Review Normalcy1 4/5 · Aug 21, 2025
Bug Fables is a 2D Paper Mario-like JRPG from an indie studio that’s about five or six years old now. At face value, it immediately encounters the challenge of comparison to the Paper Mario titles, because its visual style is so clearly a pastiche. As the player gets into the mechanics and world of Bug Fables, they learn that the …
Bug Fables is a 2D Paper Mario-like JRPG from an indie studio that’s about five or six years old now. At face value, it immediately encounters the challenge of comparison to the Paper Mario titles, because its visual style is so clearly a pastiche. As the player gets into the mechanics and world of Bug Fables, they learn that the developers were almost certainly trying to design something more akin to a spiritual successor to The Thousand-Year Door—a game that just never really happened, as Nintendo went in increasingly experimental and, many would argue, unnecessary design directions with the Paper Mario series after the second title.
With that in mind, Bug Fables does largely succeed at meeting the quality of the first two Paper Mario titles. While there’s a certain magic to those games that is really difficult to capture by a separate IP, Bug Fables carves out its own world and identity. It lifts heavily from the Paper Mario formula but doesn’t attempt to reinvent that world. Instead, it creates a new one, with warring insect factions in a post-human universe. Quite honestly, the world is interesting, and although the characters are pretty tropey and generic, they really fit nicely into the colorful, silly, Saturday morning cartoon world and storyline. As long as you’re not looking for anything too serious, Bug Fables has a pretty fun and lighthearted storyline that really brings the player back to being an eleven-year-old eating cereal on a Saturday morning.
At first, the player might—if they’re anything like me—be turned off by the writing and the cast of characters, which is surprisingly small. You only control three characters, maybe four if there’s an optional character you pick up along the way. That’s even significantly less than the first Paper Mario, so the developers clearly wanted to focus on a small cast. But none of them are really that worthy of personal investment. They aren’t very dimensional. I didn’t expect that much as the story progressed, but I can’t neglect to acknowledge that there is some tension between the choice of focusing on such a small cast and writing them and the story they partake in with a lack of depth.
Anyway, it doesn’t really detract much from the overall experience for me. As a person who spent many childhood days playing the Paper Mario series, I can say that the gameplay is quite faithfully recreated—almost to the point where I felt it was too similar. But the formula works pretty well: managing your medals, your health points, and your technical points upon each level-up to customize your team’s strengths, and then banking on those strengths as you encounter increasingly powerful enemies.
What I felt was shallow, however—and I don’t really remember if this was true about Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, although my nostalgia-clouded brain feels like it probably wasn’t—is that the mechanics do not develop very much from the very beginning of the game to the very end. There are definitely new abilities acquired and adaptations that have to be made as you encounter different types of enemies, but whether you’re in the early, mid, or late game, there are some really standard tactics that continue to apply. For example, flying enemies need to be hit by a boomerang. Certain enemy types are weak to ice. Certain enemies need to be dug up from the ground. And there just isn’t that much variation on those mechanics. They appear all throughout the game. They apply to random enemy encounters; they apply to bosses.
It’s unusual because your damage very rarely increases unless you apply certain medals to increase your damage, but those have drastic drawbacks. So the average player might dabble with them, but probably won’t use them much. Regardless, the point is: as you level, you never increase your damage—only your health points or ability to use badges or abilities in battle. It’s an unusual type of progression for a JRPG. Normally, as your characters level up, so do all their abilities: speed, strength, health points, etc. I’m not saying that this is necessarily broken, but it is a problem in the late game. As long as you pump a ton of points into your TP, you’re able to do more damage because you’re able to use your abilities more. That sort of negates the strategy element a little bit.
If the game had more customization—maybe even a basic equipment system—then I think that from a design point of view, the developers would have more choices about how to diversify the tactics in battles.
I’ll just touch briefly upon the sound design. The music is clearly Paper Mario-inspired but very well done—not derivative, but catchy and tuneful on its own. There are many upbeat songs, but also some tense battle music and mysterious cave melodies—everything you might expect from Paper Mario or adjacent titles. It really succeeds in the sound and music department, if you like those early 2000s catchy Nintendo-slash-Mario tunes.
Other than that, I also want to compliment the level design a bit. There are some medium-length dungeons and puzzle areas that truly never drag. The puzzles will rarely confuse the player, but they make good use of the mechanics, and the game introduces enough overworld abilities to keep things fresh—in contrast to the battle system, which plateaued a bit for me. I thought the puzzle design was fairly clever without being overly difficult. In fact, if anything, I probably would have preferred a little more challenge, but I do enjoy that the dungeons never really got stale.
As I mentioned, the visual style is really great, but they also diversify the environments while staying on theme with the bug world in a way that is fun and meaningful. Just like Paper Mario, there are lots of little secrets that you can obtain: crystal berries, medals, little items here and there. These mini-puzzles also occupy the player’s time as they’re traversing, and it keeps things fresh—and somewhat addicting, actually—to go through the world.
So there’s a really, really nice gameplay loop in Bug Fables. Between its fun—but admittedly a bit prone to staleness—battle system, its lovely and tuneful world filled with little secrets and decent puzzles, and some story bits that never feel especially deep or affecting but are fun and nostalgic, overall, Bug Fables is a worthwhile experience. If you’re interested in a Paper Mario successor, in fact, I’d say it’s probably borderline necessary if you are a Paper Mario aficionado. But anyone really interested in indie—or rather, quality indie—titles, and weighty yet lean JRPGs, should probably check out Bug Fables.
