Why Do Reviewers Feel So Differently About Bubsy 4D And Forbidden Solitaire?

I recently wrapped up playing Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! and Bubsy 4D, and before those two, Forbidden Solitaire. I've always said I have neither the aptitude nor the patience to be a formal assessor of video games; nonetheless, I do feel qualified to say all of these games left me with the same feeling. After playing them for four to five hours, I saw their credits and felt like I had partaken in a single extended joke or gag across the entire experience. Even if you struggle to grapple with some of their intermediate mechanics, they are all less about whether you'll see their endings and more about when. On the flip side, none of these games have any replayability. Sans a discussion of their mechanics or gameplay, I genuinely think the spirit of what I would write about my overall feelings of any of these games and what I think their elevator pitches are to prospective players is pretty much the same. If you want jokes about isekai anime, you'll get a kick out of Truck-kun; if you remember shitty fifth-generation 3D mascot platformers, Bubsy 4D might have something for you; fans of Regency Solitaire are bound to be impressed by Forbidden Solitaire. Luckily, I'm not in the games press and will not have to risk dodging accusations of self-plagiarism to meet the ever-pressing demands of Valnet, Ziff Davis, or any cigar-chomping editor-in-chief these days. Nonetheless, the prospect does raise a point of order I have been mulling over. And now with Fuck's Quest II even gracing Giant Bomb's The Bomb 12, it honestly seems like the one-joke indie game isn't losing steam any time soon.

Let's start by comparing two of the games I mentioned earlier. Bubsy 4D and Forbidden Solitaire aim to do the same things within the scope of their short playtimes, and each employs the same tricks and gameplay hooks to get that done. Though they diverge greatly in their production values, they both flaunt the fourth wall as they dole out cheeky cutscenes and revel in self-referential or homage-heavy material. And by the end, I'd hazard to say each game ends up accomplishing the same tenets they endeavored to attain as well as hitting the same targets as well. And yet, check each game's Metacritic page, and you'll find that general assessments of each are widely different. Bubsy 4D comes across as a bit of a one-trick pony, whereas Forbidden Solitaire is a short but high-concept arthouse deconstruction of its own genre. The Guardian's Keith Stuart says as much in their review of Forbidden Solitaire, ending their assessment by calling it a "multi-textured treat." And before I continue, I want to make it clear that this essay is not a critique of critiques. While I think I got as much out of Bubsy 4D as I did out of Forbidden Solitaire, I don't exactly find myself entirely disagreeing with the spirit of Jeff Grubb's three-out-of-five review on Giant Bomb. The game is limited in its content and ambition, and when you really think you've mastered it, it sort of ends.

But many of those criticisms of Bubsy 4D are completely valid when directed at Forbidden Solitaire. The story in Forbidden Solitaire has some neat moments and plays up the whole game-within-a-game element, but you know where it's going and can see all of its twists and turns a mile away. And just like Bubsy 4D, its humor is largely one-note, relying heavily on how much nostalgia and value you place on a game that winks directly at the camera when referencing 90s multimedia or early CD-ROM game design. If I actually cared about algorithm-friendly YouTube video essay thumbnails, I'd probably go with something with red text and me tilting my head with my right hand underneath my chin in a thinking gesture with the Metacritic scores for Bubsy 4D and Forbidden Solitaire in the back, with the nearly twenty-point difference between the two being surrounded by large red question marks. Now, luckily I'm a lazy asshole rather than a productive asshole, so that's not happening, and I also have half a brain to know that you shouldn't give a shit about Metacritic scores without a generous tablespoon of salt. Nevertheless, there is something to be explored here. Why did so many people feel more satisfied with one of these single joke-heavy games rather than the other?

Why Does Forbidden Solitaire "Work" Slightly Better For Me?

When you feel a deep connection with a genre, topic, or theme, anything that makes enough smart jokes about it immediately jives with you. It's kind of like why Boomers fell in love with That '70s Show with their kids back in the 2000s. It's not that That '70s Show perfectly represented the decade they grew up in; it was smart enough while being a general-audience comedy that they were able to suspend their disbelief because it perfectly captured enough of their life experience for them to see a heart in it, even if it was a corporate-approved network television comedy. Games like Bubsy 4D or even Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! might have only a single joke to tell over a span of three to five hours. They're also about as subtle as a sledgehammer, but the few times when they nail their target, you pop because you remember what it is they're referencing. Even if the act of playing them isn't always satisfying, you're not entirely against them because you recall those times when they "worked," and in Bubsy 4D's case, the fact it doesn't play well is part of the joke. And make no mistake, Forbidden Solitaire isn't subtle either. The FMV cutscenes with members of the development team are deliberately over the top and don't really cover any new ground we haven't already seen in self-aware FMV cutscenes in prior games.

