Thanks to Selectaplay for the review code
Title: Bubble Ghost Remake
System: Steam (PC)
Price: $19.99
Release Date: 03/26/2025
Story
In this reimagining of the obscure Game Boy/Atari ST game, you take control of the ghost of a researcher named Heinrich, as he returns to find his old house abandoned and haunted by the various creatures he and his wife Sofia had harbored. Now he must delve deep into the depths of his own home, trying to find his lover and piecing together more information about his past in the process…
The amount of plot in this game caught me off guard. The original Game Boy/Atari ST versions didn’t really have much of a plot at all outside of what was in the manual, but here we have a plot that spans the entire length of the adventure to the point Bubble Ghost might as well be more of a reinterpretation compared to a typical remake. Is the new plot particularly memorable? Not really, if I’m being honest.
Bubble Ghost has some cute moments and interesting nuggets of info that tie all the areas together in a nice fashion, but this really wasn’t a game that I felt benefited from a story in any meaningful way, so the addition of a detailed plot with lore and such comes off as excessive.
Presentation
The two original versions of Bubble Ghost looked simplistic in their own ways. The Game Boy version stuck with a cute super deformed look, which really fit the portable nature of the game at the time and made navigating the rooms on screen a lot easier. On the other hand, the Atari ST/other computer versions were a lot creepier looking, but still tailored enough to demonstrate a solid concept for a game and not have any major visibility issues.
For Bubble Ghost Remake, you still have a visible playing field, but now stages are far more elaborate and complex, and the artstyles of the original two versions have been thrown out the window in favor of something more cartoony, and I gotta be honest, while I expected this look to grow on me after a while, it just didn’t end up clicking with me. Something about the way everything looks comes off a bit too silly, and when the story has the rare moments of going into a topic that’s somewhat serious (like World War II), the new look makes it hard to take these moments with any degree of seriousness. The main character looking a little dorky compared to the cute ghost of the GB version or the actual spooky ghost of the ST original is also a bit of a bummer, and I wish there was some sort of toggle that let you switch between the three versions.
Still, even with an art style I didn’t particularly care for, the visuals of Bubble Ghost Remake were clearly made with love, since the enemies are rather expressive, with boss fights having a lot more charm than you’d expect because of it, and even the silly looking Ghost hero does some cute animations here and there depending on how you play. It may be a bit too different from the original for my liking, but for the new stuff here it does lead to the haunted house feeling like a true cartoon, and happens to run well on my Steam Deck, too.
For the audio, this was easily the weakest aspect of Bubble Ghost Remake for me. The original game didn’t have much in terms of memorable tunes besides a couple of catchy tracks in the Game Boy version, and while they do make an appearance in decent remixed fashion in a bonus mode, most of the OST here is brand new, and rather forgettable. Nothing bad, just very generic sounding and more quiet across the board to the point I forget every single tune when I close the game for the day. Neither version of Bubble Ghost has ever contained an OST of bangers from start to finish, and this one didn’t really do anything to change that.
Gameplay
Upon booting the game, you have the option of picking the normal story mode, or a pair of bonus modes. The first of these modes is “Original”, which is what leads to the actual remake of the original Game Boy/ST title, and is a good way to get to basics with the gameplay. You as Heinrich can move around almost anywhere on screen, even through walls and enemies, and your main goal is to blow a bubble around and carefully navigate it away from anything that could pop it.
Walls, enemies, obstacles, pretty much everything that it touches will cause the bubble to pop, and you blow with the A button while using the shoulder buttons to rotate Heinrich around to angle him just right. The single-screen levels in Original mode are simplistic and quite a lot of fun, and I was able to use this mode to practice angling the ghost around, since that’s by far the trickiest aspect to the controls. Either you mash the shoulder buttons to rotate and navigate the screens just right, or you use X to lock-on and have Heinrich automatically angle himself when behind the bubble, which doesn’t work as well as it should, unfortunately. It feels rather clunky and not as precise as I’d like, which led to me making more mistakes than doing it manually, even if the manual positioning will make things slower.
