Small details of Epic Mickey: Rebrushed make all the difference

At 16, I was quite the artist. I would draw anime portraits of myself and some other people in my sketchbook whenever I took breaks from schoolwork, worked my community service hours, or went out to dinner with my family. My drawings never reached the professional level of Akira Toriyama, Yana Toboso, or Naoto Ohshima, but it was an excellent way to relieve adolescent stress, especially as an autistic high school student. I rarely took up painting because I feared leaving a mess everywhere unless it was for my art classes. However, there was one game that let me paint the world freely: Disney’s Epic Mickey.

Disney Interactive Studios and Junction Point released Epic Mickey exclusively for the Wii in 2010 to experiment with motion-controlled gameplay. Being a fan of Kingdom Hearts at the time, I was drawn to Mickey’s adventure for its artistic elements. I would play like I was swinging around two paintbrushes with the Wii remote and Nunchuck (despite Mickey wielding only one paintbrush in-game). Repainting the environment and erasing enemies with thinner was just a cool concept for a Disney game at the time.

Nearly 14 years later, that game is being released on multiple platforms as a remaster titled Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed. The memories came flooding back when I fired it up on my Steam Deck. It excited my 16-year-old self to experience her favorite Disney game on a different console. It’s even more exciting to replay it with a fresh coat of paint courtesy of THQ Nordic and Purple Lamp Studios. While the game plays the same as it did in 2010, I noticed plenty of changes from the original Wii title, ranging from the obvious to the minuscule. Here’s how Rebrushed stacks up with its cult classic Wii predecessor.

Reworking the Mickey code

The visuals are the most notable change in Epic Mickey: Rebrushed. While the original game had brighter lighting and unrefined structures, the graphics in the remaster are finely detailed, with the lighting dimmed to match the dark ambiance of Wasteland and the tone of the storyline. The opening cutscene shows as much, with the candle lamps lighting up Mickey’s bedroom and Yen Sid’s workshop. Gameplay-wise, you can literally watch the paint dry when you paint a toon wall, topiary, building, or any other toon object. I saw paint drops sliding down anything I painted upon a closer look — something I couldn’t do in the original game.

Purple Lamp Studios also provides their players with more agency to progress through the game proactively by adding more options to create their own paths through the projector levels, new areas to explore, new secrets to reveal, and new collectibles to gather. They even improved the control scheme. The crosshair for Paint and Thinner stays in the middle of the screen no matter which direction you’re pointing the paintbrush instead of floating around like in the Wii version. When you use Paint and Thinner, you simply press the right and left trigger, respectively, in lieu of using a D-pad button for Paint and the left bumper for Thinner. You don’t even have to shake your controllers to sic your guardians on your enemies anymore; just press the left bumper (Thinner guardians) or right bumper (Paint guardians).

The controls have improved to the point where Mickey can now run for his life away from Splatters and other Blotling baddies. Pressing down the left analog stick lets Mickey run a little faster, and pressing the B button allows him to dash, getting him out of harm’s way. Speed would’ve saved some players’ lives in the Wii version, so I’m happy to see it get some attention in the remaster.

Mickey’s health gauge gets a modern upgrade here, with his head no longer being depicted as a sketchbook doodle, but a 3D one. The hearts are no longer little white ones inside a pink Mickey symbol; they’re just regular pink hearts. The hearts on Mickey’s health gauge have been changed from red dots to red hearts, adding to the mouse’s cartoony personality. The guardian gauge below the health gauge has also been updated to make it so that the meter for the Paint guardian goes right, while the Thinner meter goes left the more stuff you erase to attract respective guardians. The original game had the Paint and Thinner meters going right, regardless of which one you use.

Fine changes like that appear throughout if you look for them. The loading/save symbol is no longer the Mickey ears dripping with paint. Instead, it’s just a regular Mickey Mouse symbol with paint and thinner circling it. The detail that especially delights me is the loading screen, which shows off the game’s concept artwork of locales such as Dark Beauty Castle and Mean Street framed by black paint dripping on both sides instead of exhibiting the art in postcards. 

Subtitles now pop up when Yen Sid narrates the opening cutscene, which did not happen in the original game either. Subtitles appear in animated cutscenes throughout the game — there wasn’t much voice acting for Mickey, Oswald, and other characters save for mumbles and yelps — and it’s a small, but helpful touch that adds some accessibility (this is something I wish I saw in the Wii version all those years ago, as I tend to watch everything with subtitles due to a processing delay unique to being on the spectrum).

It would have been easy to simply slap a new coat of paint on the original game and hastily kick it out to make some nostalgia money. That Purple Lamp was willing to retool the game with so many fine details shows how serious Disney was here in making sure this wasn’t a quick cash grab. Warren Spector’s return as creative director makes the remaster even more impressive. Not many people who produced the original games get involved with remakes, let alone remasters.

Playing Epic Mickey: Rebrushed is reminiscent of Spyro Reignited Trilogy, where every character and asset was given a full-blown refresh 20 years after the original PlayStation titles were released with polygonal graphics. Epic Mickey only released 14 years ago, so the game’s upgrades are smaller by comparison. However, just like Spyro Reignited Trilogy and Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, Epic Mickey: Rebrushed has been made for every console, so that whoever didn’t get to experience it on the Wii the first time around will now able to play it on their preferred platform. For those who did play the Wii version, such as myself, the remaster is like looking at a Monet painting with fresh eyes.