"Ruffy and the Riverside" and "Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream"

Publisher: Phiphen Games

Developer: Zockrates Laboratories UG

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S

One of my favorite things about being a small time critic with a small-but-dedicated readership is the fact that I get to review what I want. Anyone can review AAA titles all the time, but I'm lucky enough to be in a position where I can use this platform to shine a spotlight on smaller projects that are destined to fall under the radar for most people. Ruffy and the Riverside is one such project. 

Sporting a sort of nondescript European cartoon coat of paint, Ruffy and the Riverside is an old school platforming collect-a-thon in the same vein as Banjo Kazooie. You're the titular Ruffy: a bear who lives in the titular town of Riverside. But Ruffy is no ordinary bear. Our hero is blessed with a mystical power call "The Swap," which allows him to retain and replace textures within the world. If faced with a lake, Ruffy can take the texture from a block of ice and freeze that whole body of water. That kind of thing. One day, an ancient evil king is awakened and destroys the giant Hollywood-style sign that powers the core of the world. So, it's up to Ruffy and his bumblebee sidekick Pip to track down the letters of the sign and restore order to Riverside. About the level of story strength one would expect from a game like this, but that's never the focus, so it's ok. 

You may be able to guess what gameplay is all about given what was said in that previous paragraph. It's a classic platformer/collect-a-thon: you're plopped in a handful of maps that are littered with little challenges and secrets to find, and you accomplish various objectives in these maps, but the whole point is to explore and solve puzzles. With Ruffy's power, you can likely intuit that these puzzles revolve around texture swapping, and if that sounds incredibly simple, that's because it is! These game aren't meant to be unbelievably challenging, they're meant to touch that part of the monkey brain that likes finding things.

Here's an example of these puzzles in action: you'll find treasure chests all around the world, but there are several that are stuck underwater (where you can't open them). When you see one of these, you'll likely look around to see what textures are available. What, then, might you try? For me, my first idea was to use dirt from the bank of the water to turn the water to dirt, possibly forcing the chest out that way. However, swapping textures only swaps...well...textures, not things like consistency. So, rather than turning the water into solid ground, it turned into more of a flowing river of sand. Changing the chest's texture to wood, however, made it float, solving the puzzle.

The puzzles are all like that: simple enough for children to solve, but clever enough to make you feel clever when you solve them. And if you are having trouble for whatever reason, there's almost always an NPC standing nearby with a hint ready.

Where Ruffy and the Riverside doesn't quite measure up is, surprisingly, in its technical fidelity. Despite using 2D character models and 3D environments barely above PS2 level, the game is plagued by stutters when you pass through invisible area transitions. It tends to happen around the same spots on the map, which is what leads me to believe that's the reason. Either way, the screen can hang up for around a second when you move from Riverside town to the surrounding forest (to give one example).

There's also some head-scratchingly bad checkpointing going on. If you die, you'll often get sent back just far enough to be irritating. For instance, there's an early segment where you need to roll on an ice ball across a small stretch of ocean littered with obstacles. This segment starts off on the far side of an island, and you roll this ball across the island and into that stretch of ocean. One would think the checkpoint would be right at the edge of the ocean or something, but it's actually right before you hop on the ice ball in the first place. There aren't a whole lot of places where you're going to die, but that doesn't make it feel much better to have to re-do so much.

Games like this tend to be pretty universally strong provided they work, so it should come as no surprise that I had a blast with Ruffy and the Riverside, even if there isn't too much to be said about it that can't be said about other games in the genre. There's a little bit of jank here and there to indicate a pretty low budget (not to mention the use of some stock iMovie sound effects), but the budget is allocated effectively enough. If you like this type of game, you're going to like Ruffy and the Riverside, so I'd recommend you go out and buy it if for no reason other than to give these developers some support. The game is small and under-the-radar enough that there's basically nothing about it on the internet right now, so it could use all the support it can get!

Let us review:

Performance issues - 0.5

Bad checkpointing - 0.5

The final score for Ruffy and the Riverside is...

9.0/10 - Fantastic

Well done, Zockrates Laboratories, well done!

Publisher: Nordcurrent

Developer: River End Games

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream is an example of why it's sometimes good to stick with things that you don't gel with at first. I'll be frank: first impressions of this game are not strong, and I'm not the only one who feels that way. But we'll get to that in a second.