Still, this Original mode contains the screen-by-screen action of the original Bubble Ghost, and is true to the title. This is the Bubble Ghost Remake and while the newer art style feels quite unlike the other two versions due to using assets from the main game, it still offers some pretty solid, three-life fun, although upon losing them all you get booted right back to the first screen to try again, but this mode really isn’t that long if you manage to get enough practice in to make it further and further.
However, the big chunk of Bubble Ghost Remake is well, not so much of a remake, but rather a reinterpretation that takes the original concept and expands it massively into its own game. Levels aren’t single screen anymore, now becoming much bigger with grueling marathons between checkpoints. There are now bosses to deal with, now requiring you figure out a little puzzle of sorts for them to take damage and have you survive with the bubble. Plenty of secret paths are hidden with challenge stages that are even tougher than the main stages, along with some gold rings that reward you for clearing a stage incredibly fast.
Quite the increase in content! Unfortunately, I just couldn’t click with this game at all no matter how much I tried doing so. There are multiple difficulty levels to choose from, with easy getting you more checkpoints and the lock-on ability, but I stuck with Normal for my attempted playthrough, which doesn’t give you the lock-on and has fewer checkpoints, but a recent QOL patch made it so some stages aren’t as hair-pullingly difficult as they were before. Yes, Bubble Ghost Remake can get brutal in spots, which is a little surprising considering how the original game was gentler even with no continues available, and how memorization helped you progress further and further within the game, just like in these newer levels.
What bugged me the most about the newer levels though, came from just how swiftly it ramps up and how picky the hitboxes seem to be. If you so much as brush against something, the bubble will pop, and more often than not I’ve barely avoided something only for the bubble to go ahead and pop anyway. “No biggie, I’ll just wait more for the hazard to not get in my way”, I thought, but that just made levels a lot slower than in the original game, and being able to die near the end of a stage and get sent back was infuriating. Before the QOL patch, I was honestly tempted to just lower the difficulty to Easy, but thankfully the patch did make things a little better, and I was able to progress past a couple of worlds as a result, hoping the game would get more engaging like that Original mode.
Despite my best efforts, Bubble Ghost Remake just continued to annoy me. A very spacious level with lots to overwhelm you with here, some clunky controls there, it just never felt right, and while I can say the same for that Original game mode too, those levels were at least a lot more fun and worthy of the challenge. Weirdly enough, I did find those secret stages to be a lot more satisfying to figure out compared to the main levels, and the bosses are surprisingly clever too, but when it comes to the bulk of the game, Heinrich’s adventure just became a slog I couldn’t fully click with.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Bubble Ghost Remake was an aggressively OK puzzler. I liked some of the cool mechanics that opened up the further you got in the game, and enjoyed some of the puzzles quite a bit, but before a recent patch remedied the checkpoint issue, this game was just brutal to the point of being completely unenjoyable in some levels.
Now with the patch and more forgiving checkpoints, I found myself enjoying the remake a bit more, but I still don’t feel like the game nails the right balance. There are still some levels that go on for way longer than they have every right to, and the bubble blowing can be a little finicky when trying to navigate tight corridors or avoid enemies with just the right amount of timing. Not to mention while some levels are improved greatly by checkpoints, others are pretty lacking with them, which just makes the difficulty feel all over the place despite multiple difficulty options being a thing, and compared to those original set of stages, Bubble Ghost Remake’s newer levels just don’t compare to the simplistic fun those levels offered. It greatly expands upon the original concept, but maybe a bit too much.
I think the biggest question for whether or not this game is right for you or not depends on how you played the original, if you did at all. I never grew up with any version of Bubble Ghost, and just came away finding this remake to be an average puzzle solving experience that not even Original mode made that much better. (though it still was by far the best part) On the other hand, I assume if you did enjoy the quirky nature of those original versions, you’ll be thrilled to have a longer, more tricky experience to dive into with replay value from the speedrun mode and hidden rings/challenge levels being more than enough to keep you plenty busy mastering the mechanics, even if they may not always play nice with you.
Still, even with my best efforts, I just couldn’t get this one to click with me, but I can at least appreciate the effort of completely flipping the table in a game’s remake to the point of making it feel like a far bigger experience overall, and it was very obvious the team were gargantuan fans of the original and wanted to make it bigger and better, even if that didn’t turn out as great as it could have in the end.
I give Bubble Ghost Remake a 6 out of 10.