Bubsy 3D is regarded as one of the best worst games out there. I would say it’s The Room of video games, but that’s not very nice to The Room, which can be really fun to watch with friends. Booting up Bubsy 3D is a pretty quick way to clear a house party.
But when you dig a little deeper and deconstruct the mess of a game held together by hopes and dreams, you have to respect the ambition. It was a 3D platformer before we had 3D platformers, with the devs having no idea that Nintendo was about to lay down a marker with Super Mario 64 just five months earlier (or four months later in the West). By the time they were aware of this, it was too late, giving us a game with a very different idea of what the genre would look like.
And if you respect that ambition, you have to respect Bubsy 4D as well. With a name like that, it’s clearly not hiding from the series’ checkered past and trying to slip back in like nothing happened. To perhaps some surprise, it plays like that too, with frequent nods to its disastrous predecessor, just in a package that is much, much better - like it’s what Bubsy 3D could have been if it were another game entirely.
Bubsy Is Still Bubsy
If you find Bubsy annoying, this is not the game for you. He’s very much treated as the pull, and the story jumps right into his and his crew’s antics as if he were any other platforming mascot.
Also, Bubsy is annoying, but I sort of love that. It’s being played straight, as if Bubsy is a dear friend of mine whose actions I have come to love. That is not true, we are not friends and everything about him is grating. But there’s a smile on my face regardless. At least the other characters make fun of him sometimes. Poor Bubsy’s an in-universe loser, in that sense.
There is a surprising amount of dialogue. Outside of the cutscenes, you can chat with characters too, although this isn’t voiced. Still, it means there’s a whole lot of Bubsy ‘charm’, if that’s what you’re here for.
Imagine Bubsy 3D, But Good
The real question here is whether or not the game is good, to which I will, based on the couple of levels I checked out, give you a tentative… yes? I think so.
The controls are varied, as we’d expect from a 3D platformer, and I was having a blast running around the (detailed, if not entirely pretty) levels. Everything you’d expect is here, but with some added cat-like abilities, such as climbing walls or running on all fours. Abilities are paired up to get through some of the more difficult platforming sections, which included some surprisingly challenging sections of the first level.
You can turn into a ball and speed really fast down a slide, which, as we know, is the best part of any platformer.
It’s the Bubsy branding that gets the attention, but in its own right, this is a well put together platformer with an almost nostalgic simplicity, letting us lose to run around, jump between ledges, race down slides, and collect a bunch of items like the good old days. To say the game is stuck in the ‘00s is, to me, the biggest compliment, and the best thing Bubsy 4D has going for it.
The drawback to that, of course, is that the presentation is not as slick as we’ve come to expect from the genre in 2025. Other modern platformers put the visuals to shame, with the main level I got to explore being full of contrasted designs that did not complement each other. I wouldn’t expect the game to be pushing modern hardware to its limits by any stretch of the imagination, but that doesn’t mean it has to be hard on the eyes.
All in all, this is the game Bubsy 3D should have been all those years ago, if they’d scrapped and redone the entire thing after catching a glimpse of Super Mario 64. It’s great to see this in the hands of devs who are clearly passionate about the project, and - from the impression I got, at least - aren’t just here to bank off Bubsy’s infamy. Thanks to their efforts, Bubsy 4D could give us a worthy platformer, even if he’s not ready for the big leagues.
