Epic Mickey Rebrushed is a remaster of 2010 Wii-exclusive game featuring the titular mouse. The original suffered from extremely awkward motion controls, but had an interesting premise, so I had been looking forward to this rerelease featuring updated controls and full HD graphics.

You'll take on the role of Mickey, armed with a magic paintbrush that can use paint to restore structures or win enemies over to your side, or thinner to destroy things. The game will also ... paint... this as a basic good/evil spectrum, and I just can't bring myself to play an evil Mickey. The game does let you mix freely, and how you deal with major bosses with increase your paint or thinner capacity, respectively, but otherwise has no bearing on the very linear story.

You'll travel from world to world, exploring a mirror universe's knock-off versions of classic Disney attractions like Small World, Jungle Cruise, or Space Mountain. A "Blot" is wrecking havoc and his blotlings will do their best to thwart you, but the awkward camera which feels like it has barely advanced in 14 years will do more to hinder you than the enemies every will.

Thankfully, the modern controls do a lot, and I appreciated the option to remap controls. I would like a word with anyone responsible for putting the jump button on B [Xbox] / A [Switch] / o ... that is the WRONG spot and I will thank you for ceasing this deplorable behavior.

I played this on the Switch, and I can wholeheartedly recommend you do NOT do likewise. Incredibly, a remaster of a 14-year old game suffers frame rate problems, unable to hold even 30 fps stable on the admittedly 7-year-old hardware (OLED, docked). The game is low-stakes enough that you can power through these, but my semi-trained eye says the dips were commonly up to 5 fps and occasionally as bad as 10 fps, which is very noticeable. It would be one thing if it was trying to push 60 and failing (which is true of the PS4 version), but being unable to hold 30 fps in 2024 is inexcusable.

Besides these frame rate dips, you'll face long, frequent load times as the game separates levels with cute 2d platforming sections based on classic Mickey cartoons, that you access by jumping into a projector screen. You'll wait 30-120 seconds for the new level to load, and spend 1-2 minutes traversing it, then wait 30-120 seconds for the new 3d level to load.

Based on all of this, I have say, get the PS5 version if you're going to get this. But maybe just... don't? The core gameplay doesn't really change, ever. There are no difficulty settings, and it's incredibly easy. You don't learn any new moves, new attacks, traversal options, nothing. You do eventually unlock the ability to summon a TV (distraction or energy), an Anvil (drop it on an enemy or use it as a platform), or a Stopwatch (slow time), but there's just no reason to use these outside of their mandatory puzzles.

There is actually a decent story here, about how Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and other characters from Disney's past get forgotten about as we focus on the new, perhaps more true now than it even was in 2010, but it's hard to recommend this for story alone, at least not at full price. If you have the ability to pick this up for $10-20 or if it ever comes to PS+, it might be worth a look then if you're curious, but otherwise, I give it an "OK" rating.

Edition played: Switch physical via docked OLED