I'll never forget the Giant Bomb Quick Look for Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. In it, Jeff Gerstmann comes upon the game's tutorial, which parodies sixth-generation first-person shooter tutorials like the one in the original Halo on Xbox, which attempt to teach people how to use two analog sticks to play the game. Jeff's point, at the time, was that if your joke is to call bullshit on something that is shit, you dull the impact of your joke by repeating the bullshit in question, and for the longest time, I agreed with him. These days, I don't entirely agree with him anymore. For the most part, as I have gotten older, I feel like I have come to terms with the fact that most of the games of my childhood were real pieces of shit. Like beyond Blight Club levels of bad; real garbage. I do think it's funny when people call out previously codified game design and physically remind people how much better things are today than in the past. Can your game be fun and play well? Sure! Some would argue Psychonauts 2 is a perfect example, and the classic works of Sierra and LucasArts are also illustrations as well. But we all have played a bad game before. What if a game tried to speak to that? I am not prepared to draw a line in the sand and say no game designer should be able to do that, or that it's not a valuable exercise. Does it often come across as ingratiating? In Bubsy 4D and Truck-kun's cases, yes, absolutely. And that's part of the reason why some of these single-joke games are reviewed so wildly all over the place. These aren't just single-joke games; they're also single-audience games. They're intended for people with specific life experiences or background knowledge to really jive with them. If you lack that, these games are downright incomprehensible fanservice.

But we're really dancing around the key to Forbidden Solitaire being a far easier sell to most people. Solitaire is objectively more approachable, and by piggybacking on it, Forbidden Solitaire is less likely to prevent people from seeing everything it has to offer. By the time you reach the final hand in Forbidden Solitaire, you have seen everything there is in the game; there are no hidden secrets to find by fiddling with the menus or by performing a certain action on a piece of furniture. Likewise, every hand is far more tactically designed than anything in Bubsy 4D or Truck-kun. Every hand revolves around a new mechanic that you've only recently discovered, and it's highly recommended that you use them ASAP. The in-game economy is a properly balanced drip-feed system, so you won't miss anything by the time you get to the end. That's incredibly masterful game design, but expected when you consider Forbidden Solitaire came from the Regency Solitaire team. They know how to make a card game that pleases your lizard brain, and with the help of internet virality, they simply amped their typical game output two or three clicks rather than reinvent the wheel. And that leads to something that plays well, doesn't overstay its welcome, and makes some silly jokes about 90s-era multimedia video games.

You see, you and I remember Bubsy as a shitty platformer. When the Bubsy games were 2D, they controlled like hot garbage, and when Bubsy made the transition to 3D, it was even worse. So, yeah, developer Fabraz made a better game before it, in the form of Demon Tides. We didn't really care about that with Bubsy 4D. In our heart of hearts, we wanted Bubsy to control like shit. We signed up for that, and we got that. That's part of Bubsy 4D's joke, and that's either going to make you laugh or make you roll your eyes, and both reactions are entirely valid. If you remember being a kid in the 1990s and saving your money to get one new N64 or PS1 game for the month, and because you bought into the hype or saw an advertisement in a magazine, and ended up with Croc, Glover, Starshot: Space Circus Fever, or Rocket: Robot on Wheels, there's something nostalgic and life-affirming about playing a platformer that feels low-rent or "off" in the year of our Lord, 2026. That's doubly true if the game in question makes meta jokes that lampoon the very concept of its existence. Sure, in the case of Forbidden Solitaire, solitaire is objectively more fun to play than a throwback 3D platformer that very obviously had a shoestring budget. But I didn't expect a seamless-playing game out of Bubsy 4D.

But Seriously, What's The Price To A Single Good Joke In A Video Game?