First, a brief overview. Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream is an isometric stealth game set in a pretty run-of-the-mill industrial fantasy setting. You are Hanna, a teenager (I think) whose brother has evidently gotten into some trouble with the law. With this setting being kind of an all-but-openly fascist state, this is bad news. So, when Hanna is "innocently" called in for questioning, she instead takes off and becomes a fugitive herself. Because I'm recommending this game (in spite of everything I'm going to be saying), I don't want to spoil things...but believe me when I say that this story is stupid. Just imagine your average YA novel plot, but in a boring setting. That's the experience. And there isn't a whole lot of story here, but there's enough to gum up the works.

But story isn't what you're going to walk away from Eriksholm remembering. You're going to remember the gameplay for how horrible it is at first, then you're going to remember it for how much better it gets. Anyway, as I said, this is an isometric stealth game, and that tells you a lot of what you need to know. You'll be trying to get across a map without being spotted, and it's from a nearly top-down perspective, allowing you to move the camera around things like walls to plan accordingly. At least, that's how it works in theory.

In reality, the guards that serve as this game's enemies tend to blend in with the scenery. This means that you'll often have to restart from a checkpoint multiple times for no reason other than an officer's white skin and grayish uniform blended into a grayish wall lit by a campfire. Compounding onto this is the BIG gameplay problem in the early chapters. 

In the early chapters, Eriksholm isn't actually a stealth game...it's a memory game. New swaths of guards will randomly come into an area and start spreading out in every direction, ruining whatever plans you had. From there, you'll continuously fail as you try to learn their patterns second-by-second. It was so bad that I almost didn't play beyond chapter 2. 

But as I said, it gets better. It gets much better, in fact. The memory aspect of it goes away and the inherent puzzles in each stealth encounter actually get interesting. The final two chapters in particular are the best stealth segments I've experienced this year...maybe longer than that. These puzzles were just brain-bendy enough to hang me up for a little while, but they were never so difficult that I felt the need to look up a guide....well, except in one instance, but we'll get to that in the technical section. 

Before we get into that, there's one other major problem that I need to bring up: Hanna never. Ever. Ever. Shuts. Up. I'll never understand why developers these days feel the need to have their characters constantly run their mouths about everything going on. 

"I should do x" - ok, whatever.

"There's a guard there, I just have to get past him" - what? You don't say!

"There's someone there, I'll turn off my light" - well, I can't turn my light off and on in the first place, so it's kinda weird that you're narrating that.

"Not far now" - thanks, not like there's an objective marker right in front of me.

"This reminds me of this thing me and my brother used to do" - you realize you're trying not to be detected, right?

It becomes less egregious as time goes on (and it's not Marvel quips), but I was starting to get red in the face with frustration early on because characters who don't ever shut up are one of my biggest pet peeves. 

Finally, let's discuss the technical fidelity. I never experienced any texture pop-in, framerate dips, crashes, nothing like that. But the game does still falter in ways that matter. 

Remember how I mentioned there was one exception to the puzzle difficulty? Well, that exception happened because my dart gun bugged out and didn't do exactly what it needed. So I looked up a guide, saw I was actually doing everything right, restarted, and managed to get through that section. That's not great. 

There was also a stretch of time late in the game where Hanna simply stopped moving. This was once again fixed with a reload, but its another example of Eriksholm not 100% holding it together in weird places. 

As tends to be the case in my reviews more often than I'd like, I'd understand if you don't believe me when I say I enjoyed Eriksholm a lot. That kind of comes with the territory when there are sizable problems I'm able to move past. The game starts off about as weak as weak can get, has a paper-thin narrative tying it all together, and occasionally has some not insignificant technical issues. But I love stealth games, and I can say with certainty that once the gameplay here picks up, it's some of the best stealth gameplay I've experienced in a long time. Eriksholm is a game with so many asterisks as to resemble a password being typed, but if you can trudge through a weak opening (a prospect perhaps made easier with its cheaper-than-usual price), I think it's worthwhile.

Let us review:

Hanna never shuts up - 1.0

Weak opening chapters - 1.0

Stupid Story - 0.5

Technical flaws - 0.5

The final score for Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream is...

7.0/10 - Good

Decent effort, River End Games, decent effort