logic, with very little explanation from the game. Vines are climbable. Wood floats in water, but burns in lava. A block of wood is heavier than a block of hay, but a block of stone is even heavier. Many, if not most, of the game’s puzzles can be solved by taking a moment to look around and understand how the environment would interact if it were arranged in a slightly different way. The intuitiveness of this world is one of the things that makes Ruffy and the Riverside feel so joyful and easy to dive into.

Truly, so much of this game feels deeply familiar to me, like on a subconscious level. Maybe this is what people mean by “an instant classic,” because I feel like someone Back-to-the-Future’d me into thinking this could be a long-forgotten favorite of mine.

That said, I did run into occasional frustration with specific puzzles. In some cases, I’m not sure if the signposting wasn’t quite clear enough, or if I simply wasn’t picking up what the game was putting down in terms of clues. Which, in the end, also felt like a nostalgic experience that was essential in Y2K-era 3D platformers, so I found it easy to forgive. There were a couple of moments where I accidentally soft locked myself temporarily from solving a puzzle or got stuck. These were easily fixed by quitting to the main menu and loading back in, but hopefully we’ll see a few patches for these come out post-launch.

Ruffy-ception, directly into the brain

While the developers don’t explicitly label this game as a retro-inspired title, they clearly drew from the rich history of 90s and 00s 3D platformers, both in aesthetic and in tone. I’ll say up front that I’m not a retro gamer myself. I can appreciate the nostalgia, but I’m not necessarily drawn in by most games that center themselves around perfectly recreating the gaming experiences of a bygone era. Ruffy and the Riverside succeeds at striking a perfect balance for me between aesthetics and campy characters that felt familiar from my childhood, with fresh mechanics and features. For one, retro consoles could never handle the visual rendering or internal logic behind The Swap. And of course you also have all of the modern quality of life features we’ve come to expect (like autosave), and plenty of settings to tailor visuals, controls and approachability. 

Truly, so much of this game feels deeply familiar to me, like on a subconscious level. Maybe this is what people mean by “an instant classic,” because I feel like someone Back-to-the-Future’d me into thinking this could be a long-forgotten favorite of mine. Let’s take Ruffy’s character design, for example. Classic 3D platforming character from a millennial’s childhood. I’m told he’s a bear, but he certainly doesn’t look like any bear I’ve ever seen. His hooded cape, big gloves, and slightly manic facial features make him instantly recognizable in almost any art style. He’s an icon. What do you mean Ruffy hasn’t been in our lives since birth?

Ruffy and the Riverside Trailer

Then there’s the original soundtrack, which features a variety of bouncy, upbeat tunes that loop endlessly as you traverse the world of Riverside. They’re pleasant enough to listen to, and most are generic enough that they’ll get lost in your consciousness as you play the game. But they’re also unique and fun, in the kind of way that causes you to start humming them to yourself hours after you put the game down. A couple of the main songs feature some of the wackiest vocal tracks I’ve heard on a game soundtrack, and I don’t want to stop listening to them. And again, they have a truly infectious quality. I know if I hear the main theme from the Ruffy soundtrack 10 years from now, I’ll recognize it immediately.

I had a delightful time playing Ruffy and the Riverside and struggled to put it down. It absolutely nails what it’s trying to do in terms of player experience. In my experience, it’s very rare to find a title that balances nostalgia with freshness so successfully. I would love to see more installments in the Ruffy series (which I do hope will become a series), and maybe I can eventually gaslight myself into believing he was an actual staple of my childhood.

Emily was provided with a review key of Ruffy and the Riverside by Pirate PR

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