When Epic Mickey was initially launched in 2010, it marked one thing of a daring new route for Disney’s most beloved mascot.
Developed by Junction Level, the studio run by Deus Ex director Warren Spector, Epic Mickey recreation was a darker have a look at the historical past of Walt Disney, a peek past the corporate’s celebrated IP and a narrative that centered extra on its forgotten creations.
Whereas the sport was praised by many for its distinctive tone and its willingness to discover the much less glamorous aspect of Disney, its Wii exclusivity led to numerous points with digital camera and controls that stored it from being thought of a real must-have.
Quick ahead almost a decade and a half and Epic Mickey is again. Junction Level’s closure in 2013 means this remake of the unique recreation is dealt with by Purple Lamp, an Austrian studio greatest identified for SpongeBob video games up till now.
By opting to focus primarily on the problems of the unique launch slightly than utterly overhauling every thing, the studio has delivered a model of Epic Mickey that provides a far much less irritating expertise, permitting its design to lastly take centre stage.
If it handed you by the primary time round, Epic Mickey sees the titular mouse exploring a particular world created by the sorcerer Yen Sid for all of Walt Disney’s forgotten creations to dwell in.
When Mickey messes round in Yen Sid’s workshop, he by chance spills magic paint thinner on the sorcerer’s mannequin of this world, turning it right into a grim and grotesque setting referred to as the Wasteland.
It’s as much as Mickey to enter the Wasteland and use Yen Sid’s magical paintbrush to proper his wrongs and restore the world to one thing a bit extra interesting for the retired Disney characters.
Whereas there he additionally has to take care of the Blot (an evil creature created by Mickey’s brush) in addition to Oswald the Fortunate Rabbit, a personality who Disney had simply regained the rights to when the sport was initially in improvement on Wii.
Oswald was considered one of Walt Disney’s early creations, and when Common muscled away the rights, Walt created Mickey Mouse as his alternative. On the subject of forgotten characters, then, Oswald is about as good a figurehead for this world as you may get, and his misplaced jealousy of Mickey within the story right here is nonetheless completely comprehensible.
The world design continues to be one of many essential highlights of Epic Mickey. To be clear, that is no easy remaster with upscaled visuals and never a lot else – Rebrushed has (to make use of a painfully overused improvement phrase) been rebuilt from the bottom up, with character fashions, environmental parts and textures fully recreated, and often improved.
And but, regardless of virtually each ingredient of the sport being redesigned, there’s nonetheless been not less than sufficient restraint right here to make sure that all these new textures and objects nonetheless slot in with the unique recreation’s artwork.
In case you’ve performed the Wii recreation earlier than you’d be forgiven for considering that is what it seemed like again in 2010, and it’s solely if you place each video games side-by-side that you just realise simply how vastly completely different Rebrushed seems.
That it doesn’t seem instantly improved isn’t a criticism, it’s a praise – Purple Lamp has achieved an outstanding job of retaining the texture and environment of the Wii model whereas modernising it in a means that’s complete however by no means contradictory to the unique imaginative and prescient.
One side of the Wii recreation that has been made noticeably higher, nevertheless, is the sport’s digital camera. When performed with a Wii Distant and Nunchuk, gamers needed to goal Mickey’s paint with the Distant’s pointer whereas utilizing its D-Pad to rotate the digital camera.
The outcome was a frustratingly fiddly expertise, through which the digital camera and portray controls all the time felt like they have been combating towards one another, to the good thing about neither. The truth that usually the digital camera controls simply outright refused to work was in the end the principle cause Epic Mickey wasn’t held up as one of many must-have platformers of its era.
With no extra requirement to cater for the Wii’s distinctive management technique, Rebrushed does away with such gimmickry and mercifully implements an easy twin-stick management technique, killing each birds with one stone. Each the digital camera and the controls at the moment are fully innocent, serving their function with out difficulty.
Not stopping there, Purple Lamp has additionally added some new strikes, considered one of which is an absolute godsend. Floor pound and dodge methods have been added to enhance gamers’ offensive and defensive capabilities throughout fight, with the latter being the extra helpful of the 2.
It’s the addition of a dash toggle by pushing within the left thumbstick, nevertheless, that makes the prospect of exploring the Wasteland’s usually giant areas a lot extra interesting. The Wii model didn’t have a dash transfer, and its presence – particularly when working round phases in quest of particular factors of curiosity throughout side-missions – is definitely a welcome one.
Followers of the unique can even observe that the Projector Display ranges – which supply a sequence of two.5D side-scrolling platformer phases primarily based on traditional Mickey cartoons – are now not the empty areas they was. Extra interactive parts (like switches, manually managed elevator platforms and extra collectibles) guarantee they’re now greater than only a nostalgic walkway designed to transition the participant between 3D platformer areas.
Whereas that is all very constructive, there are nonetheless some points right here. The morality system, which primarily determines which of the sport’s endings you’ll get, nonetheless doesn’t really feel as fully-formed because it may very well be. Whereas there are specific missions that have an effect on it, a lot of it’s nonetheless primarily based on whether or not you defeat enemies with paint thinner (to kill them) or paint (to show them pleasant), so it’s a bit extra binary than we’d have favored.
Nonetheless, this doesn’t detract an excessive amount of from what’s an creative platformer that even almost a decade and a half later continues to be a splendidly darkish tackle the Walt Disney legacy, filled with easter eggs for the extra die-hard followers of Disney films and the Disney theme parks.
