‘Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed’ is developer Purple Lamp and publisher THQ Nordic’s enhanced remaster take on Mickey’s strange journey through the ravaged Wasteland. A former Wii-exclusive now saved from the horrifying confines of the Wiimote, players will take on the role of everyone’s favourite clubhouse mouse Mickey Mouse as he (or rather, you) looks to escape from Wasteland while making choices that will shape the world as well as the ending you get.
A collaboration by many and headed by Deus Ex’s director and producer Warren Spector, this remaster goes on to fix many of the issues that plagued the original—leaving us with a fairly neat concept of just how good (or bad) you can make the Mouse. With a paintbrush, no less! Oh, and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is here. Almost forgot that one.
Disney fans will love this one and narrative enjoyers will be amused.
How ‘Heartless’ Can You Get?
Epic Mickey starts us off with a cinematic, showing us how the mischievous Mickey Mouse found himself in the quarters of the great wizard Yen Sid (spell that one backwards) Yen Sid had created a world for forgotten cartoon characters to live out their lives in peace, forged through a combination of paint, thinner, and a magical paintbrush. Watching all this play out from the corner of the room, Mickey, too, thinks himself an artist (don’t we all!). Once Yen Sid retires to his chambers, the Mouse grabs the paintbrush and splashes it all over this magical world, creating a creepy, giant blob of black ink. To make matters worse, in Mickey’s escape back to his room, he knocks over a whole bottle of thinner, creating the Wasteland. It would be many years later before Mickey finds himself being yanked into the literal mess he made.
Epic Mickey: Rebrushed is a 3D narrative-driven platformer. The original Wii release was sold on the idea of making choices that impact how your adventure plays out and most of those choices will be made with your paintbrush. Mickey’s paintbrush can fire paint and thinner at a limited range and you can use these two to fill in or “thin out” set paths, walls, and objects made out of “Toon”. How you use this paintbrush can either make challenges easier or take more time, if you don’t want to be a jerk. See, thin out the wrong stuff and someone can get hurt—making Wasteland a nastier place to be. But if you paint things and take your time, the fruits of your labour will be rewarded by the sheer fact that you made someone’s life a little easier.
The paintbrush mechanic is a novel idea, and I found it keeping what would otherwise be a bog-standard 3D platformer fresh and fun to play. Painting and thinning are pretty addicting and the best thing Rebrushed has done is that what you paint and thin out actually remain! In the original release, nothing was more demotivating than to spend a good 20 minutes filling in an entire world with paint, leave, and return to find all your hard work wiped out. Rebrushed also adds a few new moves to Mickey’s arsenal. You can now sprint, dash, and ground pound. Dashing is particularly useful for getting out of the way of enemies as ground pounding is for pushing back all those little blots.
Mickey himself still controls pretty well. I wasn’t kidding about the whole “saved from the Wiimote” business. Jumping around is incredibly responsive, and you can push some of your jumps quite far if you time your double jump properly. You can also elongate your jump a little longer by doing your “spin attack” move with the simple push of the “X” button. Before this remaster? You had to shake the awful Wii Remote to achieve similar results.
Jumping around is fun and Purple Lamp have done an excellent job keeping the original game largely intact while converting Epic Mickey for regular controller use. Some zones will pull up an emulated Wii cursor, but these are few and far between and they’ve also upped the range on the target during these sequences so you’re not flailing around trying to dodge and paint. Combat is simple—most enemies can be befriended or thinned out. Some can only be thinned out. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, but as long as you spin, you’ll keep foes at bay.
The worlds themselves are fairly small but densely packed with things to do. Once Mickey gets to Mean Street, the game’s central hub area, you’ll have to trek to four other zones to progress and ultimately get out of Wasteland. The hubs are full of quests and lots of collectibles. Heck, part of what makes this game a lot of fun is just thinning out surfaces to find concept art, film reels, and even quest items for quests you haven’t taken yet. To go between hub areas, you’ll have to jump into projector screens and run through short, 2D platforming sections. These are fun challenges that do get repetitive up until the final ones due to level layout and challenge reuse and, occasionally, a finnicky camera that tries to predict your movements. But thankfully you can pay a measly 10 tickets to skip these sections once you’ve completed them, which you’ll need to do quite a few times to complete quests.
