One-hit kills are expected in old arcade games. You’d pop a quarter or two into the slot and get a few lives, then you’d lose one each time you got hit, only to get to start the level and try again immediately after. Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons is very fond of this conceit. In fact, it’s so fond of it that it decided to base the entire game around one-hit kills. However, instead of short levels where dying means retrying right away, dying means failing an entire run. This could have been a fun game, but instead the devs decided it needed to be incredibly miserable all around and completely ruined it. Good job, guys. You did it.
At first, Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons doesn’t seem that bad. Your first dungeon runs can only last ten floors, so having to restart the whole thing for making a single mistake isn’t that big of a deal. Sure, you need to farm materials from randomly appearing chests you find in these first ten levels for the first hour or so to unlock the game’s first castle, but it knocks this off pretty quickly. The first castle itself also isn’t bad at all. While dungeons have randomly chosen screens akin to the levels in the classic games, castles are interconnected and aren’t randomised at all. You even get checkpoints upon finding exits.
After completing the first dungeon, I was looking forward to the rest of the game in spite of the castle’s boss fight, which goes on too long and requires trial and error to win. What an utter fool I was. See, Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons bills itself as a bit of a roguelite. You collect materials and can use them to buy items to take with you, as well as permanent upgrades for your character. You can freely purchase a few of these items from the outset and they grant you more powerful bubble shots (some of which function as a sort of ability gate in certain castle areas even.)
Upgrades, on the other hand, give you more range for your bubbles (it’s Bubble Bobble, you shoot bubbles at enemies to trap them in it, which you then burst by hitting them with the spines on your head or back, or by pressing down while standing on them), or give you more time. That’s right, there’s a timer. Just like the classic games, running out of time summons invincible enemies that hound you for the rest of your run, which mostly just means that you’re sure to die. You’re given 100 seconds by default, but you can get more in tiny increments by beating enemies.
To start with the obvious, the timer has no business being in the game. It’s mercifully not present in the castles, but putting it in the levels of something that’s meant to be a roguelite was a horrible choice. But at least you can upgrade the timer, right? In theory? Sure you can! But, what Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons doesn’t tell you, is that you have to make it to level 40 of the first dungeon in order to even unlock the ability to purchase any upgrades whatsoever. Yes, you have to make it through 40 entire floors without taking a single hit, all while on a 100 second time limit in order to unlock the mere ability to upgrade yourself.
If you’re a game developer and that sounds like a good idea to you, I want you to go grab a brick. I’ll wait. Do you have it? Good. Slam it into your face. Are you still conscious? Do it again. Make sure you’re actually rattling your brain around. Repeat until you no longer remember what a video game is. Voila, the rest of us are now spared from having to play another game as ineptly designed as Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons. As if the one-hit-kill rule wasn’t bad enough, throwing this on the pile absolutely adds insult to injury. The developers of this game just kept doubling down on bad ideas before deciding that tripling down was also a valid move.
There’s an item you can bring with you that lets you take an extra hit, though! But buying one outright requires you to kill 1,000 enemies. You can exchange materials for one too! But you have to let the timer run out ten times in dungeons before you can do this. While the game’s first castle is fine, the second one (and the second dungeon) has a massive difficulty spike. Getting through its rooms without getting hit a single time between checkpoints is a gruelling, miserable exercise in frustration. Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons takes an enormous amount of patience.
Beyond the above, there’s not much else in the game. Instead, the rest of the experience is predicated on getting through as many floors in the dungeons as you can (there are achievements for getting through hundreds of floors.) So once you’ve suffered through the second castle and jumped through the hoops necessary to unlock 9,999 in the dungeons, you’re just meant to do them over and over again and keep upgrading. So basically, almost all of Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons is built around blatant padding.
It’s not all bad, at least. The game comes with an emulated version of Bubble Symphony, the second arcade game in the series from back in the mid 90s. This is far from my favourite Bubble Bobble game, as the jumping is extremely weird and ruins the gameplay compared to other entries, but maybe that’s why the devs picked this one. Most of the choices that were made for Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons were misguided, wrong, and sadistic. I have no idea who this infuriating nightmare masquerading as entertainment is supposed to be for, but it sure isn’t me. If you both love Bubble Bobble while simultaneously hating yourself, I suppose you might find something here. Everyone else would be better off pretending it doesn’t exist.
Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons: A truly masochistic game built out of terrible decisions that only the most ardent series fans would be able to love. – Andrew Farrell
For a different kind of horror experience:
Sleep Awake PC review — Eyes wide shut |
