Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed is a remaster of the cult classic 3D platformer Disney Epic Mickey, which first released on the Wii a decade ago. In the original, you controlled the eponymous Mickey Mouse, armed with a magic paintbrush (which can be used by shaking the Wiimote) and able to paint or scrub surfaces to solve puzzles. This was the work of Junction Studios, led by Warren Spector, best known as The Deus Ex Guy. No, Mickey couldn’t nano-enhance his paintbrush for better target acquisition or fire laser-guided anti-tank rockets from his chubby white gloves.
And no, Rebrushed doesn't let you do any of those things. It's clearly a missed opportunity. But is it still better? With an updated look, some added secrets, more moves for Mickey, and controller/M&K support, I'd say longtime Mickey fans will love this nostalgia trip. For complete newcomers like me, it's definitely a charming, clever, and wonderfully experimental platformer, if a little flat in places.
The story of Rebrushed begins with a huge mistake. Mickey is awakened by a magical mirror that transports him to a wizard's house. The wizard appears to be painting a beautiful world on the canvas. The wizard leaves, pleased with his work, so Mickey says, “I'd better splatter some paint lol” and does just that. However, in the process, he spills a bottle of paint thinner on the canvas, because he's an idiot. The wizard's world is now in shambles and is giving off some bad energy, Mickey returns to the mirror and the safety of his room. Surprisingly, he immediately falls asleep as if nothing had happened. But then karma takes its toll on him, as he is dragged away from the mirror by an evil hand and back to the ruined painting.
And so Mickey is armed with his magic brush, which he initially wrongfully acquired, and tasked with fixing the world he's ruined from the inside. I honestly think Disney is shrugging it off a bit (growing up, I'd have preferred Dexter's Laboratory and Hell in a Cell to The Lion King), but I will admit that the setting is nice. The fact that it's a world populated by Disney's forgotten creatures and misfits is both an interesting look at a back catalogue and a motivation: you really want to save these poor people.
This is best achieved through platforming, aided by “ho ho” double jumps and the ability to paint or thin surfaces. The latter is the real issue here, as Rebrushed is not designed to be a movement-focused platformer. In fact, Mickey is a bit of a jerk in rodentkour, with his oddly airborne falls and tendency to slide rather than cling to edges. He also maintains the same mediocre moveset throughout his adventures, so don't expect him to develop Celeste-like aerial moves or Mario-esque jump-bounce-hop moves.
Instead, Rebrushed focuses on brush swinging. Guided easily and accurately by your mouse or controller's thumbsticks, you can hit highlighted areas with paint or thinner: pick a blue splat and it'll fill things in, while green splatters of thinner will burn off parts. Again, you won't develop any new brush swinging skills or meet Daffio Vequackquez, for example, who will lend you new oil paints. Ultimately, the challenge and fun depends largely on how each level is laid out.
Throughout Mickey's travels, you'll pass through sewer slums, dilapidated theme parks with crumbling rockets, crumbling ruins, fire-ravaged towns, and pirate-infested islands. You move through these areas pretty quickly, too, as each spot is broken down into easily digestible mechanical puzzles. Almost all of them require you to tick off a checklist of items: grab masks, find keys, rescue friends. Most of what you'll be doing involves running around an area, looking for highlighted items to fill or thin, which are usually pretty obvious. You may need to flip a switch up to paint some platforms to get there. A crate might be on fire, so you thin the platform above it, where the water barrels are. The best bits have you painting or thinning gears, which help to turn the platforms for you or hold them in place.
It's all pretty basic stuff, and it's hard for me to really get stuck in. But I find its relative ease quite comforting, and it's a testament to the layout of each level. I love being given what seems like a boring or daunting “find the Xs and Ys” task, but then you find surfaces and paths highlighted or folded together in a way that complements a natural curiosity. Or, really, the exploratory tendencies of someone like me who just wanders around and chalks it up to being a “vibe-based” problem solver. It gives the whole place a real playground feel, as you splash paint or paint thinner and accidentally discover a bunch of optional secrets.
These 3D platforming main events are interconnected with other 2D mini-levels, like portals to forgotten or lost Disney episodes. You may have to jump during the scene where Willy Doo: The Goose (I made this character up)'s steamboat fights the whales (I made this part up too), in the classic 1930s style of trumpet parps and big-eyed waving characters. These are a bit of fun, if you A lot they're simply a test of double jumps, because these ancient lands have no powers of painting or thinning. In fact, they exist to please Disney fans and gently educate the average person, because they feel like levels designed for a pop-up stand in Walt's museum.
After exiting these levels, you'll end up in a few hub areas that you'll return to several times throughout the story. The most important of these is Mean Street, home to vendors who will give you simple side quests that will earn you either: 1) a collectible badge or 2) an orb. These badges come in a variety of forms, usually given as rewards for finding hidden spots while tinkering or painting things in the world, which annoys me as someone who doesn't care about them, but may satisfy those of you who like that sort of thing. Anyway, yes, Mean Street also has a Gremlin who tells you to collect as many orbs as you can to open more portals to the 3D levels, so you can Mickey' them even more.
The aforementioned obligatory Mickeying does have some interesting decision-making aspects, though, which actually end up being more “interesting” than effective – but still. At its most basic level, combat is about painting or thinning out enemies. Paint them enough and they'll become friendly, while thinning them out completely (some enemies can only be thinned out, then attacked). There are also Gremlins imprisoned in cages in some levels, where they'll offer to fix or change bits of the map around you to make your path to the main objective a little easier, or to open up a room for another jerk. Another time, I gave a pirate ice cream to impress a woman he liked, without consulting her about what else she might want. Apparently, she didn't like ice cream.
Many of the choices feel a little embryonic or experimental, as if they haven't quite been fleshed out yet: ice creams, gremlins and the like don't really have much of a lasting impact. But some bosses can be defeated by painting or thinning them, with clever challenges where you have to balance your paint, thinner and jumps to avoid falls or arm-smashes. Your choice of substance determines their fate, as a corroded shell or a character saved intact. Rescue a boy named Petetronic, and his regular colleague Pete, a Mean Street vendor, might say, “Well done” and give you a spark. So don't expect instant, earth-shattering results. Instead, this is one of those games where these decisions are calculated in the background by Dick Disney, and when the credits roll, you're given a choice of Good or Bad ending.
As someone who doesn't really get along with the source material, I found myself warming up to Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed. It's not that challenging and at times a bit Habut I liked its easy-going nature more than I hated it. You can splash paint around and tackle cool mechanical puzzles, or lift up an enemy's base and watch them plunge to their death. And while some of the side quests and optional trivia don't amount to much more than an end credits sequence, I do admire its adventurous spirit. You can tell it's trying to do something a little different than your typical platformer, and for the most part, it works!
This review is based on the game review structure provided by the publisher.