When Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back came out in 2017, I had one question: Why? When Bubsy: Paws of Fire! came out in 2019, I had one question: Why? When Bubsy in: The Purrfect Collection came out in 2025, I had one question: Why? And after playing Bubsy 4D for myself in 2026, I still only have one question: Why? Please, somebody, anybody – please tell me why Bubsy must persist! More like Bumsy Before this week, I knew of Bubsy through two angles. One,
a Circuit City demo station running Bubsy 3D, a memory so vague and so perfectly paired with painfully unintuitive gameplay I’m not convinced it isn’t hallucinatory. Two, the mildly entertaining Internet Cryptid Ulillillia, who is partially famous for playing over 500 hours of, again, Bubsy 3D. Whatever the reason, Bubsy 3D is some kind of cursed flashpoint in gaming history, damning us to revisit his Fast Fashion Sonic the Hedgehog-ass presence well beyond the natural shelf life of comparable projects. I’m sorry, there’s just nothing
appealing about Bubsy. His stupid name, his bulging eyeballs, his dumb shirt with the red exclamation point that gets replaced by an open button-up and red tie like he’s trying to dress up as Phil Spencer and Donkey Kong at the same time, his vapid supporting cast, aura-free enemies, empty, placeless world… The entirety of this universe does nothing for me. I’m having an existential crisis just writing about it. I do not understand the pseudoironic fascination with this character’s continuance, the lord-knows-how-many layers of
insincerity and self-deprecation, or the source of confidence powering the visible pride this resource-dissolving lie of a cartoon mascot’s sinister face wields. I don’t get it. Bubsy’s indie cred Stranger still, Bubsy 4D involves the talented studio Fabraz, known for its Slime-San series and the self-proclaimed expressive platformers Demon Turf and Demon Tides, the latter coming out only a few months ago. Bubsy 4D almost feels like branded DLC for Tides, as if you put footage of both next to each other you’d almost swear
you were looking at the same software. That’s not derogatory; it’s a testament to Fabraz coming into its own and developing a style that has big publishers like Atari seeking it out to do its trademark thing with a, uh, known IP. So Bubsy 4D doesn’t necessarily feel like a Bubsy game, such that a Bubsy game has some kind of identifiable selfness what we conjure within our mind’s eyes when we hear the word “Bubsy.” It feels like the developers of Demon Tides making
a new game, and the Bubsy part is incidental. Fabraz’s thing is expressive mechanics in platforming, which basically means giving players a toybox of verbs to play with while they’re jumping around. This idea goes beyond basic things like double-jumping or fluttering, although both of those are present and accounted for. Bubsy can also do a sort of spinning jump, a mid-air dive that has targeting properties and can transition into a temporary wall climb, several jumping techniques more or less lifted from Super Mario
64, and more. There’s even a sort of transformation in which Bubsy goes into a “hairball” mode, turning his movement physics into something resembling Super Monkey Ball. There are additional and further unlockable verbs in that mode as well, giving you all kinds of things to play with as you explore Bubsy’s world. That sounds great. right? The catch, though, is that Bubsy’s world is not even a little bit interesting to explore or interact with. Like, at all. Zero! There is no sauce here.
Bubsy’s levels are mostly empty spaces littered with coin-like collectibles that are not challenging to reach, move-unlocking blueprints that usually just involve finding a level’s sole branching path, checkpoints that exist to make a litter box joke (with the most pointless fast travel I’ve ever seen), and enemies bearing no personality, for which you are given no reason to interact with beyond their simple presence. You can just run past them for the most part. You can run past most things, more or less. See,
one of the aims here is a direct appeal to speedrunning. Each level has its normal goal and hidden-ish blueprint, but there’s also a time attack challenge that gives you a legitimately tough time goal to reach for an additional reward. So mastering the tools which give Bubsy speed and momentum in order to blast through all the uninteresting scenery in record time seems to be the true purpose of Bubsy 4D, and the thing you’ll have to do if you’re a completionist type. It
kind of betrays the lack of interesting things to do in each level, because of course the ideal outcome of these systems is that time attack goal. All the different jumping verbs at your disposal? More about finding ways to physics your way to shaving seconds off your time than exploring or finding fun or interesting interactions in your environment. I hate to say it, but it’s kind of giving Mighty No. 9 in here. My conundrum is, if I’m not having fun on the
normal golden path, what motivation do I have to come back in and shoot for the speedrun mastery? You haven’t given me a reason to care the first time when I’m figuring out the mechanics, taking in my surroundings, and engaging with the characters and the fiction they inhabit. Speedrunning something like a Sonic the Hedgehog, or a Contra, or even something more cursed like Donkey Kong 64 is appealing because those spaces are compelling to be in for various reasons to begin with. Speedrunning
isn’t just a given, to me anyway. So with Bubsy 4D, I have all these fun and interesting mechanics, but nothing really fun or interesting to do with them. It’s like Super Mario Odyssey without all the crazy stuff happening around me all the time. Hell, it’s like Sonic Frontiers without the bizarre combat or floating challenge sequences. Bubsy has floating stuff, but it’s just stuff. Things to jump on or climb to simply reach the next thing to jump on or climb. It’s no
wonder the game is so short, running at around four or five hours, because by the time it’s over most folks might not have a chance to notice how insubstantive the environment is. Bubsy 4D is, straight up, a bad time. It’s fun to jump around a little bit and play with the tools you get, but in a fleeting, shallow way that isn’t enough to sustain a multi-hour platforming video game. There’s nothing to do with those tools, no practical application that’s actually fulfilling
for the other parts of your brain you want to use in games like this. It almost feels like a tech demo, a demonstration that it’s possible to redo Bubsy 3D in a way that doesn’t feel like the controller you’re holding is a hunk of radioactive alien detritus not meant for human hands. But the rest of it just isn’t there. Bubsy 4D is available now for PC, Nintendo Switch 1 and 2, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Xbox One and Series X|S. An
Xbox code was provided by the publisher for this review.
Bubsy 4D, Fabraz, platformer review, speedrunning, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC