Bubsy 4D Review

Bubsy is one of those characters that was always in orbit around the galaxy of games that have been in my life since the late 1980s. He just never found a way to land on a console I was playing at the time.

If I scrape at the bottom edges of my memory, there’s probably a time where I played a Bubsy on a SNES emulator. But I did that for hundreds of games. (Shh, please don’t tell the powers that be who for years made retro gaming painful for people without disposable incomes). When you love games, you want to play as many as possible. Especially when there’s a slew of easily digestible platformers to be found on consoles made before 1996.

For me, Bubsy is in the same wheelhouse as Tinhead or Ristar or Aero the Acro-Bat or Zool or countless others drooling at the dinner table for a piece of Mario and Sonic’s pie. I think as a kid I could tell pretty easily what games were an imitation of others. I was also lucky enough to be in a generation that could rent games for a few bucks on a Saturday and get their fill. Even when emulators weren’t a thing, I played a lot. God, I remember being gifted Battletoads as a kid and unable to make any meaningful progress past Turbo Tunnels. Sure the music was incredible but even Ninja Gaiden felt more approachable.

Being receptive towards colorful characters who could jump around in fun ways and bop enemies on the head was easy. Read a gaming magazine, look at the pretty screenshots. Kid brains fill in the blanks of what it would look like to see it move on a small CRT screen.

So anytime I looked at Bubsy or potentially saw him, it was easy to understand what kind of game it was. What the particular cut of his jib was. An anthropomorphic character that would hop around worlds and collect shit. It would do that from start to finish, stage/level after stage/level, and credits would roll.

And here we are in 2026, talking about Bubsy 4D. 30 years after Bubsy 3D released, opinion on it festering all this time.

Pruning my nostalgia is a popular thesis for me when reviewing games. I can spend hundreds of words reflecting on how a current game makes me feel about past games and trends, using the new as a vehicle to drive around my history with the medium. It feels warm and nice. A vibe check. Up above there in those previous paragraphs are memories contained within those words, sparking dozens of recollections in milliseconds. But I also realize I write them with a kind of apathy.

Honestly, I think that’s primarily how I feel about Bubsy 4D. The innocuous drug of apathy.

The game is not profound in any way nor is it particularly egregious in its poor quality. Banal feels too harsh, too wordy. But over the possible five hours I spent playing Bubsy 4D, I’m leaning on one edge of the fence, waiting to be shoved in a direction or merely doze off until I topple. Wherever god takes me, I suppose.

One thing stands out to me most when reflecting on Bubsy 4D. The game looks washed out. The entire time I played it, there was a nagging feeling of some spectral filter caked over my screen. Whether it was a rainbow trail or Bubsy’s orange fur or a purple skateboard park, the game appears to have the brightness dialed up too high. Honestly, I thought it was me. At one point, I changed the field of view–kind of a novel option for a platformer–and thought the game looked better. Really, though, I was simply looking at more real estate, more objects bombarding my view. But I looked at screenshots and watched videos and recognized it was merely how the game looked.

This absence of color, of vibrancy, seeps into the foundation of Bubsy 4D.

Developer Fabraz has made a painfully short game. Three themed worlds that each house 15 stages/levels. Each took me about 10-15 minutes to collect everything. Housed in each of these stages/levels are massive voids of action and things to do.

Absolutely I enjoyed how each world was meant to invoke arts and crafts. There’ scissors that try and cut up Bubsy, spilled glue that can be used to ascend walls or impede speed; buildings look to be made out of cardboard; push pins are stuck in the environment to bounce off of. It’s reminiscent of those I Spy books I used to peruse as a kid and feel appropriate for the kind of vibes Fabraz is aiming for.

But again, it all has this muted tone. It wants to be full of life but not only does it not look the part, it doesn’t feel that way.

Bubsy 4D fashions itself as a collectathon game. Yet here, there’s not a lot for players to collect. 150 balls of yarn are peppered across each stage/level. These balls of yarn can be used as currency to purchase new cosmetic outfits for Bubsy, nothing else. So unless you’re a completionist, it’s not entirely necessary to grab them all. Blueprints are also found that can be used to purchase a decent repertoire of moves that will expand players’ ability to navigate Bubsy around. And… that’s about it.

Should players wish, they can opt to beat fast times on each stage/level and tout their times through online leaderboards or silent bragging rights. In fact, Bubsy 4D seems primed for an audience in speedrunning. There is a lot of movement tech here. Several moves are all about timing Bubsy’s momentum to capitalize on placement and then having him zip and bounce around the stages faster. Though I never really attempted to test the limits of what I could do in Bubsy 4D, there is a generous feeling of speed the game provides in its platforming.

However, something about that platforming never really sat right with me. And it’s kind of a multi-pronged issue. When loading into a stage/level, players are presented with far-off distant things swirling in the sky, or points of interest that imply the player will be able to reach them. There is almost an illusion of infinite space stretching across the confines of each level, inaccessible things the player could reach if a bobcat had wings and could fly.

The frustration is that Bubsy 4D has these playable spaces that are simply too big for their own good and somewhat visually jarring. My aforementioned issue with the game’s hazy colors gives distant objects and platforms this blurry quality the further away they are. Is this where I need to go next? Where is the “right” path forward? But if you don’t care about collecting everything, it almost doesn’t matter. So much of Bubsy 4D‘s real estate is disjointed things to jump on or traverse over. Often, there’s no sense of cohesion, just the notion that a level is chopped up into chunks and separated by long tubes and sections where Bubsy can ball up and roll around like Sonic.

These rolling sections of Bubsy 4D are prominent and sometimes lengthy. But they don’t feel that great in execution. Players can unlock a drift maneuver but often I felt that Bubsy was rolling too fast for me to control and I would merely press a button to have him on his legs again, halting all speed. At times, the game asks players to blindly jump off a ramp onto a distant spot and it can be hard to gauge when to transition out of the ball form. Bubsy doesn’t move fast and far enough to make these jumps as a ball and frequently I would fall and fall and fall having to prepare myself better when I spawn at the top of the ramp again.

As I write these words the thought of “skill issue” bubbles into my brain. But unless players are working towards fast times, Bubsy 4D is a shockingly easy game. There may be a few dozen enemies that will try and attack the bobcat. Each one disposed by a claw-forward homing dive that isn’t as accurate as anyone would wish. Rare are the moments where I might encounter a puzzle or series of obstacles that required any sort of precision timing or several quick reactions back to back.

Bubsy himself is a decent jumper. The player can flutter for a few seconds, momentarily float during another jump, and then top off their distance with a dive. Many times players will dive into a wall to allow Bubsy to claw up the final few inches in clutch moments. He gets a surprising amount of air time but it could have felt significantly tighter. I would often overshoot or undershoot a jump and then try to recover with a secondary move, only to flail around in excess.

And when all these elements are combined, it makes for a platforming experience that is filled with very few highs and many middling moments. At times there is an attempt to present a spectacle. The camera may zoom out as Bubsy is sucked along a pipe, showing some interesting framing or a sense of scale. But that feeling of Bubsy 4D being a chopped salad of interesting details thrown into a bowl the size of a swimming pool can’t escape me.

Is mediocrity Bubsy’s bread and butter? What little story there is about the “mascot” and his longtime enemies being replaced by mean robot sheep has no bearing on anything. Throughout the game the joke is that Bubsy is a third-rate character that barely deserves the benefit of the doubt. Jokes are riddled with fourth wall breaks and often poke fun at other recognizable games.

Again, I have virtually no attachment to this character outside of knowing that Bubsy 3D is one of the most derided games of all time. But is that what we should hinge our entire humor on? I mean sure, it kind of works. I chuckled a few times at the disdain everyone has for Bubsy and as a very self-critical person I didn’t mind when he took jabs at himself. But that’s it, that’s the extent of the humor. One character always says his name wrong. Others mock him or are in shock that he’s made it this far.

This kind of humor works in pieces for Bubsy 4D but it so often feels like I’m hearing the same joke over and over again. And, much like the writing, I was doing the same thing in the game over and over again.

Bubsy 4D is not a bad game by any means. But I think it would have been more interesting if it was actually terrible. Absolutely I had a few really fun moments in it. But when I play back the game in my mind, all I see is me controlling the bobcat around these hazy locations with some of the emptiest vertical spaces I’ve ever seen. I never really felt compelled to hop around every inch of the playable space but did so because I have that itch to collect everything. It was like I could tell where the game was going to go next and I accepted it.

Super Mario 64 came out the same year as Bubsy 3D, how crazy is that? 30 years ago Nintendo laid the groundwork for almost every 3D platformer and what it should do. Imagine going into Bob-omb Battlefield or Whomp’s Fortress and them being four times the size but still packed with the same amount of stars. Except now, everything is less colorful and the connective tissue between points of interest is a variation of the handful of slides found in the game. If that sounds not so bad, I think you and Bubsy 4D will get along great.

The inclination to have Bubsy 4D‘s length be its main point of contention is a double-edged sword. Would I have wanted more of this? No, not really. These stages/levels are too big and lack cohesive direction. Could the engine have handled it, it would have made more sense to pack every single challenge and thought into one gargantuan world and throw Bubsy and the player into it and ask them to figure it out. There is a distinct starting point and end point and not much of a really to desire going in anything but a straight line.

And yet, I go back to the way Bubsy 4D looks. A handful of analogies come to mind. Trying to play my Game Boy in broad daylight. The plastic film over jewel cases that were always so annoying to get off. A mozzarella stick with only a dollop of cheese inside. Still, I think I nailed it earlier. Bubsy 4D is like a chopped salad you would order at a restaurant, except its served in a bowl the size of a pool. Tucked away in this game are some enjoyable parts, a few are almost great. But the player has to wade through so much nothing to get to them. That nothing isn’t awful or even that bad. It just is.

Bubsy 4D appears to get the joke. The never-a-mascot bobcat has been around for decades, scraping for relevance. And after 30 years, this game isn’t going to move the needle much. It is absolutely a competent platformer but is that truly enough? Everyone around Bubsy seems apathetic if not outright dismissive to his existence, so it shouldn’t be a surprise I feel the same way. And hey, maybe that’s the point?