

Rift Riff
Adriaan de Jongh · 2025 · Tower Defense, Minimalist, Strategy, Base Building, PvE
PC
Very Positive95% · 359
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About Rift Riff
Jump a rift, fight off monsters, and plunder their world. Rift Riff is a tower defense game noteworthy in two ways: it's particularly strategic and remarkably forgiving.
Strategic
At the heart of the strategic layer of Rift Riff is a mix of choosing what towers you bring into each rift and being clever about the various monster behaviors. Monsters attack in waves, either going straight for your Extractor (your main tower) or attacking every tower in proximity. To defend yourself, you choose a handful of towers at the start of a scenario and build them on predetermined spots on the map. You obtain juice (your build resource) during monster waves and have the ability to build and upgrade towers before and during each wave. Surviving the onslaught of monsters gives you prisms, which in turn unlocks more rifts, towers, companions, and tower upgrades.
Forgiving
Don’t have enough juice to build your tower? Schedule it. Built the wrong tower? Get a full refund. Lost a tower? It’ll respawn for free after the wave. Lost your Extractor? Only redo the last wave. Having a hard time? Pick flowers for a bit of extra juice.
Content
The full game currently features ± 15–20 hours of gameplay:
- 20 worlds with 2 or more scenarios each.
- 17 tower types with 7 overpowered upgrades.
- 25 monster types with varying behaviors.
- 6 companions who'll assist you and your towers.
- 45 challenges for die hards.
- All the good Steam stuff: achievements, stats, controller support, cloud saves, etc.
Made by…
Rift Riff is made by game designer Adriaan de Jongh (best known for the indie hit Hidden Folks), graphic designer Sim Kaart, enemy wave designer Professional Panda, music composer and sound designer Matthijs Koster, and programmer Franz LaZerte. Rift Riff is made using the open source game engine Godot.
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
The game is very similar to Thronefall but here you have a hub where you can buy new towers, companions and upgrade options for towers. On some levels the final wave can be challenging so thankfully you can restart a wave and rearrange your defenses. Visuals are nice and very colourful. But the best part is the sounds, all of the sounds. And these sounds combined with these visuals create an atmosphere so most of the times I don't want to leave. I hope we'll get a sequel1 found this helpful
Baffling gameplay. The teaser in the intro of "You'll figure it out" comes across as hostile to casual gamers, not playful. Controls seem like a weird mix of 2D top-down shooter and point-and-click mystery, yet the game is fundamentally a tower-defense game???
I just finished the last challenge and I thought this was a very good game. Highly recommended. Just a few gripes - I wasn't a fan of having to restart the entire scenario just to change one tower late in the game. Perhaps you can allow people to choose towers as they go to a limit of 5 instead of having to choose all 5 towers at the beginning, this way I still retain the flexibilty of experimenting with differnent towers in the late waves. Also, maybe you can allow people to rewind to a particular wave instead of just restarting the previous one. But on the whole the game is very good.
I don't even like tower defense and this slaps, so streamlined and fun to play. Challenging but never overwhelming.
good
Solid game overall. I'll start with the bad bc there aren't much of it. → The early levels are a bit boring because of the very limited selection of turrets and companions. → The balance could be improved : ricochet tower is op while the stinger and self-destruct towers are AWEFUL. The hook tower is also very situational (mendatory in like 2-3 missions or challenges, and uber useless the rest of the time). → No easy mode or hints for casual players. Now with the positive. → OST is pretty good. → A pixel art that doesn't look bad. → Later levels require you to rethink your strategy instead of going for the most op towers all the time, thankfully we don't get the ricochet tower early on though :p Some maps are small, others are big, some have one path, others have multiple, some will throw rushing enemies while others will unleash enemies that go for your turrets, and so on. A couple of small ones even ask you to sell your turrets in order to match enemy waves, I love it! → The challenges unlocked near the end of the game are pretty cool, demanding specific strategies that you must find out by yourself. It's a smart way to recycle the entirety of the maps and extend the game's repl…
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