I've name-dropped Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! without exploring my overall thoughts about it in this essay. When I look at Bubsy 4D, Truck-kun, and Forbidden Solitaire right next to each other, I rank Forbidden Solitaire well above the other two and flip back and forth on how I rank or rate Bubsy 4D and Truck-kun. I think I enjoyed playing Truck-kun a smidge more than Bubsy 4D because I outright love Crazy Taxi, and those Crazy Taxi bones are in Truck-kun's body. I think the only part of Bubsy 4D that speaks to me personally is the fact that I find the very concept of an utterly satisfactory Bubsy game in 2026 not sucking complete shit very funny. But I have to warn you, Truck-kun isn't perfect, and it's not going to work for everyone. The game revolves around a single map, and that's understandable given that it is only about three-and-a-half to four hours long and comes from an incredibly small team. Nonetheless, that map gets real tiresome and repetitive quick. The production values in Truck-kun are a bit inconsistent as well, with voice acting only kicking in during the introductory cutscene and the concluding one, along with a humorous song that plays during the credits, but most of the in-game cutscenes are voiceless. The game uses a deliberately colorful but cel-shaded adjacent world to help maintain a stable framerate. It matches the game's silly tone, but the variety just isn't there, and HOT DAMN, does Truck-kun desperately need at least a half-dozen more mission objectives. I did get giddy while crashing through any number of things at the start, but seeing two overlapping or contradictory mission objectives on my task list really bummed me out, and that happened every single mission in the game.

Truck-kun is only three to four hours long, but I was genuinely burnt out playing it by the time I rolled credits. The penultimate mission has you needing to acquire 60 stars during a single mission, and the RNG necessary to make that happen is soul-crushing at times. For reference, I may have accomplished that prior to that mission three times, and the game didn't penalize me all that harshly before then. Nonetheless, because the game does involve you helping a female who has been sent to an isekai fantasy world, you need to level her up to make the rest of her journey possible, and that means the game does involve some grinding. There are weird gaps in Truck-kun when you're just making deliveries or creating mayhem with no real narrative hook other than the game is jingling a set of plastic keys, which are the game's silly cutscenes, which are told through 2D character portraits. Everything that you see in those cutscenes is wild and ridiculous, but that also highlights a major shortcoming. If you aren't an anime fan who wants to revel in the most surface-level jokes at the expense of the isekai genre, I don't think the game's mix of Carmageddon and Crazy Taxi is enough to maintain your interest. When the game first explained how I needed to kill civilians to create enemies while also destroying debris to help the isekai-ed elf girl do more damage while also worrying about making deliveries and completing mission objectives, I thought Truck-kun was going to be a mechanically dense game. It turns out it really isn't, and your top priority is to engage in activities that help you get past the story checkpoints or milestones and forget about everything else. And worse of all, by the second hour you've pretty much seen everything there is to be seen in the game, but unfortunately, you still have an additional hour before the end of the story.

Bubsy 4D and Truck-kun, when they aren't on sale, are $19.99, and when Forbidden Solitaire isn't on sale, it's $15.99. I want to make it clear that I didn't feel more satisfied with Forbidden Solitaire because it's four dollars cheaper. Instead, I feel it offered the best overall package while telling silly jokes and delving into referential humor that I related to personally. I played the 3D platformers during the fifth generation that Bubsy 4D gives the middle finger to, and for Truck-kun, I've been in the isekai slop mines since the rise of Sword Art Online. I was the target audience for all three of these games, and I can safely say I feel the best about my purchase of Forbidden Solitaire. But as I said before, unless someone demands to see me play it, I'm probably never going to play it again, and that returns me to the guiding question of this essay: what is our asking price for games that are a single good or relatable joke? On top of that, what's our expectation for these games in general?

It's obviously not realistic to expect Psychonauts 2 with each and every single one of these. If we can accept that they cap out at around five hours, we can be more receptive to their generally smaller scopes and sequences. So, what are you thinking? Fuck's Quest II has become a viral sensation recently, and it's only $4.99, but not every game wants to look and play like Fuck's Quest II. Sometimes you do need to crank up the production values, and that moves the price-sliding scale into the double digits. But does there come a point when your joke game, in being oriented around insular farces for a very specific brand of person, becomes unviable if it crosses $10 or even $15? I don't know the answer to that, but I do know these sorts of games speak to the shaky foundation modern game reviews are built on. How do you review Fuck's Quest II? Honestly. People won't stop talking about it on BlueSky, so you probably can squeeze some SEO from reviewing it, but at what cost? Are the people buying Fuck's Quest II or Bubsy 4D actually served a purpose when you or I attempt to lay out the facts about what those games actually are and how they play? I don't think so, but the rest of my questions definitely remain open-ended and unresolved and are likely to remain that way for a while.