Epic Mickey Rebrushed is a much improved platformer

When Epic Mickey was originally released in 2010, it marked something of a bold new direction for Disney’s most beloved mascot.

Developed by Junction Point, the studio run by Deus Ex director Warren Spector, Epic Mickey game was a darker look at the history of Walt Disney, a peek beyond the company’s celebrated IP and a story that focused more on its forgotten creations.

While the game was praised by many for its unique tone and its willingness to explore the less glamorous side of Disney, its Wii exclusivity led to a number of issues with camera and controls that kept it from being considered a true must-have.

Fast forward nearly a decade and a half and Epic Mickey is back. Junction Point’s closure in 2013 means this remake of the original game is handled by Purple Lamp, an Austrian studio best known for SpongeBob games up until now.

By opting to focus mainly on the issues of the original release rather than completely overhauling everything, the studio has delivered a version of Epic Mickey that offers a far less frustrating experience, allowing its design to finally take centre stage.

If it passed you by the first time around, Epic Mickey sees the titular mouse exploring a special world created by the sorcerer Yen Sid for all of Walt Disney’s forgotten creations to live in.

When Mickey messes around in Yen Sid’s workshop, he accidentally spills magic paint thinner on the sorcerer’s model of this world, turning it into a grim and grotesque environment called the Wasteland.

It’s up to Mickey to enter the Wasteland and use Yen Sid’s magical paintbrush to right his wrongs and restore the world to something a bit more appealing for the retired Disney characters.

While there he also has to deal with the Blot (an evil creature created by Mickey’s brush) as well as Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a character who Disney had just regained the rights to when the game was originally in development on Wii.

Oswald was one of Walt Disney’s early creations, and when Universal muscled away the rights, Walt created Mickey Mouse as his replacement. When it comes to forgotten characters, then, Oswald is about as perfect a figurehead for this world as you can get, and his misplaced jealousy of Mickey in the story here is nevertheless perfectly understandable.

The world design is still one of the main highlights of Epic Mickey. To be clear, this is no simple remaster with upscaled visuals and not much else – Rebrushed has (to use a painfully overused development phrase) been rebuilt from the ground up, with character models, environmental elements and textures entirely recreated, and usually improved.

And yet, despite practically every element of the game being redesigned, there’s still been at least enough restraint here to ensure that all these new textures and objects still fit in with the original game’s art.

If you’ve played the Wii game before you’d be forgiven for thinking this is what it looked like back in 2010, and it’s only when you place both games side-by-side that you realise just how vastly different Rebrushed looks.

That it doesn’t appear immediately improved isn’t a criticism, it’s a compliment – Purple Lamp has done a superb job of retaining the feel and atmosphere of the Wii version while modernising it in a way that’s comprehensive but never contradictory to the original vision.

One aspect of the Wii game that has been made noticeably better, however, is the game’s camera. When played with a Wii Remote and Nunchuk, players had to aim Mickey’s paint with the Remote’s pointer while using its D-Pad to rotate the camera.

The result was a frustratingly fiddly experience, in which the camera and painting controls always felt like they were fighting against each other, to the benefit of neither. The fact that often the camera controls just outright refused to work was ultimately the main reason Epic Mickey wasn’t held up as one of the must-have platformers of its generation.

With no more requirement to cater for the Wii’s unique control method, Rebrushed does away with such gimmickry and mercifully implements a straightforward twin-stick control method, killing both birds with one stone. Both the camera and the controls are now entirely harmless, serving their purpose without issue.

Not stopping there, Purple Lamp has also added some new moves, one of which is an absolute godsend. Ground pound and dodge techniques have been added to improve players’ offensive and defensive capabilities during combat, with the latter being the more useful of the two.

It’s the addition of a sprint toggle by pushing in the left thumbstick, however, that makes the prospect of exploring the Wasteland’s often large areas so much more appealing. The Wii version didn’t have a sprint move, and its presence – especially when running around stages in search of specific points of interest during side-missions – is certainly a welcome one.

Fans of the original will also note that the Projector Screen levels – which offer a series of 2.5D side-scrolling platformer stages based on classic Mickey cartoons – are no longer the empty areas they used to be. More interactive elements (like switches, manually controlled elevator platforms and more collectibles) ensure they’re now more than just a nostalgic walkway designed to transition the player between 3D platformer areas.

While this is all very positive, there are still some issues here. The morality system, which essentially determines which of the game’s endings you’ll get, still doesn’t feel as fully-formed as it could be. While there are certain missions that affect it, much of it is still based on whether you defeat enemies with paint thinner (to kill them) or paint (to turn them friendly), so it’s a bit more binary than we’d have liked.

Still, this doesn’t detract too much from what is an inventive platformer that even nearly a decade and a half later is still a wonderfully dark take on the Walt Disney legacy, full of easter eggs for the more die-hard fans of Disney movies and the Disney theme parks.