RUFFY AND THE RIVERSIDE

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Nostalgia is a strong force that fuels your creativity and keeps you moving forward even when everything sucks at the moment. Wishing things were now as fun as they were “back then”. I remember the feeling when I first played BANJO-KAZOOIE on my brand-new N64 until my thumbs felt sore from the controller. It was awesome. Even nowadays, when replaying it, I admire how well the level design is holding up, compared to modern titles. A lot of modern games suffer from too much bloat. It takes you at least like 5 minutes to walk around before encountering anything new.

Everyone has fond memories of their childhood‘s favourite(s). But nostalgia can also trick you into thinking that something was better than it actually was. In the case of BANJO, with time, I realised how much the camera and controls in that game SUUUCK. They are almost purposefully trying to make you fail, and it's especially rage-inducing in the less-than-stellar Switch online port. Add to that narrow ledges that end in instant death, and you find yourself at the start of a level where you have to move your fat bear-ass back to that same point, which can take you several minutes before you can attempt that platforming section again. Oh, and don't forget that you lose a life every time that happens. UGH.

Which leads us now to today's topic, RUFFY AND THE RIVERSIDE. It is immediately clear that this game was created as a gigantic love letter to all the 90s jump ‘n run and action game classics like BANJO-KAZOOIE, SPYRO, PAPER MARIO, and so on. And I adore almost everything that it delivers. But ofc the perfect game doesn‘t exist. When creating a game that wants to evoke a nostalgic memory in the player, the game designer has the unfair challenge to find the sweet spot between the modern player's standards & expectations vs the fluffy, cosy feeling of nostalgia. The classic want vs need.

In most aspects, this game does an amazing job at not only recreating a classic 90s adventure game with its style and soundtrack, but also adds its own special flavour with its texture copy-paste mechanics that is used in a variety of creative puzzles. The best elements of RUFFY AND THE RIVERSIDE are the cartoony presentation, fun characters, bonkers story, and the copy-paste mechanic to solve the puzzles.

Delightfully, the game doesn't take itself too seriously.

You have Ewoks / Disney's gummy bears running through a Renaissance era town with corresponding music, while a talking heart-vending-machine robot wants you to purchase your own health bar hearts. The race-kart equivalent of this world is a rolling haystack, while on top of the town's hills, the Hollywood-inspired "RIVERSIDE" letters tower over the landscape. It's a wild, exciting mix that makes no sense, but that's what makes it so unique. It's like discovering an old school notebook from behind the drawer and finding inside a world filled with nonsense characters and ideas that only a child can come up with. The world is equally colourful and „marker-y“. If you can't get enough of changing the world with copy-pasting textures, the game also gives you the canvas to further alter the world with your own creativity.

But after a while, small cracks appeared in the paint, and I got the feeling that some of the game‘s mechanics and elements were only rough drafts, and because of this, they are not always working in the game's favour and hinder it from becoming a true masterpiece. At first glance, the journal tab of the game gives you the illusion that this is a collectathon game, and you can't walk 2 metres without stumbling over a butterfly or a bunch of coins. You can use your swap abilities to solve puzzles that reward you with collectables, but your progression is not directly tied to collecting x number of any of the collectables to unlock new areas.

Only after the credits rolled, I noticed that I didn't complete any of the collections, and it also didn't feel like I was missing out on much because of that. Instead, the progression is tied to completing objectives that allow you to collect the plot-relevant McGuffin, which, in the next step, opens the path to the next objective that lets you collect the next McGuffin. The overall world design and collectables create the illusion of a more open progression structure, while in reality, the story progresses in a straight linear way. Which is fine too, many adventure games are like this. I am just not a completionist most of the time.

The health bar and the stamina system seem to have no real purpose when you go deeper into the game. During my playthrough, the health bar was only relevant on 3 occasions during one of the very few boss encounters. Not once running through this game, I thought "man, this stamina system is awesome, otherwise I would have never taken the time to smell the flowers and missed out on all the fun". There was no point where it made sense from a gameplay perspective to have it.

But putting these cons aside, the rest of the game is solid. Overall, RUFFY AND THE RIVERSIDE is a delightful game with a ton of love oozing out of every drawn stroke. I love the characters and their quirks, I love the look and soundtrack. The swap-puzzles are creative and varied, and so was the story progression. If you, too, enjoy lighthearted, colourful puzzle adventure games with some light jump'n'run elements, this game is definitely for you.