A cheery introduction to dark arts and crafts.
We’ve had no shortage of great 3D platformers these past few years, but I reckon that Ruffy and the Riverside might be one of this year’s best already—if its new demo on Steam is any indication. It certainly has me convinced that its core gimmick—the ability to copy and paste the textures and physical properties of its environment—is one of the most intriguing puzzle mechanics I’ve seen in the genre for a while.
What you’re getting here is a familiar, comfortable 3D platformer with satisfying but simple movement, paired with a very clever conceit. Playing as the eternally grinning bear Ruffy, you’ve got the wizardly power to pull materials from the world and apply them to other sources. Need to cross a lake? Ruffy can’t swim, but a little patch of ice can turn the whole surface frozen. Copy the fire from candles to ignite others, or turn impassable stone blocks into crates by copying the wooden property from a tree onto them.
Even early on, it’s used smartly. Sometimes it’s just a matter of copying one material to another to open a path, other times you’ll be asked to alter images or solve riddles by copying tiles around. My favourite puzzle in the demo involved trying to turn several rock columns into a stone staircase in the ocean, allowing me to reach a high ledge. The slabs are too big to be broken after turning them to wood, but the solution impressed me: Turn the rocks I didn’t want into wood first, then turn the entire ocean into lava to strategically burn down the stacks to more manageable heights.
The demo gives you a walled-off sample of the game’s overworld to explore, plus portions of three larger levels from the full game. It sounds limiting, and it does end just when it feels like it’s picking up speed, but I can’t deny that it made me want to dive straight into the full game and see where those mechanics take me. The demo constantly teases future adventures, with the rest of each level visible, but blocked off with a transparent barrier, and it looks like there’s a lot more to explore.
Ruffy and the Riverside is also pretty easy on the eyes. Riffing off the style defined by Paper Mario and recently echoed in the likes of Demon Turf and Here Comes Niko, Ruffy’s world feels like it’s made out of cardboard. Slightly stiff, painted in lush watercolours, and populated by little paper creatures with thick white outlines, while the 2D areas painted onto walls (riffing off similar areas in recent Mario games) have a simplified, crudely-illustrated look.
It’s a style that supports the copying and pasting nicely, and there’s some interesting flair, too, like the medieval aesthetic of Ruffy’s town, with the assorted cute cartoon critters all wearing doublets, hose, smocks and cowls, with rolling hay bales being the primary vehicle to get you from point A to B, despite anachronistic, higher tech stuff going on elsewhere. Familiar, but just different enough to feel fresh and immediately charming.
While Ruffy doesn’t seem to have as fleshed-out a moveset as other platformer heroes (definitely nothing comparable to the shape-shifting, wall-kicking speedrunning precision of Beebz from Demon Turf), getting around is still a breeze and everything feels tuned just right. There’s just enough traditional platforming depth here to make it feel truly elevated by the copy-paste swapping mechanics.
At this point, my only real gripe with Ruffy is that the titular critter is a bit too noisy, with almost every action accompanied by an excitable babble of noise and chatter, which was starting to grate by the end of the demo and would probably have me losing my marbles by the end of the full game. Obviously this is an excitable, lively character aimed at a younger crowd, but he could probably afford to be about a third as loud. But that’s really all I’ve got to nitpick about. If the full game expands on the puzzles and clever uses of Ruffy’s copy-and-pasting powers, this could end up as one of 2025’s best platformers.
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