Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons is one of the strangest pseudo-roguelite games I have ever played. At Anime Expo 2025 this year, I had the chance to sit down and play about 45 minutes of this recently revealed new title in the long-running series.
To be honest, Bubble Bobble is a series that I am familiar with but have never had the chance to check out until now. Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons feels like a bizarre spin-off of the series in which you deal with randomized dungeons for you to explore and find treasure in.
How the Tutorial Section Eases You Into Gameplay
The timed demo began on Nintendo Switch with a linear tutorial section. This section featured numerous levels and rooms in which I learned about the various mechanics of this game.
Some of the classic ideas of shooting out bubbles at enemies still remain, along with the platforming elements of jumping on enemies and bubbles to traverse rooms. But there are also neat upgrades like fire bubbles that burst to release flames and many puzzle-like elements as well.
The tutorial section is great at easing you into the mechanics of this game while also gradually increasing the difficulty of each room before throwing you into the full experience with the first dungeon to explore.
How Dungeons Work in Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons
How the dungeons work is that there is a timer located at the bottom of the screen that starts at 99 seconds, and that is the total time you have to explore this dungeon as much as possible. There are various floors to the dungeon, and completing a room will send you to the next floor, but with the remaining time.
It is currently uncertain how you get more time in a dungeon, as I only get an extra second at best for completing a room, which isn’t much in the grand scheme of a dungeon run.
Each of the floors themselves is also fully randomized, so you never know what you might get. The goal, however, remains the same across all floors: get to the exit. Some rooms may require you to defeat foes to progress, while others may allow you to jump and run around the enemies and just go for the goal. This is also crucial if you plan on speedrunning dungeons.
Sugar Dungeons Feels Surprisingly Puzzle-Focused
Since it is more about escaping the room rather than fighting, though that is still an option, Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons feels so much more puzzle-like in this way than most other similar roguelite types of games.
For instance, one room might feature a wind turbine that is blowing wind throughout the room. You can then blow a bubble to either access the enemies that are above you and take them out, or use it to blow a bubble, jump on it, and float up and around the enemies to avoid them entirely.
These rooms may be small, but they generally provide a good bit of depth for how to approach the foes. Do you release a water bubble to flood the room and take out the enemies there to give you a clear shot to the exit, or use your jumping skills to leap over the enemies carefully while avoiding hits and make it to the end?
As a whole, it does feel like Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons is a pretty easy game for the most part. That said, there are some challenges, especially the deeper you get into the floors of a dungeon. I never got further than the 10th floor of the first dungeon you enter in this demo. And it wasn’t because of the timer, either, as the game does offer some more difficult rooms later on.
Part of the challenge comes from the fact that your character can’t get hit at all. Even a single touch of an enemy will send you packing and back to the hub area for your next mission. Couple this with the ever-looming timer in the dungeon, and the cutesy game does get intense at times. Mistakes and slip-ups aren’t looked upon kindly, so I found myself getting knocked out of a dungeon quite often.
What can help with this are the abilities and items you can get along the way. I didn’t get to explore this feature much, but it does give me hope for the potential depth that could come about. During the tutorial, I received 10 fire bubbles as an item.
You can equip these in the main menu to one of the four main skill buttons. You can then use that item anytime in a dungeon and however you like. The fire bubbles, as mentioned, pop and create flames that burst upwards and defeat anything in their path. You can even use them carefully to take out multiple enemies at once.
From what it seems, you keep the items you find in treasure and dungeons for later playthroughs. So, once I finished the tutorial, I still had nine flame bubbles that I could use in the first true dungeon however I please. So, there is this element of collecting items to make runs easier and knowing when to properly use them at play.
In addition, there were materials of some kind that I was able to collect in the dungeons. While I didn’t get to see crafting of any kind, this does hint that there will potentially be a way to make items and then be able to use them in later runs, so it will be interesting to see how deep that goes in the full release.
Then there is the general aesthetic of this experience. I will admit it goes a bit too far on the adorable side with the pink Candy Land-style sweets and treats locales. While it is certainly cute to look at, the entire candy aesthetic does give off some mobile game vibes in the presentation.
All of the environments and monsters just look a little too simplistic in their designs. There isn’t a lot of detail to find in the sugary sweet cloud backgrounds or the tiny little monsters that you face along the way. As such, I wouldn’t say it is as visually appealing as it could be with its lack of general detail.
No Multiplayer Hurts Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons
Furthermore, the most disappointing part of Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons appears to be the lack of the ability to play this with another person. I asked the representative from Arc System Works about this during my preview at Anime Expo 2025, and I was told that this is strictly a single-player game.
The lack of multiplayer here is a shame since this is a series that was built on the entire idea of playing as both Bub and Bob, hence the actual name of the game. I am not sure how the two characters fit in this experience, with it being only single-player, especially since I only saw one of them in my demo.
I do wish this had a two-player option, though, because there is a lot of potential there with being able to traverse the dungeons with another person. This would make the general simplicity of the gameplay and presentation more appealing, having fun alongside someone else, but, alas, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Bubble Bobble Sugar Dungeons is a very odd spin-off game that delves into the roguelite genre with its randomized dungeons and simple progression system with items. There is some enjoyment to be had with the heavy emphasis on puzzles and platforming, but I’m not sure it will be deep enough to warrant play long-term, given its timed dungeon runs and lack of multiplayer.
