This delightfully game-breaking Steam Next Fest platformer allows you to texture-swap lava for water as you reshape the environment

gamesradar.com:

When's water not water? When it's lava, of course. Or whatever it is you want it to be. Playing Ruffy and the Riverside from Zockrates Laboroatories, at its core I'm reminded of my favorite collectathon retro 3D platformers – Banjo-Kazooie, Super Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot and the like. But, thanks to a clever and charming texture-swapping twist it's also not quite like any of the above – a distinctly modern twist on a classic format. This is already shaping up to be one of the best platformers of 2025.

With boppy music and colorful visuals, I knew I was on board from the moment I saw Ruffy and the Riverside, but I had some questions about just how the 'copy-and-paste' ability to absorb materials and then apply them to objects would work. The best platformers are often about the joy in keeping up momentum. Would this be too stop-start? Thankfully not.

After going hands-on with the Steam Next Fest demo, I'm pleased to confirm it's incredibly slick. Holding down a bumper has you scan for and suck in a texture, then pressing the trigger on a different target has you hurl it like an energy ball until it transforms. These can help you navigate the world, for instance turning hazardous surfaces into safe ones, or non-descript areas into ones you can navigate. A waterfall, for instance, can become a ladder of climbing vines.

But Ruffy's texture manipulating power can also help you solve puzzles to track down each level's stars – used to unlock more levels from the hub world, just like Super Mario 64's castle. Stone boxes can be turned into wooden ones to make them breakable – which may need to be smashed to create a certain configuration. Or, perhaps turning some of them to wood on a surface that can also be turned to lava could burn down a series of pillars into stepping stones to jump across?

So far it's given me just the right amount of possibilities to think about when poking around these tightly designed little levels. I'm curious how this will expand into the larger