When I sat down to play Bubsy 4D at this year’s Game Developers Conference, I didn’t exactly have high expectations. The Bubsy series has been reduced to a punchline over the past few decades, and its latest installment sure sounded like an ironic way to capitalize on the meme. Even its title is a cheeky riff on the maligned Bubsy 3D. And yet, within minutes of playing, I was totally captivated by this mechanically deep 3D platformer that gave me countless ways to chain together my moves. It reminded me of another game I had been playing recently: this year’s critically acclaimed Demon Tides.
You can probably imagine how fast my ears perked up when lead developer Ben Miller, who walked me through my demo at GDC, mentioned that his studio, Fabraz, just released its latest game, Demon Tides. Well, duh!
With that overdue revelation, everything about Bubsy 4D finally snapped into place for me. It’s an example of a proven indie studio with a clear vision making the most of an IP it has been tasked with reviving, a trend that’s becoming increasingly popular as of late. As Miller told me during my demo, Fabraz isn’t tackling Bubsy for the sake of cheap nostalgia; it sees an opportunity to push the platforming genre forward, start a conversation with its own games, and earnestly give the cat his flowers.
It’s fitting that Bubsy 4D’s origin story has to do with memes. Back in 2023, Atari acquired the rights to over 100 franchises. That list included Bubsy, which Atari CEO Wade Rosen seemed to have a particular fondness for. In an interview with MinnMax in 2023, Rosen expressed his desire to make a “good” Bubsy game and invited indie developers to pitch their ideas to Atari. Fabraz didn’t see that interview. Instead, the developers just saw their fans bombarding them with posts about how they should make a Bubsy game. They didn’t understand the joke, leading someone on the team to make a version of an Akira meme that said something along the lines of “Stop pressuring us about Bubsy!”
Fabraz was doubly confused when, during all that, Atari personally reached out to the studio and asked for a Bubsy pitch. The studio only recently connected the dots and realized why its fans were asking it to make a Bubsy game. Whether it was an ironic request from fans or not, Fabraz took the invitation in earnest. You can feel that in the game’s meta story, which has some shades of BoJack Horseman in how it characterizes Bubsy.
“He’s this failed B-list celebrity,” Miller told Polygon. “People dunk on him and take shots. He’s had his stumbles, but we still wanted to treat it with respect. He’s lasted for 20+ years! Even as a meme, people keep on coming back to him. There’s something endearing; he’s like an underdog. We don’t really take potshots. There’s not really much you can do with that, and it doesn’t actually feel fair to what he’s accomplished. He is a bit of, in his own way, an industry icon… Anything you love to hate, you still love.”
Rather than making fun of the character, Fabraz decided to do what it does best: make a great platformer. Unlike the open-world Demon Tides, Bubsy 4D is structured as a straightforward, level-based 3D platformer. It’s not so far off from Astro Bot in structure, where you pop into a level that has a linear path, but there are little digressions along the way where you can use your movement skills to find optional collectibles. It’s traditional, but Miller sees it as an evolution of Fabraz’s games rather than a retro retread.
“Starting from Slime-san, that was very much going back to do some of the retro nostalgia stuff. Still pushing 2D platformers, but looking back on it a bit as a nostalgic genre,” Miller said. “Demon Turf had that as well, but we started to feel like it was limiting the conversation about what these games can do, and constrains what people are expecting from them or how we talk about them. And this was very much us looking at other developers and figuring out what else we can do. How do you make it interesting to navigate the world, using your movement as a toolkit to actually explore?”
That toolkit is the key to understanding Bubsy 4D. The wise-cracking cat can run, double jump, hover, pounce on enemies, scramble up walls, roll into a big hairball, and more. Just about all of those ideas can be chained together to allow Bubsy to cross impossibly large chasms. It feels similar to Demon Tides, though Miller said that Bubsy 4D is “not as bonkers” as that game when it comes to chaining movement together. Still, the connection between those games is no coincidence. Both worship at the altar of Super Mario Odyssey.
“The discovery we all made [in Odyssey] of jump, throw the hat, dive onto the hat, jump off of that, that’s just satisfying to pull off,” Miller said. “You feel like you found a hack that lets you skip whole parts of levels. You feel like you outsmarted the dev, or like you broke the game. In our version of this, we kind of plan for it and are hoping to engender that feeling of playfulness and experimentation. I remember playing Transistor. I had this moment halfway through the game, where the way their system worked, you could get bonkers combinations. You could crack the entire mechanics open, and it feels so gratifying to your ability to understand and dig into a system.”
We can’t just rely on retro. We can’t just go back to mine nostalgia.
Miller said that every level has what he calls an intended, unintended-intended, and unintended route. That is to say, there’s a right way to complete a level, a faster route laid for clever players who know how to use their tools just right, and an unknowable space where Fabraz is sure players will break the game in ways the devs haven’t figured out yet. You can expect a speedrunning community to rise from Bubsy 4D, and for Fabraz to embrace it with open arms. The game will even launch with leaderboards and ghost runs to support that community.
While the Super Mario Odyssey influence is obvious the moment you touch the controller, Fabraz isn’t confined to building on platformer ideas. Bubsy 4D has an unexpected action game influence that makes no sense on paper, but feels entirely right when you start toying with the game’s deceptively deep movement.
“It’s bleeding through from what we enjoy about platformers, but also a lot of the other games we play,” Miller said. “A big reference point for me was Devil May Cry. It’s a hack-and-slash, but you have a dozen different options that are all viable, and it’s a lot more about how you want to express yourself through your moveset.”
It’s a lot of thought to put into a Bubsy game. Another studio might settle for some basic running and jumping that’s more in line with the old games and let nostalgia do the rest of the heavy lifting. That’s not Fabraz’s style. The studio believes that even a mascot-driven platformer can find room to innovate. It’s what separates games like Super Mario Odyssey from so many other 3D platformers that haven’t enjoyed the same staying power.
“We can’t just rely on retro. We can’t just go back to mine nostalgia,” Miller said. “I think Odyssey is a really great middle ground of that. There’s so much affection for that history — all of New Donk City, the 2D sidescrolling segments — but then the structure, the mechanics, and the hat throw is very forward-looking and experimental. Donkey Kong Bananza especially! I was trying to figure out when I was playing through it, is this a platformer? It is! But weird! I’m into it!”
I can only hope that means we’ll see Bubsy going absolutely ape-shit in his next outing.
