Bubsy In: The Purrfect Collection - Cat Shit (Review)
- James Stephanie Sterling
- 1 minute ago
- 6 min read
Bubsy in: The Purrfect Collection
Released: September 9th, 2025
Developer: Limited Run (compiler), Accolade, Imagitec, Eidetic
Publisher: Atari
Systems: PC, PS5, Switch (reviewed), Xbox X/S
“Is Bubsy a celebrated icon from the mascot wars of the early 90s,” Limited Run dares ask, “or a platforming punchline?”
Having tasted the misery contained within The Purrfect Collection, I can very confidently say it’s a trick question. The obnoxious orange bastard has never been celebrated, nor are his games funny enough to serve as the punchline to any joke on this planet. Bubsy is what Bubsy has always been - fucking shit.
This selection of ROMs includes multiple versions of four retro games. Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind comes in SNES, Genesis, and Super Famicom flavors. Bubsy II inflicts itself on you via the SNES, Genesis, and Gameboy. Fractured Furry Tales represents the cat’s cursed presence on the Atari Jaguar, and then there’s Bubsy 3D…
Of course there’s Bubsy 3D.
Claws Encounters was ahead of its time in its own twisted way, for Bubsy’s lamentable debut is a rage game generations before rage games occupied their own subgenre.
Getting through the early stages almost requires the collection’s rewind function unless you’re capable of exhibiting far more patience and grace than the cunt deserves. Frequently looking to instakill players in ways they couldn’t see coming, it gives Bubsy one hit point and includes goddamn fall damage! Of course, Bubsy has the natural feline ability to glide, but opportunities to die via floor traps and treacherous leaps of faith are legion.
Some of the “traps” are outright bullshit. Claws Encounters delights in sending you back to earlier parts of a level, often via a boot that kicks you either backwards or directly into a trap. You can ride roller coasters if you jump on them, but merely grazing one while it’s completely motionless will murder you. It is so rigged to fuck you over that if it were released today, screamy YouTubers would be all over the thing.
Malicious enemy placement is practically a given. Jumping on the highly unappealing creatures is awkward and many of them shoot at you from offscreen because the game is a prick. Boss fights are ludicrous clusterfucks full of so much onscreen shit and high-speed hitboxes that “unfair” doesn’t seem a strong enough descriptor.
All of this is made worse by aggressively unwieldy movement physics that actively fight the player and try to pull Bubsy away from the direction you want to go. There's a horrible sense of momentum when he moves, trudging through molasses unless he's going down a steep slope - in which case you best be careful, because there's almost certainly a trap at the bottom to punish you for enjoying a bit of speed. God, this game is rubbish.
Simply put, it plays like shit, the “funny” animations and music are actually pretty solid, and at least the fucking cat only briefly talks between levels.
Bubsy II (apparently they needed a breather from the litany of fur/claw puns) gives the whiskered wanker more hit points but keeps the fall damage. Other than that, it’s better than the first, barely managing to claw its way up to the status of a substandard 90s platformer.
The graphics are basically the same as the first but far more busy and cluttered. Gameplay is mostly identical, save for more item pickups and a bonus round where you steer an armadillo around pipes in a car. To be frank, I was burned out just from my run with the first game, so I didn’t waste half as much time on this fucker.
Bubsy II’s GameBoy counterpart is included in the lineup. It’s a smear of pixels that plays slowly and tediously. Load of guff.
Fractured Furry Tales for the Jaguar might be the best of a bad lot. It’s the most visually interesting, with levels inspired by literary works. The first is based on Alice in Wonderland and it has some nice enemy designs. It’s still full of wonky physics and cheap ambush-based deaths though.
Anyway, that drags us kicking and screaming to the PlayStation era and the notorious Bubsy 3D. It’s memetic in its awfulness, one of the truly quintessential bad games, but I’m here to tell you it’s actually not as terrible as the years of online mockery have suggested. It’s actually way, way worse.
The immediacy of its shittiness is jawdropping. After kicking off with some disgustingly ugly FMV, Bubsy 3D treats you with PSX graphics so abstract in their hideousness they border on fucking experimental. It’s like the Money for Nothing music video was passed through the digestive system of every single character on Reboot.
This is all before you nudge Bubsy forward and marvel as he spurts forth with the slippery enthusiasm of orange jizz. I’ll extend a little credit for the era it came out in, since plenty of 3D platformers controlled badly at the time, but even by those standards it’s nightmarish. Simply trying to jump on anything is like trying to do ballet wearing shoes made of soap while getting blasted with a riot hose.
Limited Run has supplied two versions of the game. One is the original crime replicated as-is while the other is a "Re-fur-bished" (get it because fur?) edition with a modern control scheme. I suppose the latter is better, but it's like comparing a stick of shit to a stick of shit with a sugar granule embedded in it. Also, why is it always fur and claw puns? There's so much cat-based wordplay, yet Bubsy's entire career has been fur and claw jokes almost exclusively. They could have had the whole kitten caboodle but they just weren't feline it. Did the cat get their tongue? Sometimes you'll get paw jokes, but they only ever make it in by a whisker.
See, this is why devs pay me the big bucks to write for them.
Anyway, back to this PlayStation atrocity. I hate how it looks, I hate how it plays, I hate Bubsy’s mawkish 90s kid voice, I hate the piercing music and glitched out cutscenes and drunken camera and miserable underwater stages. Most of all, I hate how unfunny it is.
Bubsy 3D isn’t entertainingly bad, and that’s the real kicker. Its crude levels are senseless and repetitive, Bubsy’s stupid one-liners are forgettable, and it just feels sad to play. Nothing about it is notable past the first few seconds of processing just how fucked up Bubsy and his immediate environment looks.
It isn’t funny. Bubsy 3D is not a funny joke. It’s just a really bad PlayStation game.
For all the memey bullshit, Bubsy is a series of poorly designed and distinctly unamusing videogames. The problem with basing a collection on a joke, as Limited Run’s done here, is that after the initial gag - releasing it in the first place - all that’s left is a library of ROMs that simply aren’t worth playing.
If your life took such a wrong turn that you're somehow a fan of Bubsy, the collection will likely appeal. Adding multiple game versions is a nice bit of comprehensiveness and the extra content has some base historical value - art, old ads, interviews, that sort of thing.
There’s also the pilot episode of a scrapped Bubsy cartoon to hurt yourself with! The episode is called “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” and Bubsy says “What could possibly go wrong?” twice in the intro followed by multiple utterances of it throughout the entire cartoon. It’s the most desperate attempt to push a catchphrase I think I’ve ever seen.
To so abjectly fail at pitching a marketable catchphrase in the decade of “cowabunga” and “don’t have a cow” might be the most impressive thing about Bubsy’s entire existence. Everything this cat touches turns to shit, and these days he seems like a magnet for hacks - any chancer can cobble some old shit together and claim “it’s the joke” when it sucks.
I can’t fault the work that’s gone into making the collection, but it is a collection of clapped out garbage. They put in way too much effort to make the videogame equivalent of those novelty VHS tapes in the 90s that nobody was ever really expected to watch but got as gag gifts on Christmas. That’s all Bubsy is if we’re brutally honest - a fucking prank.
5/10
