Let’s get one thing out of the way: I hate Bubsy. NO Bubsy 4D, the fascinating, lively game I’m featuring here, but rather Bubsy himself, the mangy, nasty cat, the poisonous product of a cynical era of mascot marketing. Born in the obscure hour when virtually every video game company seemed to have tied their fortunes to some clone of Sonic’s sidekick, Bubsy has a well-deserved reputation as a D-tier character best forgotten.
Fortunately, I have a lot more positive things to say about what I saw in Bubsy 4D, a brand modern reconstruction of the furry’s tainted legacy that, while far from perfect, clearly improves on Bubsy’s questionable past in almost every way. In just over an hour with the Bubsy Steam demo, I found a lot of things worth exploring… and also some less encouraging signs.
It’s true: Bubsy 4D has a lot to like. It’s a colorful game with some lovely, inventive elements scattered throughout the themed worlds, such as knitted doily highways in the early stages with a thread and needle motif. The voice work is solid (even if the script is a bit uneven), and my preview version was mostly bug-free. The movement mechanics are quite solid, apart from some minor camera frustration during very long jumps to compact targets.
The tutorial area is concise and useful, which is quite a occasional combination in gaming, and teaches valuable skills with minimal exposure. Bubsy’s jumping mechanics are logical but take some getting used to – with different types of combo jumps tied to the face button and both triggers – and it’s nice to be able to practice moving with minimal risk and consequence before moving on to the main campaign. Not that death is that much of a problem… the checkpoints (represented by litter boxes) are quite generous, and even if Bubsy dies, he rarely respawns that far from where he last fell.
And that pesky cat is doing quite well. Bubsy’s main strength is his aerial mobility. He can jump, double jump, jump forward and gently descend like a parachute, and jump forward to cover huge horizontal distances… or do all of these at once. Bubsy can also inflate himself into a ball to roll up hills and ramps, gaining momentum to make even longer jumps. He can jump on and climb certain flat surfaces or grab special points to gain a bonus to air distance. He is very capable of movement, to the point that he can sometimes outrun the camera when he performs his jump at the end of a combo.
This attack doubles as Bubsy’s main attack, although I actually found Bubsy to have very few threats worth attacking. The demo stages are filled with plenty of steep jumps and acrobatic challenges, but there are very, very few enemies, and those that are present are brain dead and can be eliminated quite easily. Platformers with few enemies are not uncommon (Portal, Super Meat Boy, and Thomas Was Alone come to mind), but it was still a little strange how eerily empty the colorful platforming environments seemed without the usual crowds of Goombas, Koopas, and giant enemy crabs. And while Bubsy’s level layouts are clear and competent, none of them come close to the more subtle complexity of the classic platformers listed above.
And that’s my biggest question about where the full version of Bubsy 4D will ultimately land. The demo stages have some difficulties in the design of the basic levels, not in terms of aesthetics, but in the layouts themselves. The worlds, while appropriately themed, are not particularly well laid out. Most of them are obvious main paths with clearly perceptible spokes and isolated islands. The most valuable collectibles are scattered around the spokes, and along the main path there are countless balls of yarn floating in space. The result is medium-sized, explorable levels that should encourage curiosity and discovery… but often don’t.
The problem is not with the general method, but with its glaringly obvious lack of refinement. In a sense, it is a return to the style of the world of many mascot platformers from the PlayStation 1 era, or perhaps more precisely, to the kitchen sink, random style popularized by many platform games for C64 and Amiga computers, including classics like the Turrican series. Wherever the inspiration comes from, it hasn’t quite worked here yet. The objectives of each compact part of the level feel repetitive, and the layout is either too obvious or the objectives are not hard enough. You can tell where you should probably go next, which is a good thing, but often it’s so obvious that the sense of discovery really suffers. There are tons of collectibles to find, but they’re rarely hidden in fascinating ways or blocked off by thrilling challenges. And the lack of enemies greatly reduces multi-layered threats that could otherwise add nuance and challenge.
Jumping between towers and collecting baubles is as aged as video games, but what separates mediocre from classic is the sophistication that goes into putting these routine mechanics into practice. After playing Astrobot and Donkey Kong Bananza last year, I can say that Bubsy 4D’s level design feels unfinished in comparison. Play areas, although visually fascinating, are not refined in terms of energetic interactions. Jumping between obstacles and avoiding spikes feels immaculate, straightforward and competent, but it’s rarely thrilling. The openness to worlds is enough to obviously require massive testing and refinement on the part of developers when designing obstacles that can be reached from the many angles and heights available, and yet it’s painfully obvious that this testing process didn’t come close to the final result. It’s not that bad, it’s just not as good as you might think. Within minutes of entering Bubsy 4D, you realize that you’ve done most of these things before, but much better… and it’s not the feeling you want a video game to give you.
Fortunately, these are problems that can be solved with developers’ time and attention. This is a preview of a work in progress, not a review of the finished product, and there is still plenty of room for significant improvement before its launch next year. The potential is certainly there… Bubsy’s HUGE horizontal mobility is a lot of fun in practice, and if the environment continues to be adjusted to suit the cat’s basic skills, the Fabraz team could create something really fun.
I have one specific complaint about the design choices, which don’t work very well: the only mandatory challenge in the demo, racing up steep, blind hills, and a bridge that largely requires memorization to complete successfully. I was hoping that in the Year of our Lord Two Thousand Twenty-Five we would be able to move beyond stuffing an unskippable, somewhat unintuitive timed obstacle race into a golden path through the next level, and yet here we are with Bubsy 4D. This wasn’t fun in the PlayStation 1 era, and 30 years later these are unforgivable sins.
Elsewhere, Bubsy purchases additional skills at the central store run by his annoying niece and nephew, exchanging collectibles for power-ups. My favorite of these was a Wile E. Coyote-inspired power that allowed me to float for a second over empty space like a Looney Tunes cartoon character who had just fallen off a cliff, which is a flavorful and really useful addition. It was thematically appropriate and charming.
Finally, when it comes to sound, the Bubsy 4D sample scores ranged from average to booming. The theme music for the first three scenes started out innocently enough, but after a few loops it became grating. I can only classify the audio as something that started its life as elevator music that was then run through an N64 nostalgia filter and digitizer, and what came out the other end added little to the platforming experience. Maybe it’s just me and others may like it more.
On the other hand, the voice work is solid and the script contains many references to the era of mascots and platformers. Bubsy maintains a heightened self-awareness throughout his modern journey. He is openly unenthusiastic about his latest quest for the golden fleece. He’s older, tired, and fed up with it all, and comments reflecting a sense of exhaustion in his 40s mostly work. The occasional sarcastic quip and poop joke seems like the obligatory nod to the era in which Bubsy was born, but nothing I heard was laughable. I didn’t like Bubsy’s family and cohorts, which seemed to me like worse versions of Sonic’s terrible friends or DK’s annoying, extended catalog of characters.
Overall, Bubsy 4D is a dazzling, fascinating template for a 3D platformer so far. It’s demanding to predict whether it will develop and reach its full potential before release. The creators’ clear care to treat this character with some reflex and even a bit of dignity works to 4D’s advantage. We hope the final product will build on the sturdy start seen in this demo.
Jared Petty likes to write about how great and stupid video games are. You can find him on Bluesky as @petty and threads as @petty.
