Ruffy and the Riverside knows exactly what kind of game it wants to be. It’s not content with just paying homage to classic platformers or going through the usual motions. Instead, it builds its entire identity around one clever idea — what if you could reshape the environment itself to solve problems, reach new areas, and mess with the rules?
That idea forms the backbone of an experience that feels consistently creative and occasionally surprising. From the opening moments to the final set piece, the swap mechanic doesn’t just show up — it defines how you engage with puzzles, how you explore, and even how you interact with the game world itself.
It’s not flawless. A few pacing issues, underwhelming combat, and some repetitive elements hold it back from top-tier status. But even with those rough edges, Ruffy and the Riverside is a confident, polished, and refreshingly original take on the genre — one that manages to leave a lasting impression.
The Swap Mechanic – Smart, Flexible, and Central to Everything
At the core of Ruffy and the Riverside is its most defining feature: the swap system. This isn’t just a visual trick or a side mechanic that shows up occasionally. It shapes how you explore, solve puzzles, and interact with the world around you.
With a quick scan, Ruffy can absorb the properties of nearby materials such as wood, lava, vines, metal, or water. These can then be applied to other objects to alter how they behave. A heavy metal box might become light and buoyant if turned into wood, allowing you to float it across a river. A climbing wall might only become usable after you overwrite it with vines. It’s a mechanic that touches every part of the game’s design.
Swaps are limited by a short timer, which keeps things interesting without feeling restrictive. As you progress, the ability to apply changes to multiple objects at once makes more complex challenges easier to manage. It’s a smart upgrade that keeps the flow of gameplay steady, even in later areas.
What stands out most is how often the mechanic encourages playful problem-solving. You might swap lava into water to bypass a hazard, or sabotage a rival in a hay bale race by turning their path into stone. Some swaps serve no purpose other than to entertain, like helping a character swap their identity from the sun to the moon.
While the mechanic does lose some novelty toward the end of the game due to repeated puzzle formats, the core idea remains strong throughout. It never fades into the background. Instead, it becomes part of how you think, explore, and move through the world. This is not a platformer with a gimmick. It is a full puzzle adventure built around one clever, well-implemented concept.
A Handcrafted World with Personality and Purpose
One of Ruffy and the Riverside’s biggest strengths is how much care has gone into building its world. Riverside isn’t just a backdrop for platforming challenges. It feels like a place with its own logic, communities, and a surprising amount of side content that exists beyond the main quest.
The hand-drawn art style immediately stands out. Every area, from sun-bleached beaches to haunted graveyards and snow-covered plains, is designed with bold colour choices and detailed flourishes. The art gives the game a distinct identity, and even though characters and objects are rendered in a flat style, the world never feels static. Animations are expressive, transitions between areas are seamless, and each new region introduces a fresh biome with its own vibe.
The towns and overworld zones are filled with interactive characters who offer more than just filler dialogue. Most side quests have a clear structure and a reason to exist. Whether you’re helping a fox collect butterflies, racing hay bales through booby-trapped tracks, or dealing with a gang of talking fish, the tasks are creative and tie back into the core mechanics. It’s not just about collecting items. You’re often using the swap system in new ways, even outside of main missions.
There are also surreal chalk-style 2D puzzle levels that appear as side content. These zones strip away most of your tools and offer short, focused challenges that act almost like standalone puzzle rooms. Some are tough, others are more conceptual, but they’re all effective at giving the swap mechanic a new flavour.
Not everything hits the same high bar. A few quests rely on basic fetch objectives and repeat the same structure in different areas. But the game offsets that by offering consistent surprises. Even small discoveries—like manipulating the landscape for visual rewards or hidden interactions with side characters—reinforce that sense of a living world. Riverside doesn’t just react to your presence. It invites you to play with it.
Combat, Upgrades, and a Light Touch on Progression
Combat in Ruffy and the Riverside is never the main attraction, but it plays a functional role in keeping you engaged between puzzles and platforming. Ruffy has a basic punch and a charged attack, both of which are responsive enough to feel satisfying early on. The addition of gliding, sprinting, and the occasional ability-based twist helps movement feel fluid and quick, which makes encounters feel less like roadblocks and more like interruptions you can swat away.
