The upcoming Ruffy and the Riverside is already a colorful and rambunctious platformer to look at, but keep watching for the ‘oh snap’ moment – the protagonist can copy and paste game textures to affect the world. This surprising ability, dubbed ‘SWAP’ lets you turn the sun into the moon, water into lava, waterfalls into vines, and so much more. Ruffy will have to use this literally world-changing ability to explore the Riverside and overcome the mischievous plans of the villain Groll.
With a hand drawn, cartoony world that hearkens back to classic 3D platformers from the Nintendo 64 era, Ruffy and the Riverside seeks to channel the very same inventiveness and whimsy of that time. Riding hay bales, swapping parts of your environment, meeting new animal friends and fulfilling side-quests, Ruffy has a lot to do while saving the Riverside.
Ruffy and the Riverside is wrapping up development at Zockrates Laboratories, a studio based in Nuremberg, Germany. This is the studio’s debut title, and we asked the studio’s CEO Dr. phil. Patrick Ruckdeschel a few questions to learn more about the game and its development.
IIG: How long is the game to play from start to finish?
The game will be about 15 hours for the main story and another five 5 hours if you do all side quests and explore the world to find all collectibles. We even have a drawing board in the game, so players will be able to draw their own textures and customize the look of the game world. So if you want to stay in the beautiful all hand drawn world for a longer time, you can do so.
IIG: Where did the inspiration for the “Copy Paste” mechanic come from?
That`s a really nice story. The idea came to me, when i looked through a couple of old drawings. One drawing was strange. It showed a waterfall, but was it really water? Or was it lava? The drawing was black and white, so I really didn’t know. That moment the idea came to me that it actually could be both. Lava and water. I made a copy of the drawing and colored it red. The other I colored blue. Both drawings looked great. And there it was: How about making a game that lets you change textures of objects to change the world?
We did a little prototype game and it was fun, so we kept going with that idea.
IIG: This is the debut game from Zockrates Laboratories. Can you tell us more about the team?
We are a team of five. Most of us are doing arts in our free time, so we do music, we draw or even do interactive robots and stuff like that, so art really is what we love. In fact our company Zockrates Labs does not only develop videogames like “Ruffy and the Riverside” but also does interactive art from time to time. Our latest project is to design and program an interactive fountain where kids can play with water fountains.
However “Ruffy and the Riverside” is our most important project. We put all our passion in this game and besides our core team, there are even more people involved. We have awesome partners who translate the dialogues, music artists for the soundtrack and our brilliant voice artist Nero Negron, the voice of Ruffy.
Also we usually have two or three of interns that bring fresh ideas to the game. All in all it is a very creative team and that is also the reason why the game got bigger and bigger over the years.
Ruffy and the Riverside releases on June 26th, 2025 for PC, Linux, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and Switch.For more information on the game, check out its official website here. You’ll find the game on Steam here.
Thank you for reading this preview of Ruffy and the Riverside! For more interesting articles on all things indie games, be sure to check out the links below.
- Into Indie Games Homepage
- Date Everything Review
- The Alters Review
- Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo Walkthrough
- The Precinct Walkthrough
