Epic Mickey: Rebrushed Review – A Fine Stroke

It’s very rare that Disney is willing to get tonally dark with its marquee characters. The closest we’ve generally come in video game form is the gothic gacha game Disney Mirrorverse, and the Epic Mickey duology that released in the early 2010s. Those games were quite unlike anything we’d seen before from the House of Mouse: downcast in tone, devoid of the usual Disney color, and taking Mickey away from his upbeat cast of supporting characters.

As such, it was a nice surprise when THQ Nordic announced a next-gen remake of the first Epic Mickey game. Launching almost 15 years after its original version, Epic Mickey: Rebrush does exactly what you’d expect: modernizing the graphics, updating the controls, and adding slight quality-of-life features to make traversing the world more straightforward. There may not be enough on the new side for those who’ve played the original, but for newcomers, it’s definitely the best way to experience Epic Mickey.

Image Source: THQ Nordic

The game takes place in a fantastical world full of Disney’s forgotten characters and locations, which Mickey gets transported into after accidentally spilling an ink blot onto a canvas. It’s overrun by enemies borne out of this spillage, causing most of the buildings and structures across the world to fall into disrepair. It’s up to Mickey, alongside his predecessor Disney marquee Oswald, to repair the world as they also vie to destroy the blot spillage and save the Wasteland.

You primarily do this by using one of Mickey’s two paint-based abilities, which form the basis of the gameplay loop. Pressing the right trigger on your controller shoots out paint, repairing broken structures and possessing enemies to fight on your side. The left trigger fires thinner, which has the opposite effect of destroying everything around you and defeating enemies in the process. It’s a simple yet nifty dichotomy that rewards experimentation, with some areas and treasures hidden behind destructible walls and others only accessible if you paint platforms to climb up.

Most of the roughly ten hours you’ll spend with Epic Mickey: Rebrushed’s main story requires you to use these diverging paint brushes to defeat enemies and recover items from platforming-heavy worlds based on distinct aesthetics. There’s a futuristic world complete with whirring conveyor belts to navigate and a haunted mansion that’s bound to strike a chord with the Disney faithful, and you never spend long enough in each area for it to grow stale. Each one has very distinct art direction, though enemy types remain broadly the same in each.

Image Source: THQ Nordic

Between these main levels are side-scrolling projector screens – shorter platforming areas that contain hidden collectibles to scour and form the connective tissue between each world. It’s fun to blitz through these, either hunting for pins and badges or heading straight to the next area. The game does lean on backtracking in its final hours, though, which makes going through them over again far less engaging. You can pay a small fee to bypass them, but it’s frustrating to have to go back on yourself when the game should be bubbling to an engaging conclusion.

Though it’s not as impressive as recent platformers like Astro Bot, the gameplay in Epic Mickey: Rebrushed is more than enough to hook you in. Aside from the main component-collecting you do in main worlds, there’s a plethora of side quests, ranging from solving mysteries with a detective to returning lost library books. The game occasionally throws some interesting choices your way – albeit without any major ramifications for choosing either side – which means you’ll need a few playthroughs to see everything. If you’re more interested in just the main story, though, you aren’t missing out on too much.

As a remaster of a game approaching 15 years old, Epic Mickey: Rebrushed is subtle but well-executed. The in-game visuals are noticeably improved, with character models looking smooth and environments richly detailed. It all runs without a flaw on PS5, with no noticeable performance issues and a crispy 60 frames per second.

Image Source: THQ Nordic

On the controls front, Mickey’s expanded move set, including spin attacks and sprinting, feels absolutely crucial if you’re to play the game with a modern lens. The remastered 2D cutscenes look less impressive than the rest of the game, with a lot of blurriness and pixelation that stands out from the polish seen elsewhere. If you’re able to look past those issues, actually playing the game itself is plenty of fun.

Epic Mickey: Rebrushed is exactly what you’d want from a remastered Wii game. It gives the visuals the contemporary sheen worthy of its unique art style, adds important control improvements to make it palatable to modern audiences, and also knows when to let the gameplay speak for itself. It’s not a groundbreaking game by any means – especially in a year ripe with high-quality platformers – but definitely worth checking out for Disney fans who may have missed this hidden gem.

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