August 23, 2026
Bug Fables is a 2019 game that's like Paper Mario. It's very good at being like Paper Mario, and Paper Mario is good, so the few improvements it does make elevate it nicely. The cast is charming - the main cast in particular, with the bratty and greedy Vi acting as a foil to the two more serious sorts. Kabbu is chivalrous, honorable, an almost knightly character, but with an adorable soft side. On the other hand, Leif is quiet and stoic to cover a deep insecurity. The recurring rivals are an idol with a rancid personality and her biggest simp who can't tear himself away. I could go on.
Then there's the one transmisogynistic charicature, who appears once in a sidequest and is mentioned once more, ever. There's no need for this character to exist. You could even just change their pronouns, making the character into an evil woman. It's a glaring black mark on an otherwise incredible cast.
The world is similarly quite good. Each region feels unique, it's never too much of a pain to backtrack, and the enemy variance is good. The side quests bring you to a bunch of hidden areas, and there's some nonlinearity in the way those can be reached. You'll get a lot of lore about the world, but the questions it raises - Why are bugs people? Where are the humans that clearly existed at some point? What the hell is going on with the last zone? - are left unanswered. This is for the best. The game isn't about answering every question, and it leaves the world with a bit of mystery while preventing it from feeling contrived. Bug Fables strikes a good balance, there.
On the mechanical side, the game is solid - if you liked Paper Mario, it'll hit the spot. It keeps the choice of health/skill points/badge points on level-up, but unlike Paper Mario, you're going to need to invest in health quite a bit as enemy damage ramps up. Instead of a single leading character, it's a party of three, able to switch positions and equip their own badges. The combat's got good bones, but it fumbles a bit in the deep end in a couple ways.
I played the game on Hard Mode, which increases enemy stats a bit throughout the game. It forced me to engage with all the mechanics, and to find good badge combinations. Unfortunately, there's a single optimal strategy, and as far as I can tell, it's more about how you get there. Vi has a pair of skills which deal decreasing damage - if she has 8 attack, it'll do 8+7+6+5 damage. The strategy, then, is ramping Vi's attack as high as possible, then using those skills. There's a few ways to do this, but the core strategy remains the same. There's other attacks that can scale heavily in the same way, but they're vastly more expensive to use. There's team attacks that do high damage on their own, but they're expensive to use and consume the turns of multiple characters.
With a rebalance, this could very much be fixed. Vi's other skills, and the skills of the other party members, could see more use. It would help a lot with keeping combat interesting instead of it being a damage race - but it would reveal a few other weaknesses. In particular, the later skills make extensive use of "press this random button" as their prompt. I'm not very good at this, so I might be salting off a little here, but it's every team skill.
The cooking system, as mentioned, is necessary on Hard Mode. It's taken more or less directly from Paper Mario - which is not great, because cooking the same thing multiple times means scrolling through the inventory repeatedly. This is merely an annoyance, but having a simple menu of known recipes would have saved me quite a lot of time over the course of the game. Shops are similar - it's the Paper Mario "approach the item on a counter and interact" system. I don't hate it, it's cute to have the items visible like that, and it's less work for the developers since it is just a reuse of the dialogue system. The same is true of the cooking system. Never the less! It's annoying.
The normal menu is similarly minimal. For the cooking log, quests, monster log, and medal selection, it's a bit tiring to scroll through twenty to seventy items. There are plenty of unused buttons, and the game is on computer - give me pagination, please! I want some quality of life from a modern game!
The overworld mechancis were also quite good. Without spoiling too much, the three team members have abilties that interact in fun ways, leading to a lot of neat puzzles. I, specifically, struggled more than was probably intended, because my controller is old and the sticks would often flick backwards when released, leading to abilities firing off in the wrong direction. This isn't a flaw of the game, though - except in a few areas where you're asked for more precision than you can really achieve with the controls as given, the puzzles and overworld mechanics are all satisfying and intuitive.
Overall, Bug Fables is a solidly good game. If you've been missing Paper Mario, you'll love it. I did! If not, it's still good. There's enough weaknesses that I can't say it's great... but there's also a mod that seems invested in alleviating a lot of my issues, which I'm interested in returning with in the future.
