Review: Bubsy In: The Purrfect Collection (Switch)

As soon as Bubsy in: The Purrfect Collection was revealed, the announcement racked up hundreds of thousands of reposts and millions of combined views. That, dear readers, is a blunt demonstration of nostalgia’s muscle—an emotion able to tug at the heartstrings while fogging the brain.

Let’s spell it out: Bubsy the Bobcat has never starred in a genuinely decent game. Although Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back (2017) and Bubsy: Paws On Fire! (2019) are marginally less agonising than their ’90s ancestors, they still landed with a collective shrug.

Back at Bubsy’s 1993 SNES debut, some magazines praised its sampled quips, sprite animation, gags, and bright palette; others savaged the experience for its flaws. Either way, units shifted sufficiently to fuel follow-ups right into the PlayStation generation.

The Purrfect Collection bundles five vintage Bubsy outings if you treat the Game Boy port of Bubsy II as a separate beast, because it deviates sharply from its home-console siblings. The front-end is bright, cartoon-styled, and appropriate, offering crisp menus plus a trove of extras: promotional flyers, retail packaging galleries, and Q&A-style snippets taken from longer dev interviews.

Every entry is present, including the cross-format 16-bit releases on Super Nintendo and Genesis. A curious bonus is the Japanese Super Famicom build with regional speech—the only 16-bit Bubsy that ever reached Japan, after which the nation apparently bid the bobcat good-riddance. A music jukebox caters to masochists, there are save states, display tweaking, wallpaper borders, and a rather feeble CRT overlay. A rewind option is also on tap; usually I loathe that gimmick, yet here it’s borderline essential. Once you sample it, the idea of enduring raw Bubsy feels unthinkable.

The opening pair of Bubsy romps run a touch faster on Genesis than on SNES, albeit with duller colour and tinnier audio. Both are dreadful. The original, Bubsy in: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind, hands you nine lives—not so much a feline pun as a ham-fisted band-aid for busted handling and slipshod stage design.

You die from a single tap, and brushing the wrong pixel dumps you at the last checkpoint. Momentum rules are among the most spiteful in 2D platforming: Bubsy accelerates from stone-still to mach-speed in two heartbeats. It feels as if two studios on different continents built the game—one crafting a Sonic-style speedster, the other devising levels that punish anything above a crawl. The bobcat races so far ahead of the scrolling that hazards pop in too late to react, while stages are minefields of seemingly random bottomless pits demanding rote memorisation.

Mid-air control is pitiful; course-correction mid-jump is nearly nil, turning routine landings into slapstick doom. guiding Bubsy often feels like wrestling a digital steer, thumb wedged against the D-pad in desperate redirection. A half-useless glide move lets you drift left or right during descent, but it, too, frequently steers you straight into death.

Deciphering what hurts you, what constitutes solid ground, and what’s mere scenery is a lottery, and hit detection is a joke—sometimes you ghost through hazards unscathed, later the identical object kills you on contact. Designers pull stunts like booby-trapping a two-second theme-park ride or funneling you down elongated water slides that terminate in spike pits.

But the crown jewel of awfulness is that Bubsy—a platformer protagonist—expires after drops his own height multiplied a few times. In labyrinthine stages with cramped visibility, every blind leap risks instant fatality.

Follow-up Bubsy II, set inside a theme park split into selectable time periods, inherits most of the above grief. Levels are claustrophobic labyrinths stitched from endlessly recycled tiles, creating a tedious hide-and-seek with identical doorways that warp you to yet more indistinguishable doors, occasionally looping you back to where you began. Distinguishing platforms from wall dressing is a headache—worst in the Egyptian zone—and the random fling of objects feels even sloppier.

Note, too, that Bubsy II vies for the title of most ear-rupturing soundtrack on 16-bit hardware, rivalling even the Genesis version of Taz-Mania. The screechy cacophony bleeds into a music-themed stage where you hop across saxophones and musical notation, compounding the absurdity.

On the slim bright side, the sequel ditches the one-touch death rule and instead gifts the cat a three-segment life bar, calming nerves a little. You’ll also stumble onto an amusing frog-launching bonus round, plus on-rail shooter interludes starring a spaceship and later a biplane. And if you hanker for mutual torment, two-player couch co-op remains intact.

Bubsy II on the Game Boy is a train-wreck dragged through treacle: sluggish, hideous, and hardly worth booting. Its sole justification for inclusion is archival tick-boxing.

Bubsy in: Fractured Furry Tales on Atari’s “world-beating, honest-to-goodness 64-bit beast” (their words, not history’s) shows off the Jag’s silicon by recycling graphics for a third lap, flaunting shallower parallax than its 16-bit elders, and resurrecting instant death while clinging to floaty momentum, woeful leap arcs, shoddy collision maths, and hit-boxes that phase in and out of reality. The sole mercy is the axeing of those stitched-together maze levels, tightening the flow. Maps remain bloated, yet they now nudge you forward instead of abandoning you. The soundtrack, following the prior entry’s “cat-walks-across-Casio” aesthetic, settles for merely tolerable. Even so, the thing will have you ripping out clumps of fur thanks to spiteful foe placement and a catalogue of layout howlers; expect the cartridge to hit the wall well before the ten-minute mark.

Capping the set is Bubsy 3D on Sony’s PlayStation—infamous punch-line and landfill legend. Given the parade of awfulness already on parade, expecting redemption here would be delusional. It’s excerable, broken junk kept semi-conscious by an endless stream of one-liners, riddled with bugs, piloted by a drunken camera, and incapable of letting you land on a platform directly at your paws.

For this compilation the controls have been modernised—right-stick camera, hooray—but the patient remains terminal. A turd buffed to a matte sheen is still a turd; only the truly self-loathing will press “new game”.

None of this reads like praise, and that’s because none is deserved. What Bubsy nails is attitude: the snark, the Day-Glo chaos, the throwaway zingers that litter every stage. That personality—half snide feline, half Rocko’s Modern Life cynicism—was probably the hook back in the day.

The anthology also underlines why Japan lorded over the 16- and 32-bit periods while many Western studios stumbled over basics like jump physics and coherent level blueprints. Somehow the bobcat keeps clawing his way back from cultural oblivion. If raw nostalgia is enough to prise your wallet open, have at it—just don’t say the universe didn’t warn you.

Conclusion

You’d be forgiven for suspecting the whole franchise was secretly a prank—an elaborate scheme to traumatise youngsters under the guise of a colourful, wisecracking platformer.

Imagine a 1993 Christmas morning: one kid tears off the wrapping, hoping for Sonic or Mario, only to find this smug orange fur-ball. That child either nurses a lifelong grudge against clueless parents and the playground ridicule that followed, or goes full cultist and embraces the madness. If you belong to the second, tiny congregation, this bundle is your scripture—preach away. Everyone else: keep your distance.