The lines on the cyber-potato connect to a celebratory jingle. Another collectible floats off into my inventory, but I remain stoic. The line-matching puzzle is good, even a little fun, but the amount of doodads Ruffy & the Riverside hoovers up is a little intimidating. How did I get through multiple platformers like the Spyro games, Croc, and even Jersey Devil? I was younger. Games were younger.
Someone rolls atop a circular hay bale, beckoning me to another minigame, another thing to collect. Ruffy & the Riverside scratches the primal gamer itch to run, jump, and pick things up. A genuinely exciting object-swapping power is icing on the proverbial cake. But I think I’m past my endless buffet days. There’s so much to do in all directions, yet I find myself chafing at the 3D platformer format itself. I must be the problem.
Drilling Deeper
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Days later, in an entirely different game, I start piecing together my thoughts. Everdeep Aurora dangles some big questions in front of me, urging me deeper into the earth. I’m Shell, a small black cat with a cloak and an oversized drill. I know three things: the situation with the red moon and the meteors is bad, my mom is somewhere in the tunnels underground, and I absolutely do not have the entire story. That’s all the motivation I need to drill further down.
After prying a particularly tough triangular stone from the rock, I catch myself. Am I a hypocrite? Why am I compelled to keep going in Everdeep Aurora, yet remain put off by Ruffy & the Riverside’s platforming smorgasbord? Maybe it’s some residual cruft from the Playstation 1 era, where so many franchises morphed into 3D before they felt ready. Maybe Ruffy is a modern update to Nintendo 64 platformers, a console I almost entirely missed.
Or maybe the reason I’m being a bit unfair is that I simply can’t keep track of every collectible in three dimensions. My mid-thirties brain is prone to overstimulation. I have to run, jump, aim, AND pick things up? In this economy? Ruffy & the Riverside expects a layer of real-time proficiency that I simply do not have.
Unseen Boundaries
Ruffy & the Riverside’s sense of whimsy is tempered by the necessary constraints of a 3D platformer. Characters are flat but rendered in bright watercolors, moving and emoting as they should. Environments blend pleasantly blocky polygons with vivid detailing. And for the most part, the way Ruffy navigates the world lives up to that cheer. Jumps, dashes, and hovers chain together in fun ways without holding back less agile players (me). Collectibles leave a constant trail toward more things to try.
Ruffy can swap materials on highlighted objects with others. Stones can turn into breakable wood. A previously inaccessible wall can be swapped with a curtain of vines. Unfortunately, control quirks dampen this potential freedom. Entering swap mode brings the camera in to a first person view, and objects already in the reticle are highlighted with no visible way to toggle them out of the selection.
Mechanical hiccups slow the pace. After my tutorial companions set me loose, I promptly jump right into an invisible barrier. It’s not immersion-breaking, but it does bring me down to earth a bit: this is a commercial product by a small team. There is only so much one can do. Ruffy has a tendency to pop off ladders before reaching the summit. Slowing down to a crawl and then inching up the last bit of ladder seems to fix the problem, but it deflates any momentum they built up.
I try reloading the game and even waiting until my pre-release code lines up with the actual launch, but no luck. Ruffy & the Riverside’s freewheeling tone clashes with the act of playing it, feeling more like a too-close picket fence than a sprawling garden.
Natural Limits
Ruffy & the Riverside and Everdeep Aurora are at their best when channeling mood and motion of games past, but falter when organizing inventory. Everdeep Aurora commits to keeping all information and inventory onscreen, even when it has to resort to giving Shell bags to store other items inside. The Nintendo Switch button layout adds friction to interacting with Shell’s backpack. Up and down on the D-pad scrolls through item text and description, while left and right swaps the current inventory item. But not every item uses the same interaction button. Some use A and others use X, so I often fumble a few times before getting it right.
Ruffy & the Riverside’s collectible page, accessed via the Start menu, is serviceable but almost immediately overwhelming. Some item types get organized menu layouts, while others simply display their icons and amounts collected. Character art fills in empty space that could have been better organized, only adding to the visual noise.
The game is reluctant to show you collectible information during play, briefly showing your updated collectible count at the top right of the screen before tucking it away again. These interface decisions are meant to be friendly and approachable, but they just make me feel disconnected from my current objective.
Retro-Inspired Platformers, Three-Dimensional Problems
This groundswell of retro-inspired games is encouraging, even when it comes with a new batch of problems. Ruffy & the Riverside’s 3D collectathon is unabashedly bright and joyful, but that playfulness butts heads with mechanical limits and interface quirks. Everdeep Aurora commits a little too hard to interface conventions of the past, sacrificing some accessibility and readability for its distinctive look. Ultimately, these compromises made me reckon with each title’s homage to platformers.
Whether in 2D or 3D, Everdeep Aurora and Ruffy & the Riverside feel hemmed in by the genre expectations of platformers past. But it’s comforting that no experience is universal. While I grapple with design questions, other players will enjoy and even love these titles, filling in the gaps that I missed. For now, I simply can’t make the jump.
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