That said, combat is where the game feels least developed. Enemy variety is limited, and encounters rarely require more than a couple of hits to resolve. Most enemies serve more as environmental noise than actual threats, and aside from a few moments where you’re surrounded or dealing with terrain hazards, they don’t ask much of you as a player. Boss fights are few in number and generally underwhelming, often boiling down to a simple pattern of dodging then attacking with little variation. What’s here works, but it doesn’t elevate the experience in the way the puzzle and world systems do.
Progression, however, fares better thanks to a handful of systems that reward exploration and add layers to your build. Cape customization is one of the more playful additions. By collecting coins and visiting specific NPCs, you can unlock different visual styles and passive bonuses that tweak your stats. These upgrades aren’t game-changers, but they do offer enough variety to make collecting feel worthwhile.
Health upgrades, temporary heart boosts, and stamina extensions are all handled through in-world characters rather than standard menus. This keeps everything feeling grounded in the setting and reinforces the game’s tendency to deliver systems through interaction rather than interface. The stamina mechanic, in particular, is smartly tuned. Sprinting drains your meter, but collecting coins refills it quickly, which creates a natural flow where exploring, collecting, and moving efficiently all feed into each other.
The result is a progression system that’s simple but rewarding. You’re not grinding for stats or unlocking skill trees. You’re shaping your experience through movement, interaction, and discovery. It’s a good fit for a game that values curiosity more than combat mastery.
Pacing and Puzzle Design – Strong Foundation, Uneven Rhythm
Ruffy and the Riverside starts strong. The early areas introduce the swap mechanic through well-paced tutorials, interesting environmental puzzles, and side objectives that feel meaningful rather than distracting. You’re given the freedom to explore at your own pace, and the game rewards that curiosity with small surprises, quirky characters, and creative uses of its core mechanic.
Over time, though, some of that momentum begins to waver. Puzzle concepts that initially feel clever—like changing water to lava or turning stone into wood—tend to repeat without much evolution. Once you understand the basic rules, many later puzzles become more about applying what you already know than solving something new. It’s not that they’re bad, but they often feel familiar rather than challenging.
A few story objectives also rely too heavily on basic fetch quests or light backtracking. These moments can slow the pace, especially when you’re moving through areas you’ve already explored, and the payoff isn’t always worth the effort. The game’s open areas encourage exploration, but its linear sequences don’t always offer the same level of engagement.
That said, the pacing is rarely frustrating. Sprinting is fast and responsive, loading is minimal, and most objectives are short enough to keep things moving. Even during slower stretches, the world stays visually interesting and interactive, and there’s usually a collectible or optional challenge nearby to break things up.
Most players will finish the game in around six to eight hours, depending on how much optional content they pursue. Completing every side quest, collecting all the butterflies, and unlocking environmental customisation can push that closer to ten or twelve hours. It’s a good length for a game built around a single mechanic, and it ends before it overstays its welcome.
The ideas behind the puzzles are strong. It’s the variety that falters in the second half. Still, the game never loses its identity, and even when the design becomes predictable, the world and characters give you enough reason to keep going.
Closing Thoughts – Creative, Memorable, and Full of Personality
Ruffy and the Riverside doesn’t reinvent the platformer, but it doesn’t need to. It focuses on one standout mechanic, builds a vibrant world around it, and offers enough personality and variety to make the journey feel worth taking. The swap system is clever and rewarding, the environments are full of colour and charm, and the game constantly invites you to engage with its world in playful, creative ways.
There are areas that fall short. Enemy design and boss battles are undercooked, puzzle repetition sets in during the second half, and some pacing hiccups can stall the experience. But even with those issues, Ruffy and the Riverside always feels like it’s coming from a good place. It’s a game made with care, full of little details and ideas that stick with you after the credits roll.
For players who enjoy platformers with experimentation, exploration, and a unique mechanic at the centre of it all, this is absolutely worth your time. It might not land every idea perfectly, but it never stops trying to give you something interesting to do or look at. That kind of energy is hard not to appreciate.
Clever, creative, and full of surprises.
🔗 Where to Play and Learn More
Play it on Xbox Series X|S
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