Now there’s one thing Rebrushed added that I’m sort of wishy-washy on. Sprinting is nice, I’m not going to say it isn’t. But even though it’s been nearly 14 years or so since I finished the original, I couldn’t help but notice how the game’s levels had grown slightly. Now I had no interest in pulling up the original to check, namely because I have a small disdain for the overclocked GameCube, but looking up footage from older walkthroughs corroborated my thoughts on the matter. Not the end of the world, mind you, but it is amusing to wonder if sprint is necessary in the year 2024.
Watch Where You Paint!
As I’ve implied, platforming is only part of Epic Mickey’s arsenal. As you progress, you’ll be presented with a number of ways to continue the game. There are almost always a paint and thinner path for quests, while a set number will only progress one way or another. Very much true to older CRPGs but simplified for a younger audience to understand (less “evil” choices, more rude ‘n crude ones). Mickey will always be accompanied by Gremlin Gus who will almost always point out your available options. He also likes to judge, so expect to be reprimanded if you try to go for a darker path. Heck, everyone will be the judge of you depending on how you handle quests and major characters in your playthrough. Toons might give you discounts for helping them, others have collectibles to trade. All in all, what you do might make it easy or take more time for you to advance the story, which despite being a focal point isn’t particularly noteworthy. A lot of characters like the Gremlins blend in, villains don’t really stick the landing, and ultimately, I felt that the overarching narrative falls flat in comparison to the moment-to-moment questing, but the opportunity for multiple endings makes it worth pursuing.
But the one thing that Epic Mickey: Rebrushed excels at is just how reactive the world is to your decisions. On the surface, the world visually changes as characters are either downtrodden, neutral, or upbeat. Characters may offer you collectibles that can be only completed by either thinning or painting, which means you’ll have to decide whether to briefly be a jerk to get that 100% sooner or simply replay the game on New Game Plus and not tamper with your potential ending possibilities. Even the game’s music, composed by James Dooley, has multiple variations based on whether the player is going “paint” or “thinner”, or even being neutral, with in-betweens for both. Going paint marks the atmosphere with a light, steady xylophone while going thinner blasts heavy, low notes as you leave everyone sad in your wake. Mix this in with clever takes on classic Disney songs and you have quite the unique score.
And just like Disney, I’ve long neglected to talk about Wasteland’s characters. You’ll find recognisable faces from all over older cartoons, brought to life by the long-forgotten Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (along with a few, more familiar faces). And even the levels are based on old rides and Disney properties such as ‘It’s a Small World’, ‘Tron’, ‘Peter Pan’, and the like (though only the former has a real connection). Make no mistake, Epic Mickey wears old Disney memorabilia on its sleeve and does so in creepy ways, like when you get to Mickey Junk Mountain. The levels are cool and encourage you to really explore every nook and cranny, but I wish the bosses did more with the morality system. My favourite fight is the Robo Captain Hook one simply because the game gives you the option of fighting him head on or taking an alternative path without getting your hands dirty (or anyone getting seriously hurt).
All this is really brought together by this excellent remaster of a unique 3D platformer. Purple Lamp has done a great job with both the visuals and quality of life changes, bringing an aged (but still quite beautiful title for its time and hardware) to modern platforms through Unreal Engine. By and large, it’s the same game as the original, even down to the animated cutscenes, which have been slightly edited to wipe away Wiimote references. Any complaints I have are mostly nitpicking visual choices, aside from one collectible that got moved and had me scratching my head for a good half hour. The audio mixing is also not very good as sound effects are frequently lost or sometimes not even played proper.
Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed is an excellent remaster of one of the Wii’s best games. It fixes its shortcomings, adds to it with quality-of-life changes, and most importantly makes it available to all on modern platforms. Rebrushed does a good job being both a 3D platformer and a narrative driven-adventure title, sprinkled in with a lot of love for old Disney animation—a fun, unique adventure game for all. ∎
Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed
Played on
Xbox Series X / Xbox Series S
PROS
- Epic Mickey gets a beautiful facelift.
- Quality of life changes and improvements to the core gameplay make Rebrushed the definitive way to play Epic Mickey.
- Branching story paths add to replayability.
- Levels are filled to the brim with collectibles and are just the right size.
- Excellent character controller.
CONS
- Sound mixing isn't very good.
- Camera sometimes can't keep up with you.
- Bosses are fairly lame.
